Fixing Camping

[demlin]

After a couple sessions using the camping rules, we gave up in frustration.

RAW camping is going to take up at least 15 minutes of your session and will eat up an entire encounter you could have had. I made the following adjustments to it and automated the hell out of it in Foundry:

Camping is optional. If you don't want to make camp, you:

* Can still subsist as usual with a -5 penalty
* Consume 1 day worth of rations or food gained from subsistence or spells
* Advance time by 12 hours (usually)
-> 2 hours for finding a camp
-> 9 hours for camping with 9 or more people (including companions)
-> 1 hour for Daily preps (or 30 minutes without gunslinger; cleaning more than 4 weapons incurs an additional hour per 4 guns as usual)

Otherwise:

* Prepare campsite does not allow performing any other activities nor can you perform any activities that do not have the Camping trait during camping rounds
* There is only one round of activities and no random encounter check is rolled, nor do you decrease the encounter DC.
* Rest and Relax and Tell Campfire Story are gone
* All other buffs (e.g. Linzi's Bolster Confidence) happen before the first round of combat
* Each companion can only be influenced or discovered once per camping session, but multiple companions can be influenced or discovered in the same round
* Performing a camping activity does not decrease the flat check (aka increase the likelihood of a random encounter)
* All camping activities take 2 hours and all buffs that last only 1 hour are extended to 2 hours
* Up to 3 companions perform their activities automatically

Watches:

* There is a single random encounter check per night, not one per 4 hours

[Paul Zagieboylo]

Yeah... these are pretty much the same changes I ended up making. It really seems like whoever was writing the camping system cared more about campfire cuisine than, like, math. Because the math doesn't work, at all. It virtually guarantees an encounter every single night, often two, sometimes three. That's just not playable.

My changes were slightly less sweeping than yours, but I definitely ended up with a lot of the same things you did, particularly "everyone has time for one activity before dinner and bedtime." I kept the increased chance of encounters for doing camping activities (although I reduced it a little), but I improved the Camouflage Campsite activity a lot, and I changed the roll to only once per night (unless you critically fail at Preparing a Campsite, which is still an immediate bonus encounter check).

I haven't had the companions show up yet, so I haven't yet had to make any decisions there, but your changes seem reasonable. I'm not going to let my PCs adventure with more than two companions at a time, so I won't have to worry about too many of them doing things at once.