You might look at the AD&D Wilderness Survival Guide.  It has lots of rules for that sort of thing that could easily be adapted to the very similar AS&SH.  There are a lot of copies on ebay, so you can usually get one pretty cheap; I think I paid ten bucks for mine.

(My personal way to handle it is: if the PCs have enough food and water, they're safe from whatever sick penalties I might decide to assess.  But if they run out... )

Which is why the Encumbrance system I linkes is such a good idea.

A possible item weight table:
2 Light Armor
3 Medium Armor
4 Heavy Armor
1 One-handed Weapon (and bows)
2 Two-handed Weapon
1 Shields

1 Food for one day
1 Water (one unit, daily requirements depend on environment)
1 Quiver with 20 arrows
1 100 page spellbook
1 Thief Tools
1 Three potions
2 Firewood
1 Spare Clothing
2 Winter Clothing
1 Rope
1 100 coins

Any time you find a source of water, you can fully refill your water supply. When you reach a settlement, you can restock food for free (unless there's a local shortage, in which case you have to mark down an expanse from your wealth).

[cut this]Allowing characters to carry a number of Encumbrance Units equal to their Strength score with no penalty seems too much to me. A Strength 10 character in heavy armor with weapon and shield, and a backpack of spare clothing and enough food and water for a day of marching should not be unencumbred.
Half Strength score for unencumbred, full strength score for encumbred, and one-and-a-half Strength score for heavy encumbrance seems like a better idea to me.[/cut this]
Actually, allowing characters to carry items worth a number of slots equal to their Strength score with no penalty, twice as much encumbered, and three times as much heavily encumbered does make a lot sense and much more than halving these values.

I think Wilderness Survival Guide goes way too much into detail. Overland travel should be inobstrusive and basically invisible, as long as everything is alright. The guide doesn't just provide a system to answer the questions "will we get to our destination in time?" and "will we still be able to fight when we encounter enemies", but creates a whole new minigame of tracking weather and making starvation checks, that isn't even that mini.
But I think it might be a starting point to develop a simple to use wilderness survival mechanic.

Last edited by Yora (4/14/2014 4:38 pm)

I looked up the thirst rules in Dark Sun, and I like them quite a lot. Much simpler than in WSG.
Characters need 4 liters of water per day, 2 liters if resting. Half that amount if not exposed to the desert sun (which should be the default in most non-desert settings).
At the end of every day in which the character did not meet his water requirement, his Constitution goes down by 1d4 points. If he does not meet even half the requirement, he loses 1d6 points.
At the end of a day when a character does meet his water requirement, this penalty is reduced by 1d8 points.
It does not take into account that a chartacter would have trouble concentrating or doing anything based on strength, but a system that is easy to remember and to apply beats a "realistic" one for me any day.

The system can also be adapted for hunger. Characters can go 3 days without food, after that they lose 1 point of constitution every day. When they get enough food, they regain 1d4 points.

I'm planning to make a small 3 or 4 page pdf that compiles easy rules for encumbrance, hex-travel, supplies, weather, and wilderness encounters. It's actually not that difficult once you have the rules explained in a short and straightforward (isn't that the story of AD&D in general?), and I agree that it can add so much. It's really a shame this part of the game went pretty much forgotten, but once you drop one aspect of it, all the others also stop to make sense. Encumbrance, random encounters, and hex-maps seem pretty much pointless unless you have all of them together.

Last edited by Yora (4/14/2014 10:23 am)

NAJones wrote:

I guess everybody has different goals when they play, but I've never had much success nor fun playing in or running the kind of game spends much time on logistics.

That said if wanted to faff about with it, I thought Lamentations of the flame princess has a pretty elegant system for encumbrance, but unless players are moving through a desert or a wasteland, food and water are forage items and don't enter my bookkeeping.

 
Particularly if they have a ranger or scout with them.  If the protagonist  of the adventure  is a harsh environment then more detail would add to the tension of the adventure.  General travel I just hand wave the details.

Its not about the mechanics being too complicated, it's about not needing to have a mechanic to handle stuff that most of the people I game with aren't the least bit interested in simulating. If they get caught in a blizzard they run for shelter. If they try to cross an arid plain, then they buy camels and hire guides. But when things happen in game that need to be resolved in survival situations, I remember that most characters are probably born and bred to live in a world without modern conveniences; a place where they are already accustomed to living much more intimately with nature than we do.

I have been a mountaineer and back country enthusiast for years and in those rare circumstances where survival elements have come up in game I'm perfectly content to rely on my own knowledge of the wilderness and just wing it, using my own experiences and common sense to adjudicate situations - sure, I might throw some occasional dice rolls in there like constitution checks for fatigue, or check to see if they get lost cutting across trackless wilderness, but that's about it. Every other difficulty is just an opportunity for me to drop in a hook or adventure seed.

Last edited by NAJones (4/15/2014 12:06 am)

In our next game, I expect the PCs to follow a group of raiders deep into the marshes to rescue some slaves that are taken back to the raiders village. Catching up with thw raiders before they reach their village will make freeing the slaves a lot easier. But I very much doubt the players will think about two dozen people in bad shape requiring food on the five day march back home. So finding food will be important to avert disaster.

Here's a system for tracking travel times, speed, and finding food, that I've come up with:
It's all based on a 6-mile Hex map.

Characters MV / 5 = Movement Points (MP) per day

Road: 4 MP per hex
Smooth: 6 MP per hex
Rugged: 9 MP per hex
Very rugged: 12 Mp per hex

Forraging: 6 MP (ranger a.o. 4 MP)
Hunting: 12 MP (ranger a.o 8 MP)

Forraging can get you one days ration, hunting three rations. The chance to have success depends on the abundance of food in a given hex.
Aboundant: 5:6
Scarce: 3:6
Barren: 1:6
If the characters move through farmland, they might be able to pick up food without foraging, if they are in a desert, there might be no chance to get food at all.

It only ever comes up if the PCs run out of food with no settlements nearby, which shouldn't be very often. Also,they will often be able to take the food of defeated enemies, avoiding the necessity of foraging. And even if the situation happens, it only really matters to determine how much they are slowed down. If simply on their way home wih no hurry, foraging can just be skipped in most cases.
In a situation like mine, where a large group attempts to run from pursuers in an inhospitable environment, I think it's worth the extra bookkeeping.
Any problems you see with this system? Other than being an answer to a problem you never had? (That's the most common reaction I get to any Wilderness rules I propose.)

Last edited by Yora (5/14/2014 10:55 am)

How about taking an idea from the rules for getting lost?
Rangers and barbarians roll a d4 instead of a d6. That would be automatical success in abundant regions, 3:4 in scarce areas, and 1:4 in barren ones. This would be in addition to them requiring less time to hunt and forrage.

Which reminds me that the reduced MP cost for foraging should better be exactly half the normal cost. Otherwise the ranger goes foraging for 4 MP and then sits around idle for 2 more MP while waiting for the others to finish their attempt. That way rangers and barbarians can make two attempts while everyone else makes one.

While I think rangers and barbarians should be significantly better, the original description for Wilderness Survival was written under the assumption that food and water are pretty much irrelevant. There are no rules that cover food and water requirements. Under the assumption that it can be quite important, the ability should not be able to get automatic success and make the whole issue irrelevant. Because if you are in a campaign that takes place in the wild for weeks frequently, you almost certainly will have a ranger or barbarian in the group.

One factor that might be in use of more adjusting would be the number of rations you get for a successful attempt, both normal and for rangers.