For me, as a DM, I track time most of all. Time and distance. After that anything else that will influence survival. For instance if the players are operating in the field, far away from reinforcements and resupply, then rations, ammunition, wear and tear, weight carried, amount of rest, water supply, all that stuff, and much more, directly affects survival.
For me "adventures" are always, and have always been as much about equipment, stores, water, supply trains and ability to resupply, being able to forage, and survive in hostile environments, conditions, and places as about anything else. Because that's the way it really is, and in the field arrows don't just magically appear when you've run out or water bubble up out of the ground in a desert. Yes, I know sometimes you can use magic to create water, that also uses resources that might be needed in a real emergency if only a little preparation had been employed earlier. But to me the survival aspect is as much a danger and a threat as the monsters and the maniacs. As a matter of fact if you can't survive your own lack of forethought about basic survival issues, how will you possibly survive encountering monsters who make a living out of out-surviving the people who come to kill them?
You have to go in prepared and knowing that both how you posture for an adventure, and how you act while underway, are both central to your success, and ability to survive. Resources just don't always appear out of the blue, and you have to know how to prepare yours, use them wisely, and find more if you exhaust yours. Plus the lives of your comrades may be at stake if you don't know how to survive, though I find it hard to imagine anyone who would do that kind of thing for a living not knowing how to survive. In practically any environment. It's like trying to imagine a Special Forces soldier saying to himself, "oh well, I'll find something to eat eventually, perhaps by accident" "maybe it will all work out for the best," or "the other guy will know what to do so I'm not gonna worry about be prepared for that." I always tell my players, "the odds of you living are in your hands, it won't be an accident or luck if you live through this, it'll be because you are trained and prepared. Because you know how to react."
I play my own characters in the same fashion. I'll cut out arrows from corpses and clean them, save scraps of food, scout for water, strip equipment from others if needed, set traps, use misdirection, get detailed intelligence about a place before I go there so I'll have some idea about what kinds of equipment I'll need, dig out and stock resupply holes (if I can, if the situation allows it), map, prepare in my mind defensible retreat routes and strong points based on where we travel, and I'll always be prepared to hunt, snare, and forage.
In a bad situation, when others are out to actively kill you and even the environment itself is always potentially lethal, you don't die from lack of trouble,
you die from a lack of training.
I loathe tracking any detail that isn't relevant to gameplay. So I would enjoy tracking water if I were in a game where the party was stranded in a desert, and finding water was a difficult and important task. In contrast, I would hate tracking water if I were in a game where finding water was an easy matter requiring no decision making or difficulty. In that case, tracking water becomes a rote exercise. Tracking water in such a game seems about as unwise a DMing decision as requiring the players to publically declare when their character goes to the bathroom.
I agree here. When resources are easy to come by then there is no point to tracking supplies. They are easily replenishable. When they are not then they are part of the overall survivability issue. Then lack of resources can be as dangerous as a man with a knife to your throat.
I really was into the minutiae of it all until one time, in a game wherein I was a player, we were walking for several days in the wilderness, when suddenly, the DM asks us all for our character sheets. He looks them over, gives them back, and announces: "None of you have food in your backpacks. You've been walking for several days. You're all dead of malnutrition" (He was serious, but he was a noobie DM).
He obviously wasn't doing it right. If you were hungry he should have said, you're out of food and water, and feeling sluggish and weak. What are you gonna do about it? It takes a long time for a man to starve, and even a few days to die of thirst (though that all depends on how active you are). You give people a chance to forage, hunt, scout, or try something else. That's not really a matter of detail on the player's part, as much as bad refereeing.
