Back in August, at Gencon, I had more than a couple of really excellent and informative conversations with Quinn from At Will. Like a lot of folks, Quinn has an amazing amount of passion for the game and a lot of really great ideas. I just recently incorporated one of these ideas, the Ration tracking system, into my own game with good results and I wanted to share my own interpretation and implementation of this system.
Healing Surges for Extended Rests
My intent with a ration system was to limit the amount of extended rests the party could take throughout an adventure. There are many ways to limit extended rests with such tools as random encounters, or regular patrols. I’ve often just fallen back to the “you get the feeling you cannot rest here” or “the evil aura of this place makes an extended rest psychologically impossible”. The problem is that this is an on / off switch. It gives players no real control over when they WANT to take a rest and when they don’t. The ration system fixes this problem.
With the ration tracking system, the players have control over when they take extended rests but understand that they only get so many of them before they have to really leave their location. They recognize that they might have a dozen battles ahead and only three ration packs. This gives them the option of resting early but knowing they will face more battles later or for them to press on and try to clear out a few more rooms before resting. The choice is theirs and, whenever we can, a good DM gives the players meaningful choices.
What’s In a Ration Pack?
A ration pack is a representation of the supplies a party of adventurers will need on their journey. It includes food, water, spell components, sunrods, medicines, and anything a party might need for a journey that has a limited amount. Rather than try to micromanage all of these oddities, a single ration pack can contain them all. The key is that these ration packs begin to rot or wear out if you keep them too long. For this reason, a party can only carry a small number of them. Any more and they’ll be wasted and rotten, the sunrods won’t glow and the water becomes tainted. The number they can carry is up to you, based on the number of encounters you expect them to face. Generally, divide the total number of battles you expect them to face in a dungeon by 4 and give them that many rations.
Indy! The Torch is Running Out!
The world doesn’t end if their ration packs run out. When their ration packs run out, they might get a general sense of hunger or sickness. Their spells might not work consistently. There is a multitude of things you might inflict upon your PCs should they run out of rations. You might begin adding critical fumbles on natural 1s. You might inflict a random disease on one or more members of the party. They might not be able to recover all of their healing surges. They might take a fatigue penalty to initiative. The penalties are up to you.
You might even give them a chance to build a new ration pack with a skill challenge should they run out too quickly.
Lunchables for Demigods
How do you make a system like this work for paragon or epic tiered characters? Simple. The locations they go to are almost always as terrible and physically corrupt as the PCs are powerful. If they go to the Shadowfell, they get Shadowrations – rations that survive the terrible nature of the shadow world. If they go to the Elemental Chaos they might need Primordial Rations that let mortals travel throughout the Elemental Chaos without fear of the hardships of such a place. The key is to make the need for ration packs as mighty as the power of your PCs.
The intent of these ration packs is to give players a limit on extended rests without completely removing their ability to choose when they wish to rest. Give it a try and see if it works out for you group. In a future article, we’ll look at how to give this same level of choice for magic item rewards as well.
In game – where do they go to purchase the ration packets? Do they buy the components separately and then self-assemble? I’m thinking I’ll have a hard time selling the fact that iron rats, water, and sunrods are going to spoil after only a few days. If this was the case, they’d be unable to take long, overland journeys…
I started using the ration system for the Shadowfell. It is easy to explain that the twisted nature of the Shadowfell seems to suck what little life there is in equipment and food. Water goes acrid, food spoils, sunrods weaken. No matter how many ration packs you bring, they will all go bad in X days where X is as many extended rests as you calculate out.
I don’t think it’s that hard to explain it in the mortal world either. Food can spoil pretty easily and a group can’t realistically carry enough water to last more than seven days or so. By the time they get the magics to carry more, they should be traveling to areas that drain these resources even if they are in a magic sack.
Seems unnecessary. Either they have what they need or they don’t. Limiting extended rests (which really only works out to once per day) doesn’t make any sense since that is usually when they are bedding down for the night / day.
Trail Rations are basically like Slim Jims and those last quite a long time so again placing limits doesn’t seem like it is helpful to the campaign in anyway. Is the reasoning to force PCs to spend money so that they can’t save up for better items? I don’t see the point.
I think the point in the rationning is possibly to limit the adventurer to return to some sort of civilisation once in a while (as to restock in the various daily needs). Some campaigns can lead to that (adventuring in dangerous sectors and such), while others not some much (as in my city campaign). It would feel weird for a group to venture 6 months in the underdark or in the desert, for example, without restocking somewhere…magic items are a good substitute…but if you want your PCs to go back to some homebase, give them big fat heavy loot (a money loot in the form of a real size statue seems like a good idea), obliging them to let it behind or head back to town…watch those carrying capacities! ;D
though i like the idea behind it, i think its pointless. there are a lot of magic items in the game that make this pointless, ive awarded these to my players as group items.
also, these guys are heroes, even at level 1 they are known somewhere. by the time they are level 12, people should be asking for autographs, kissing babies, and will be given free dinners etc.
Not to mention the rituals they can perform.
again i like the idea behind, it but
It’s an interesting take on extended rests. I imagine it all depends on what your players expect out of a game. I really thing WoTC has adopted the philosophy of ‘here’s the rules, change what you will.’ I feel there’s nothing wrong with tweaking how you run extended rests if your player’s are on board.
I like the idea of diminishing returns rather than having a hard cap though. Maybe once the good provisions are out, the group is down to water, jerky, and hardtack. They can eek out survival, but extended rests aren’t as restful (maybe dock off a healing surge or two). It’ll give the players a little wiggle room if they need a little more preparation time for that last crypt run, but still not be at 100% until they resupply (and take some serious downtime resting somewhere comfortable).
The purpose of a system like this is to keep the players from taking extended rests every third battle but without the forced mechanic of “it’s not safe to rest here and you can’t leave until you’ve accomplished X”. This gives the players the option to choose when they rest but to know that they can only do so a limited number of times.
It also gives you something else to attack with skill challenges. Longer travels use up more rations – evil necrotic doorways can spoil what you have. It’s like adventure-long healing surges.
There are a lot of magic items that would make this obsolete in the mortal world but by the time your players reach that level – they should also be entering the Feywild and Shadowfell where it is easy to explain that normal rations aren’t available and the ones you bring don’t last as long.
I’m thinking that the packs get marked off when they use their extended rest; and if they don’t have any more Ration Packs then arrows run out, food spoils. Everyone drops a few arrows when they run through a forest or take a fall, your packed lunch gets squashed when you’re caught in a trap, you have to keep your reagents dry when fording a river, finding really good stones for your sling takes time that you just might not have during an intense cross country march.
I have no problem rationalising the reduction in expendable materials. I’m trying to figure out the cost to the party to buy these as a pack. I figure there could be a good guide to cost them per teir.
Extended Rests can only be taken once every 12 hours, and then they require at least 6 hours time for the actual rest. So each extended rest cycle takes at least 18 hours of PC time. To me this is basically self limiting; I don’t see the need to impose extra record keeping into the process. Also, if PC’s are abusing Extended Rests, just make the encounters they face more difficult.
It seems that Grimmshade (I read that as Grimm Shado…) beat me to it. Not trying to be a rules lawyer here, but the other thing is that the book has rations noted down as Journeybeard, the magical bread baked by the Elves of Middle Earth for Frodo and gang to bring to Mordor. So I would assume those are hardy rations that would take much to foul them.
I would not recommend this system for new DMs because the less players and the DM have to do housekeeping, the more play there is. I have employed a similar resting similar before, giving each possible scenario for resting a rating – excellent to poor, even for taverns. The ratings then denote how much healing the characters receive from the rest. Poor rest recovers only 2 healing surges and a healing surge value of hit points and so on. Naturally, adventures will occur in poor resting locations and almost always lay at least a day or two away from civilisation…
That said, I understand where you are coming from, and it is indeed annoying if the players are resting every three encounters. I think using a skill challenge to replenish resources – arrows, health, rations, water, – is an excellent idea and that can easily segue into more hooks and adventure plots – in the Shadowfell, as the PCs are stumbling around looking for a place to rest and to gather something edible to ease their hunger, they find something, cairns, a tablet, or even a path, tied to their current mission and story.
The idea seems good but it fait to deal with magical item that gives enought food and water for 5 M creature per days… or perhaps i miss something ?
How to deal with that ?
@Vorghryn: The concept is that traveling to the darker places of the world – necrotic tombs, the Shadowfell, the Feywild, or the other outer planes – treats mortal food differently. While good rations might last a long long time while traveling normally in the mortal world – they tend to rot far quicker while in the Shadowfell. Only certain rations designed to be eaten by mortals in these worlds can last and there is a limit to that.
The housekeeping is rather simple. Give out a 3×5 card for the party with so many boxes on it – one for each days worth of rations the party has. They check them off each time they fully rest.
My point was : when you have a magic item that makes appear each day food and water for 5 M creatures (sorry, i can’t remember the name of that object), you can not say to them that the food is rotting faster because, food appears exactly at the moment they need. Of course you can say that the dark energy of Shadowfell is also corrupting magical food but it’s simply negate this advantage to the PC, which, as you often repeat, is not a good thing…
You can also say that a part of the food only is corrupted, but it is starting to make hard calculation, when the system is suppose to be light.
And outside of Shadowfell or such dark places, how explaining the misfonction of the magical stuff
I like the idea of giving the PC skill challenge for finding what they need (which is also proposed in the rules) but i have the feeling that a “cheated” solution can easily be fund throught magic. That why i am saying that system is good as long as PC don’t top magical stuff/ritual that provide them food and water (of course there is also other thing but less vital than food and water). If you have ideas about this…
Why not just limit the Extended Rests to what you stated, and don’t base it off rations? And just have it as a cap? This avoids the whole possible magic item complications. The problem with just throwing more encounters at them, is that its time consuming..