I've participated in several wilderness APs and have yet to find a way to make tracking rations fun. It eventually always feels like pointless rolls and bookkeeping, even when it isn't being bypassed through Create Food or Forager. Rations are also so cheap that if your GM is going to track them you can easily have plenty. And it is odd, given how much content focuses on the wilderness. Rangers, druids, primal spells, various monsters, environment rules...
I ran Irongfang Invasion to completion, where the first book had an extensive wilderness survival system for feeding and caring for a group of 30-ish refugees in the woods via "ration points". It wasn't exactly bad, but the players eventually optimized it to the point they had no danger of going hungry, which also reduced the feeling they needed to find a permanent home, a major driving force of the story.
I've run hexploration in book 1 of Quest for the Frozen Flame, which didn't directly suggest tracking rations, but I tried it anyway. Making each PC to subsist every day got old when they spent like 3 consecutive weeks traveling. (I'd also argue this book shouldn't have used hexploration at all.)
I'm playing in Kingmaker, which has a system for cooking meals at camp, and that started off interesting but eventually also became boring.
To an extent this is a problem with the Survival skill as a whole, but most other functions can be rolled every now and then instead of everyday. I recently came up with some "hexploration tactics" to make navigating the wilderness (hopefully) streamlined while still having stakes. Notably absent, however, was anything regarding provisions.
It seems like either you:
1. Spend a silver so you have 10 weeks of rations and are fine.
2. Do they technically optimal but unfun thing of rolling subsist every day to try and save money, feats, or spell slots. But since we are only talking about copper here, you'll probably have more fun skipping said rolls.
3. Handwave food all together.
Maybe part of the problem is Pathfinder does a poor job with lasting consequences. HP is expected to be fully restored after every fight, and even long-lasting conditions just cost a slot or two to remove. The only thing which is hard to get rid of is Fatigued, which removes the ability to engage with any sort of exploration tactics. Things like struggling to find food are better represented by gradual deterioration.
So yeah. Has anyone ever found Subsisting and rations fun in Pathfinder?
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HP is expected to be fully restored after every fightNo? CONxLVL? Unless you include handwaving healing with Treat wounds.
I said fight, not night. And I did mean treat wounds or similar abilities, yes. Obviously you can create a gauntlet which doesn't allow for this, but it is the exception, not the rule, and must be handled with care.
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I ran Irongfang Invasion to completion, where the first book had an extensive wilderness survival system for feeding and caring for a group of 30-ish refugees in the woods via "ration points".
That was my first thought too. If we are wanting to gameplay a long-term wilderness survival type of thing, I would build it as a Victory Point system with a daily timeframe for checks and progress.
It wasn't exactly bad, but the players eventually optimized it to the point they had no danger of going hungry, which also reduced the feeling they needed to find a permanent home, a major driving force of the story.
Yeah, if it is going to be a major plot point of the game for a long period of time, then it also needs to have recurring villains and plot-driven setbacks and new challenges - to use some more typical campaign building language.
To translate that into a wilderness survival setting, the recurring villains would be things like exhaustion of natural resources in the area that the tribe is currently in, or changing of seasons. Plot-driven setbacks and new challenges would be things like weather and natural disasters, or scavengers/pests getting into the food stored.
Things that will upset the current optimizations that the party has set up.
The obstacle is minor in that it's easily overcome in anything but contrived situations (or with a party lacking any kind of forethought or wilderness skills). So no, there isn't a way to make that fun and key to the narrative except as noted with Ironfang Invasion which even then Paizo didn't want it to be too difficult. Pretty hard to fail forward! You missed a few rolls, everyone dies. (Oregon Trail vibes.)
"Your skills and/or preparation have proven valuable," is about all you can get out of this. PCs can easily match most any increase in difficulty (if aware), so at best you get an arms race w/ the benefit of...eating? Being functional as a hero? So yeah, there's little glory, starvation isn't heroic, and past the lowest levels there's little obstacle to feel good about overcoming.
One might add mini-quests like finding the perfect flora/fauna for a gourmand's delight or such, but Subsist itself? No fun.
I'm playing in Kingmaker, which has a system for cooking meals at camp, and that started off interesting but eventually also became boring.
We found that too, in that we reached a point where we usually made the same thing because it was reliable, a useful buff, and sustainable in terms of ingredients/rations without really slowing us down. Discovering new foods is fun, but rolling every day got tedious once we got good at it.
At that point, it's just "roll to see if you critically succeed on Forage" and "roll to see if you get a nat 1 to make dinner", because any other outcome is just "status quo" and we move on.
1. Spend a silver so you have 10 weeks of rations and are fine.
2. Do they technically optimal but unfun thing of rolling subsist every day to try and save money, feats, or spell slots. But since we are only talking about copper here, you'll probably have more fun skipping said rolls.
3. Handwave food all together.
Given that there's now more than one way to get "you can't get less than Success on Subsist", Paizo doesn't seem to want to make this a big focus of the game itself. The game designers are saying "if you take this skill and skill feat, you have food and can get back to adventuring, full stop." That leads to some real confusion when an adventure wants to act like food should be a problem, but then someone goes "I'll take Forager/Wandering Chef" and removes the problem. Which is a totally rational thing for a player to do: I want to spend my time out exploring, not walking back to town to buy more rations.
Given my experience, I don't think you can make rations "fun" EXCEPT when they are actually relevant: in a setting where food is hard, the risk of starvation is real, and managing this actually matters. That is not core PF2. It's a more survival type game.
And even then, I'm not sure I'd find that "fun" because I'm playing PF2 for heroic fantasy, rather than managing food. But at least in that situation it would be relevant and for people that like survival type settings would probably be a lot more enjoyable.
But in the current situation, it's either "someone didn't take Survival at all and thus we need to spend money" or "someone took Forager so rolling this is a waste of time."
Given my experience, I don't think you can make rations "fun" EXCEPT when they are actually relevant: in a setting where food is hard, the risk of starvation is real, and managing this actually matters. That is not core PF2. It's a more survival type game.
Yeah, I think it requires both a campaign where wilderness survival is a main point, and buy-in from the players to not take the feats/spells that completely trivialize the challenge in it.
I wouldn't expect that Subsist is something that I would need to do or build my character for when playing Agents of Edgewatch even though there are feats like City Scavenger that are created deliberately for using Subsist in a city environment.
I remember three campaigns in which the party finding food for themselves and their associates was vital to the plot.
The more recent case was the Ironfang Invasion adventure path that Captain Morgan mentioned in the first post. The party and 30 villagers had hidden in the forest from the invasion. That module, Trail of the Hunted had a subsystem for feeding them:
Forage or Hunt: Characters who spend a full day hunting or gathering and succeed at a DC 10 Survival check gain 1 Provision Point. Characters gain 1 additional Provision Point for every 2 by which the result exceeds 10.
The party could forage themselves or train villagers to do it. Or course, since the party was at 2nd level, the best they could do if find food for 2 people. And the villagers could be trained into Adepts, Aristocrats, Commoners, Experts, and Warriors, but only Aristocrats and Experts had a bonus in Survival checks.
I didn't like the Provision Points. I was converting Ironfang Invasion into PF2 for our very first PF2 campaign, and teaching them a Provision Point subsystem would take away from teaching them PF2. So I dropped the subsystem and improvised PF2 rules. Subsist was as useless as the Provision Points, because a person could feed at most two people via Subsist. Instead, I invented a Harvest action that found food according to the Earn Income rules. A 2nd-level character could earn 3sp a day and rations cost 7sp per week, which is about the same as 6cp for two square meals. That means that a party member could harvest the forest for enough food to feed 5 people for a day. Furthermore, the ranger had Cooking Lore, so I let a successful Cooking Lore check double the number of people the food could feed. And for variety, once when hunting they had to fight their carnivorous prey by combat rules.
And when it became routine, the foraging was handed over to the villagers and no longer the concern of the party. The party had scouting work instead.
In the PF1 module The Hungry Storm in the Jade Regent adventure path, the party organized a caravan to cross the northern ice cap in a 3-month journey. Their guide Ulf Gormundr did most of the organizing, so I sat down and calculated how much food they would need and how many wagons would be necessary to haul it. The numbers said that the party would have to purchase or forage food on the journey. I set up an ecosystem on the ice cap: cold-immune plants grew where rocks poked above the ice, cold-immune goats at the plants, winter wolves ate the goats, and the martial party members hunted the goats, wolves, and sometimes more dangerous creature for food.
Also, Rings of Sustanence were a popular magic item for the journey.
And once the hunting became routine, we stopped mentioning it. We just knew that the characters took several hours each day in hunting.
The third example was from The Empty Throne, also in the Jade Regent adventure path. The city Kasai, capital of Minkai, was starving because the regent had diverted its food to feed his armies. The party had an opportunity to raid the granary to feed the people of Kasai.
The players rejected this side quest. "We will have the city liberated by noon tomorrow. The people can go hungry for one more day." They did defeat the regent and liberate the city by noon the next day.
It seems like either you:
1. Spend a silver so you have 10 weeks of rations and are fine.
2. Do they technically optimal but unfun thing of rolling subsist every day to try and save money, feats, or spell slots. But since we are only talking about copper here, you'll probably have more fun skipping said rolls.
3. Handwave food all together.
4. Present provisioning to the players as a puzzle, and then handwave the daily provisioning activities to unmentioned background activities once the solution to the puzzle becomes boring routine. Failure to solve the puzzle will become a crisis that cannot be ignored.
But the solutions offered in the rulebook, rations and Subsist, are poor solutions. Square meals cost 3cp and one week's rations cost 4sp, so 10 weeks of rations would cost 40sp per person. Subsist feeds one person on a success and two on a critical success, but a higher Survival bonus won't feed three. And sometimes a character will fail, so someone else had better have gathered extra that day.
Instead, for PCs buying food, set up a few outposts along the road that sell food. For PCs foraging for food, use a system that gives more food at higher levels, such as Earn Income. Then as the players level up, they will have to spend less attention on needing to forage.
Higher levels have alternatives. In Fortress of the Stone Giants the party tried camping hidden in the wilderness near the fortress, after spending the day battling some of the giants. However, the giants had rangers, so they tracked down the camp and attacked. After that, the wizard prepared Teleport twice each day. They teleported to the fortress in the morning and then teleported to a comfortable inn in Magnimar at the end of their day.
When I wanted a more survival focused game I made each ration weigh L and I removed all dimensional storage options.
It was a sandbox hex crawl and while it worked somewhat. I find PF2e too quickly outpaces mundane challenges for me to to bother with it again.
If I was to do it again I would probably add a spoilage roll each week (flat check), track rations by the week and give them 1 bulk. Is it realistic? No, not really... but it would be easy to track and abstract what would be interesting for my group.
But the solutions offered in the rulebook, rations and Subsist, are poor solutions. Square meals cost 3cp and one week's rations cost 4sp, so 10 weeks of rations would cost 40sp per person. Subsist feeds one person on a success and two on a critical success, but a higher Survival bonus won't feed three. And sometimes a character will fail, so someone else had better have gathered extra that day.
Forager lets a success feed 5 people (the user and 4 others) and guarantees you never get worse than a success. Once they're expert that is 9 people. It trivializes the whole thing, which is one of the problems. The game designers very clearly don't want this to be a thing PCs have to worry about, so they just said "here's a skill feat to make the whole thing go away."
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It's similar to lighting.
Sure, a 1st level party might need some items that take up hands, depending on how many caster take Light, but it's only an issue when a legitimate encounter makes it an issue. Get a permanent light source (and a way to cover it up in one-action!) and forget about it.
Heck, I'd put clothing & other mundane aspects in the same box. It's there if you need it, but isn't typically a difficulty nor intended as more than fantasy-genre flavor (IMO).
Not that I haven't run mid-level PFS games where the party ended up only having a couple of light sources. I'd only been asking to get a sense of what enemies/NPCs might see, hadn't expected them to now need to strategize around two PCs because of poor preparation. Just buy the food at inception, and it'll likely carry you through. Some of my PFS PCs carried the same food from level 1 to that single scenario where one might need to travel and/or feed a creature/prisoner/etc.
While much of that might seem like a good argument to get rid of them, I think it's basic verisimilitude. And in a Scooby-Doo version of Dragon's Demand, the Shaggy & Scooby PCs spent the remainder of their initial funds on spare food as it suited those guys. Turns out to have played a significant role as-written!
But the solutions offered in the rulebook, rations and Subsist, are poor solutions. Square meals cost 3cp and one week's rations cost 4sp, so 10 weeks of rations would cost 40sp per person. Subsist feeds one person on a success and two on a critical success, but a higher Survival bonus won't feed three. And sometimes a character will fail, so someone else had better have gathered extra that day.Forager lets a success feed 5 people (the user and 4 others) and guarantees you never get worse than a success. Once they're expert that is 9 people. It trivializes the whole thing, which is one of the problems. The game designers very clearly don't want this to be a thing PCs have to worry about, so they just said "here's a skill feat to make the whole thing go away."
I still think the intent on forager might have been you get to feed 5 people when you roll a success, not just get one. They used that language in the GMG hunter NPCs. Then again, they didn't change that for player core 2. But I doubt anyone was saying "forager is overpowered, plz nerf" because so few people care about tracking food anyway.
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I've participated in several wilderness APs and have yet to find a way to make tracking rations fun.
I have played lots of skill challenges with victory point system and I end up disliking them. They create a gamification of the situation, abstracting it completely and it doesn't look like an RPG anymore but more like accounting.
I have also seen a lot of situations handled with one single roll and an immediate effect (sometimes not even a numbered effect, just saying that the characters are hungry is already nice) and it works but it isn't ideal for a full-on challenge.As a GM, I'm moving more and more toward the complex trap mechanics to represent these kinds of situations. Every round (representing a day or a week), PCs can try to "disable" the trap by engaging with the wilderness (a trap entirely disabled representing the success at getting where the party wants to go, so every success is a distance travelled roughly) and then they take the trap "routine" which is in general an exhaustion effect (hunger, thirst, frost, heat, and some non-removable effects associated).
I've participated in several wilderness APs and have yet to find a way to make tracking rations fun.I have played lots of skill challenges with victory point system and I end up disliking them. They create a gamification of the situation, abstracting it completely and it doesn't look like an RPG anymore but more like accounting.
The same could be said of combat. In fact, the Victory Point subsystem has a lot of similarities with combat. Combat is just a diminishing Victory Point system named Hit Points, with the adjustment that each character tracks their points separately.
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I'm thinking I am heavily biased though because I so severely dislike all of the alternatives that I can find in the rules.
Having the entire challenge tied to a single roll made by one character means that only one character is participating and that the chance of failure is pretty high (about 50% or so).
Or we could go with no mechanics at all - which dissociates success from the characters entirely. Either the players just narrates their characters succeeding, or it becomes an IRL social competition between the players and the GM - if one of the players is more charismatic and socially dominant than the GM, then the party succeeds. If not, then the party fails or suffers some other setbacks.
So I am not saying that you can't dislike Victory Point systems. But I am curious if you have something better to use instead.
I've participated in several wilderness APs and have yet to find a way to make tracking rations fun. It eventually always feels like pointless rolls and bookkeeping, even when it isn't being bypassed through Create Food or Forager. Rations are also so cheap that if your GM is going to track them you can easily have plenty. And it is odd, given how much content focuses on the wilderness. Rangers, druids, primal spells, various monsters, environment rules...
I ran Irongfang Invasion to completion, where the first book had an extensive wilderness survival system for feeding and caring for a group of 30-ish refugees in the woods via "ration points". It wasn't exactly bad, but the players eventually optimized it to the point they had no danger of going hungry, which also reduced the feeling they needed to find a permanent home, a major driving force of the story.
I've run hexploration in book 1 of Quest for the Frozen Flame, which didn't directly suggest tracking rations, but I tried it anyway. Making each PC to subsist every day got old when they spent like 3 consecutive weeks traveling. (I'd also argue this book shouldn't have used hexploration at all.)
I'm playing in Kingmaker, which has a system for cooking meals at camp, and that started off interesting but eventually also became boring.
To an extent this is a problem with the Survival skill as a whole, but most other functions can be rolled every now and then instead of everyday. I recently came up with some "hexploration tactics" to make navigating the wilderness (hopefully) streamlined while still having stakes. Notably absent, however, was anything regarding provisions.
It seems like either you:
1. Spend a silver so you have 10 weeks of rations and are fine.
2. Do they technically optimal but unfun thing of rolling subsist every day to try and save money, feats, or spell slots. But since we are only talking about copper here, you'll probably have more fun...
I've been thinking about this lately.
Subsist provides both food and shelter from the elements. i would also include deterrence of natural predators.Give yourself a random weather table or scheduled weather pattern to follow.
Subsist when weather is incorporated starts to matter even when they have rations.
If nights drop to severe cold temperatures what are the consequences of a fail on top of the fatigue. Minor cold damage every hour. That raises the stakes of getting a successful subsist roll and rewards those players that have ancestry traits that inure them to cold.
Finally the deterrence factor could mean not having the night interrupted with an encounter. Currently attracting trouble is a possibility only on crit fail. (paint the scene if they were paying attention and scouting, maybe they know a pack of wolves or worse are in the area. Or they could have a good RK check on the area so they figure certain creatures are out at night to discourage.)
But fail can have some consequences too, perhaps one fail meant deterrence didn't work and something got into the camp stirring everyone up and eating some of their rations, only to realize it was just a smaller herbivore. it explains the fatigue the next day at least. What it does is gets players thinking nights in the wild are not always going to be safe even if this time it was just a harmless creature and losing some rations for not being prepared is a nice added touch.
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With this set up, maybe subsist isnt needed for periods of good weather and no dangerous predators.
But gets more important when either of those are present.
Also this is a fantastical world, so its perfectly reasonable to have extreme weather events or regions more prone to them either naturally or due to magic or influences of fantastical or horrific creatures.
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I've participated in several wilderness APs and have yet to find a way to make tracking rations fun.
I've found that it can be enjoyable but only
1) when it unexpectedly comes up in a situation where the PCs can't just prepare in advance2) for a reasonably short period of time (maybe a few sessions) until the PCs solve the problem.
So, for example, PCs were on a ship that got shipwrecked on an unknown shore. Figuring out how to survive, scavenge for resources, etc was quite fun for a few sessions (and let the wilderness oriented characters shine).
But it got old fairly quickly and moved from a reasonably tense foreground task to a bunch of handwaving in the background.
And even then it is much more enjoyable at low levels when the PCs just don't have a lot of resources to handle the situation, Try that same shipwreck at a higher level and they'll just magic their way off to civilization very quickly.
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I've participated in several wilderness APs and have yet to find a way to make tracking rations fun. It eventually always feels like pointless rolls and bookkeeping, even when it isn't being bypassed through Create Food or Forager. Rations are also so cheap that if your GM is going to track them you can easily have plenty.
I think that is fine.
Basic survival food/shelter/warmth/encumberance are simple problems. I think it is good that a game addresses them. It establiches a routine and some daily activities for characters. This can lead to role playing opportunities from time to time. It helps ground the characters in their world.
But then it is boring. Once you have done it a few times, don't do it again. Only when you need to use it as a story hook, or something significant changes.
Isn't that the right level to handle it?