The Humble Trail Ration - It's Use and Abuse

[Cheomesh]

Food is pretty important.  As a general thing, we like variety and benefit from a diet rich in a wide range of foods both physically and psychologically.  Nobody wants to eat the same thing day in and day out.

Except RPG characters, apparently*.

We've all** had them - that character (or party) who spends their hard won gold as a miser when it comes to food.  It's usually the cheapest things available to keep his character alive - taste be damned!(bonus points if they refute the idea of non-preserved, cheaper-than-trail-rations foodstuffs going bad).

And why not?  It certainly makes economic sense.  The players can't taste their character's hardtack-and-dates combo.  We're talking about a class of super-men who will spend 16 hours a day in personal advancement without need for human interaction or any form of entertainment - dried, ultra-salty cod from last year (bottom of the barrel price!  10lb for 5s!) can't be expected to bother them.

And nutrition be damned!  Most games don't penalize you for eating nothing but maggoty bread for weeks on end (uruks don't seem to care for it much past two days, though).  It's unlikely there's a mechanic for scurvy built into the game for you to reinforce assertions that the party's rock-bottom nutrition is taking it's toll.  Similarly, eating really good food (with the assumption that the stats of the "level 1 commoner" represent the bulk of the population having been brought up with inconsistent nutrition) hardly seems to net a bonus, outside of quaffing magic potions or eating Iðunn's apples.  Those are hardly be expected as staple foods for a majority of a campaign.  Subsequently, they are mechanically better off spending their stash of money on +X items and fancy toys.

Who has time for hunting?   We need to march 16 hours a day to hurry up and get the McGuffin of Plot!

Maybe the barely detailed feasts between adventures make up for it?

But it is kind of dull.  There's no spice in it!  (Like hell if players are going to put any of that that 5gp per pound pepper on their super salty salt salted salt cod! And don't even mention the turmeric).  The details are important!  Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

So how have you dealt with this little issue in your years as a GM?  In the past, when I gamed D&D, I tried supplying snacks to the group based on what kind of provisions they'd packed - didn't last a session, nobody wants to stick with "trail mix" and homemade hardtack when you could just nip down to Sheetz for those delicious (heroin laced?) fries.  (Want a free +1 to any roll tonight?  Buy me a cup of fries.  Wait...Blast!)  Have you implemented debuffs for weeks of mineral and vitamin poor "travel rations" (even nutritious, bland food's going to wear on your patients eventually!)?  Gimped healing rates?  Have you offered buffs for proper food?  Extra XP for roleplaying your love of hard-to-find spices?  Feel free to share here.

*  I understand this broad, sweeping statement does not apply to every single character that has ever been played.  I am building a straw man for the purpose of fun.

**It is entirely possible I am the only GM at The CBG who experiences players and characters such as this.

M.

[BasnetI]

some years ago I came to the same issue with snacks and decided to put an end to those lame meals through some punishment (-1, -2, -3) ò_ó but they got tired of it a few days later, so... yeah it's a "good taste" issue yet to be resolved

[sparkletwist]

I play mostly "narrativist" systems that don't expect players to meticulously track food consumption and such. If circumstances are "normal" (for whatever definition of normal applies to the campaign, anyway) I assume they've found something to eat and such. If circumstances are not normal, then I've had them make Endurance rolls to see how the bad/lack of/whatever sort of food has been affecting them. On a failure, I've imposed conditions (or temporary aspects, in FATE parlance) on them, which mechanically translate to a penalty at some appropriately inopportune moment. Fitting the "narrativist" approach, this could also lead to compels which gets them into further trouble-- hunger tempts a character to steal a loaf of bread, and Inspector Javert comes after them, or something.

[Steerpike]

Interesting topic!

The details are important!  Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

This is a somewhat provocative statement.  Why should matters of small concern be treated seriously?  Lots of games are pretty epic in scope.  Having spoken to my own players about their experiences, the parts of my game they generally enjoy tend to be the crazy, wild, awesome parts and the parts they don't enjoy are the tedious minutiae of selling their stuff, buying supplies, and that kind of thing.  So why not gloss over those parts and get on towards the strange, wondrous, horrific, and/or exciting bits?

Still, I can see food and drink being particularly interesting in two situations:

1) Strange, weird, magical, or unusual food and drink are the norm in the setting.  For example, in the game I'm currently running IRL - set in the Planescape multiverse - I use lots of food and drink all the time, but it's always weird - like a drink that temporarily turns your Alignment to its Evil version, or chaos cheese, which causes random polymorph effects.  Due to the nature of that world, bizarre and magical food and drink are pretty common.

2)  Getting enough to eat, and getting good food, are extremely important tasks in the setting - the campaign is about surviving in a cruel, unfeeling world, post-apocalyptic wasteland, etc, so obtaining food and drink are central preoccupations.  In such campaigns you could treat spoiled food similar to mild poison, requiring some sort of save to resist its debilitating effects.  If I was running it in Pathfinder I might treat it as a DC 12 Fortitude save or become Sickened for 1d10 hours, with a failure of more than 5 resulting in Nausea for 1d6 hours followed by being Sickened for another 1d6 - or something like that.  It would be pretty easy to give small bonuses for good food: in particular temporary hit points or resistances would make sense.

But other than those sorts of situations/settings, I'm not convinced that food really needs to be that important to the game-world.  Maybe a mention or two of a few details to generate some verisimilitude, but why not just not worry about it, really?

One way to vary it more might be to just limit the supply.  Maybe well-preserved trail rations just aren't widely available in the local village and they have to go looking for more varied fare.

[Kindling]

In my Dark Silver campaign one of my players decided that his barbarian swordmaster was more concerned with bartered goods than cash payment, and so has been rewarded with cows at the end of quests. He now owns a vast quantity of beef jerky.

My tendency though, I think, would be less to punish players for a poor diet (in my vaguely early-medieval setting, a poor diet is probably the norm) and more to reward them when they do eat well - probably with bonuses to fatigue recovery or even other things from feasts in the thane's hall and so on. A fine meal could even function as a kind of mundane healing potion in some circumstances.

chaos cheese

Nomaygahd. Yes.

[LordVreeg]

Yeah. 

I have never really used traditional rations too much, though they exist.  Normally, that is smoked meat and dried fruit.  What is eaten and drank is part of game flavor and gives more of the feel of being out in the wild.

I get WAY too into food for my setting.  The guys who played SIG will tell you about the Kafee in the am, the Bagels and epfel and the bacon, not too mention the fun of getting back to civilized areas.  There is a hobyt farmer by the name of Shuruum (one of Nom's characters married one of his daughters) who always laid out a big meal before they went off into the wilds.  We often do the roleplay around the meal, and even roll success for the cooking.  Unlike Steerpike, who uses it to emphasize the unusual nature of the game, I use it more to cement the normalcy.

Cuisine in the CradleLands, btw.  A little off topic, but perhaps interesting.

[Xathan]

Interesting topic!

The details are important!  Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

This is a somewhat provocative statement.  Why should matters of small concern be treated seriously?

I'm behind Steerpike 100% right here. My games are about 50% narrrativist games like Sparkletwist mentions, 50% classic DND style games, and in either one I don't see much advantage to penalizing characters for food, or any benefit to doing so.

I have played in two games where food one was an issue. One was a game where the DM was very strict about realism, and you received a cumulative -1 morale penalty to pretty much everything for every 3 in game days you only ate trail rations. All it meant is that one of the players made her character a kitchen servant before her sorcererous talents developed and sunk a few ranks into profession (cook), and my ranger would spend some in game time hunting/gathering herbs. It wasn't particularly fun or interested and really just added time where I was going on solo quests the rest of the party couldn't help in because none of them had hide/move silently worth a damn. (Though it did lead to a funny "BAM, Critical Porridge!" moment)

The other took place in Dark Sun, and it wasn't about what you ate, but rather about making sure you had enough food/water. That time it was much more fun, because it added to the harsh survival aspect of the game, and we enjoyed having to plan how long our journey would be, how much of each we would need, and the tension caused by delays since we could only carry so much, even by bringing extra in case of the unexpected.

I guess my point there is; worrying about trail rations only makes sense (to me) in a game where that sort of harshness adds to the overall tone of the game, rather than detracts.

As an aside; old timey ship crews would eat pretty much the same thing, or close enough to it, for months on end, and the only ill effects were eventual vitamin deficiencies; most morale issues may have included complaining about the food, but it was hardly the biggest reason for mutiny.

That being said, if you want players to care about food - what's good for my group may not be good for yours - I would go the route of "rewarding bonus XP" to individuals that roleplay than penalizing those who don't. The first encourages, the second would likely breed resentment. 

[LordVreeg]

Interesting topic!

The details are important!  Matters of small concern should be treated seriously.

This is a somewhat provocative statement.  Why should matters of small concern be treated seriously?  Lots of games are pretty epic in scope.  Having spoken to my own players about their experiences, the parts of my game they generally enjoy tend to be the crazy, wild, awesome parts and the parts they don't enjoy are the tedious minutiae of selling their stuff, buying supplies, and that kind of thing.  So why not gloss over those parts and get on towards the strange, wondrous, horrific, and/or exciting bits?

I answered the OP first.
Now onto this.

First of all, I come from a differnt place, where most of the players I started with had come from the wargame heritage.  So some of the things that many players that come from otehr backgrounds might find tedious were actually much more fun than the real rote number crunching of Napoleonics.  

Secondly, I went through a long period of glossing over stuff, and my earlier campaigns and some games were much more wild.  But the monotony of the fantastic can set in.  Without the touchstone of the mundane, their wierd and fantastic loses much of it's power to impress.  And narrative design often follows this format for a reason, as well, with smaller climaxes being followed by lulls in the action.

It's not that my players rave about gathering nuts and berries; it's that the games overall got better and the fantastic seems to maintain that ability to get a response without falling into Simon R. Green syndrome (everything is the biggest and the craziest and the most dangerous...everything...so it numbs the reader very quickly).  

I think this is a consideration for some types of games, as well as more of consideration for campagn style games, however.

[Xathan]

Secondly, I went through a long period of glossing over stuff, and my earlier campaigns and some games were much more wild.  But the monotony of the fantastic can set in.  Without the touchstone of the mundane, their wierd and fantastic loses much of it's power to impress.  And narrative design often follows this format for a reason, as well, with smaller climaxes being followed by lulls in the action.

I'll grant that without a touchstone of the mundane, fantastic becomes normalized, but for me being forced to occasionally go "I roll survival to find nuts and berries" or take penalties doesn't remind me of the mundane, to make the fantastic feel more fantastic, but it reminds me of the fact that I'm playing a game with numbers and rules; it's a total breaker of immersion. Instead, the mundane can be reinforced by having the players roleplay interactions with townsfolk while in town, and by not having everything be the BLANK-est.

Back to something in the OP:

And nutrition be damned!  Most games don't penalize you for eating nothing but maggoty bread for weeks on end

There is an assumption here that trail rations are "nothing but maggoty bread;" as someone who's done a fair bit of camping, and has several friends in the armed forces, trail rations are often far more filling and fulfilling than this. Part of is that many game systems have "trail rations" you can buy without ever defining what trail rations actually are; are they just maggoty bread? Are they just maggoty bread and jerked meat?* Are they magical llamdos bread? Are they basically trail mix with the candy replaced with bits of jerked meat?** Is trail rations just a catch all for "food that can be taken on the road that has been prepared in such a way as to prevent spoiling?" Are they actual magical boxes containing a feast that will feed the party for days? Are they bits of flesh from a slain god people have been feasting upon for years?

If, if your setting, trail rations are nothing but maggoty bread and jerked meat***, then that is something worth noting to the players. Make a point each time they eat trail rations of going "You sit down to maggoty bread and jerked meat****". If your players are at all interested in roleplaying, they'll take the hint and realize that they should probably seek other food sources; if they're not, then there's really not point into penalizing them into roleplaying, because they're not going to enjoy it, it's going to be an item on a checklist and they'll just marginally adjust how much gold they spend on food to meet whatever criteria they need to meet to avoid penalties.


*heh. jerked meat.
**heh heh heh.
***okay, I'm apparently 5 years old, because that still makes me giggle to type.
****BWAHAHAHAHAHA, comedy.

[HippopotamusDundee]

I guess my point there is; worrying about trail rations only makes sense (to me) in a game where that sort of harshness adds to the overall tone of the game, rather than detracts.

2)  Getting enough to eat, and getting good food, are extremely important tasks in the setting - the campaign is about surviving in a cruel, unfeeling world, post-apocalyptic wasteland, etc, so obtaining food and drink are central preoccupations.  In such campaigns you could treat spoiled food similar to mild poison, requiring some sort of save to resist its debilitating effects.  If I was running it in Pathfinder I might treat it as a DC 12 Fortitude save or become Sickened for 1d10 hours, with a failure of more than 5 resulting in Nausea for 1d6 hours followed by being Sickened for another 1d6 - or something like that.  It would be pretty easy to give small bonuses for good food: in particular temporary hit points or resistances would make sense.

It's ironic to me that you both point this out as an exception - it just so happens that the vast majority of the games I run do include survival as a major aspect, due largely to my belief that the environment can and should be just as interesting and challenging an arena as any social setting or combat.

I believe (and my players over the years have largely agreed) that a mixture of all kinds of challenges makes for a more interesting game and I have always included 'survival' challenges in that equation.

So I suppose, to answer the thread's actual topic, I think that looking at food and the supply and quality of food differently is just a part of viewing the significantly more challenging nature of pre-modern survival as a worthy aspect of inclusion in a game.

But really, YMMV on this one, I think.

[LordVreeg]

I'll grant that without a touchstone of the mundane, fantastic becomes normalized, but for me being forced to occasionally go "I roll survival to find nuts and berries" or take penalties doesn't remind me of the mundane, to make the fantastic feel more fantastic, but it reminds me of the fact that I'm playing a game with numbers and rules; it's a total breaker of immersion. Instead, the mundane can be reinforced by having the players roleplay interactions with townsfolk while in town, and by not having everything be the BLANK-est.

Yeah, that's why i'd never do it that way.  Ignoring the issue vs making a survival roll is a horrible forced dichotomy.  I prefer going into slight detail as to the meal and the food and the prep, giving my players the ability to play some there if they want.  I have players with spice kits, field ovens, evercoal, etc.  Because allowing them to do this increases immerciaon, but it is not for everyone, or every game.

[Cheomesh]

This is a somewhat provocative statement.  Why should matters of small concern be treated seriously?

This is a quote from the Hagakure.  In full, it reads:  
[spoiler]
Among the maxims on Lord Naoshige's wall there was this one: "Matters of great concern should be treated lightly."  Master Ittei commented, "Matters of small concern should be treated seriously." [/spoiler]

There's more to the passage but it would detract from the meaning.  There's double duty behind the statement:  Let's talk details is one.  The other was humor.

This was mostly intended for fun - no DM in their right mind penalizes general players for eating trail rations endlessly without telling them up front.  I'm awful at DMing and even I know that.  It isn't tied to specific game styles, genres or anything.  It is entirely possible that survivalism in the wild is a centerpoint in any genre, not just post apoc.  It helps reinforce just what one has to go through to get the treasure at the dungeon, even if it exists entirely as narrative without penalty.

Xathan:  I used the terms "Nutrition be damned" and "maggoty bread" as a joke.  The latter is a reference to the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy.  In any case, I'd never assume it was bug-infested bread (exception:  American Civil War period games).  I'd assume it was probably something like head cheese.

M.

[Lmns Crn]

I think there's a lot of different directions you can take your game, based on which details you are interested in and which details you are disinterested in. I think games and systems should make things important (or not) based on whether they're interesting (or not). I think there's a distinct danger (which Cheomesh acknowledges in a tiny footnote in his opening post) in statements like "games should pay more attention to X," because by making such a statement, I'd essentially be taking my personal opinion of what is interesting and generalizing it out across an entire hobby, as if it were objective rather than subjective.

I've played lots of games where food, and rations, and counting every last penny when you buy and hoard supplies, and getting sick because you're malnourished because you're only eating rations... where none of that stuff matters, because it's not what the game is about. In a lot of the games I like, adding that level of detail would constitute an irritating distraction from the issues I want to shine a spotlight on.

If you want to play a game based on exploring trackless wildernesses, or being lost at sea, or trying to see how long you can survive in the palace dungeons while you plan your escape, then maybe how much food you've got available to you will start becoming a thing I care about. If you want to play a game where you count all your pennies (rather than having a vague measure of wealth/lifestyle as a regular character trait), then maybe I start caring about stuff like the relative costs of different qualities of food. If you want to play a game where I have to impress someone with the quality of fine dining experiences, or-- I dunno-- Nutritionist: the Dietary Managing, then it starts to become important what gets served. But I suppose that as a default position, I don't much care about any of that stuff.

I have a theory that most of the fixation with rations and etc. comes from our hobby's early D&D roots, and half-malformed associated baggage based on the coincidence that Tolkien liked to write about Farmer Maggot's crops and how freaking amazing Lembas-bread is.



Edit: That was weird-- one of my paragraphs ended up out of order.

[sparkletwist]

I agree that "is it interesting?" is the most important question to ask.

Asura is kind of gonzo-over-the-top (no, really, I know this is a shock) so I have definitely seen the need to occasionally take things down a notch so the crazy stuff still has impact. Focusing a bit on the day to day is a good way to do that, but I still feel like those adventures should be fun. And of course, the food and drink can figure in there: meeting in a bar and drinking, diplomacy and politics discussed over a fine meal, or the like. I've certainly detailed the kinds of food that people in the Asuraverse eat, because, while I'm not really in favor of making players generally worry about where their sustenance comes from, little background details like that add so much color.

After all, it doesn't have to stay about food for long. The entire plot arc in the current Cad Goleor game started off when Sorcha just went hunting for some breakfast...

[Humabout]

With notable exceptions, I find tracking details, like how much food a party has with them, detracting from the fun of most games.  That said, I generally enjoy more action-packed cinematic-type games where people have as much food as they need until they hit that scene when "all our rations were on that boat that just sank" or some such.  Essentially, food doesn't matter until it's a plot point.

That said, I do usually make sure PCs allot some encumbrance for provisions or the means to procure food for themselves.  Also, in survival-oriented games, food, water, sleep, infection, etc. get tracked meticulously, but in such games, those things are plot points.  So I guess, really, my lame answer to this thread is that I care about tracking rations when they matter, and they only matter when they matter.

As for using food to flavor a campaign, I've never really done that (I usually use sounds and music for that), but the prospect is intriguing.  It would certainly help further immerse people, since it would incorporate more senses.  I think I may start trying to work food into scenes more often.