Hello, is anyone else not happy with ratons in d&d?

My players tend to buy 2-3 weeks worth of rations at anyone time. I'm thinking to myself, that this needs work. 

From my understanding of rations, unless there some kind of high-grade, which could be easily homebrewed. Rations are not meant to be used as a primary source of food. I'm reality at least. 

How does this sound? 

Rations can keep you norished for up to 3 days on there own. After this you gain exhaustion after every 24 hours.

However this can be easily avoided. Hunting, forigin for foods like fruit, veg, mushrooms or simply buying a meal from an Inn. Will counteract negative effects and reset the exhaustion stat. After which, rations can be eaten for up to 3 days without negative effects. 

I'm thinking it could be a decent way to prevent abuse of a very abuseable system. What are your thoughts. 

My logic is to, as I said is to stop the laziness of rations. I'm thinking they do have their place in dungeon crawls and long treks, but probably have to be substituted eventually. 

Hell the player can kill that manticore that attacked them, and eat it, and done. It also give the player with cooking proficiency and more important role. 

Thoughts? 

I've been strongly advised not to mess with the Exhaustion rules.  There are already rules in place for dying of starvation and they probably should stand as is.  There are rules for survival in the wilderness as well, foraging and such.  The Goodberry spell not only provides some hit points, it gives a full day's worth of nutrition per berry.  There are also Beads of Nourishment, and those are a Common item, so you can hand them out like candy at first level onward if you're worried about Rations.  It's not unreasonable to have player characters with a relevant skill make their own Beads of Nourishment, or you could confine that to Artificers if you wanted to.  If you like, you could let people with the Chef feat make something like Beads of Nourishment along with those other little treats that increase healing when people spend hit dice.

I don't mind the system as is really, the only problem I had with Rations was they were really encumbering.  If you aren't using the Encumbrance rules, that doesn't matter at all, and even if you do, the only people that will have a problem is the ones who dumped Strength, and they really ought to suffer a little for that in some way.  I have a similar problem with Torches, because those are rather encumbering as well, and most of my characters are Variant Humans, so they can't see without a light source.

I for one am happy if my players take the effort to figure out how many rations they need and buy that much and a little extra. At least they're not just trying to cast Goodberry or "Create Food/Water" every day and ignore the need for food and drink.

My reasoning is that anything you change with your homebrew has to enhance the campaign in some way.

What are you trying to achieve with making rations more nuanced?

Do you have a survival themed campaign? Is there a particular encounter or plot hook that connects with rations, their manufacture, distribution?

I usually ignore rations in urban settings, and for short treks between towns I'm good when they are at least on a character sheet.

For an excursion into Dark Sun, they are crucial (less than water, but still). And for that I also used variants of rest and healing.

Why do they feel like this is a necessity? I'd expect most travelling to be feasible going from inn to waystation in a day (8 hours of walking) on foot, which means that unless calamity strikes you need 1 ration per day that you can buy from a waystation every day. That doesn't quite hold up when adventuring, but then adventuring often won't really allow for foraging (which people would do while traveling to supplement rations, so if your players figure that out you'll have to think about what it means for your homebrew mechanic when the PCs start mixing and matching). 

So from where I'm standing it seems like buying rations in bulk is either unnecessary or somewhat unavoidable depending on what the party is doing unless they magic their way out of it, so your houserule punishes them if they can't or won't use magic to provide fresh food and water.

If you're playing an ultra-gritty campaign, that's fine, but when we think of rations I think of MREs(meal ready to eat) from the US Military.  It's not literally the same thing every day for the specific reason of nutrition.  The reason I say this, its because that's what the description of a ration says:  Rations consist of dry foods suitable for extended travel, including jerky, dried fruit, hardtack, and nuts.

So now, lets combine this with the tables for how much it costs to eat per day:  Squalid is 3 CP, Poor is 6 CP, Modest is 3 SP, Comfortable is 5 SP, Wealthy is 8 SP, and Aristocratic is 2 GP  

I get what you mean about how rations can feel unsatisfying, but I'd actually encourage giving some, ahem, Flavor to the Rations. By which I mean... don't treat Rations as just "Flavorless bricks of calories", but think about what foods travel well and can be eaten in the wild without access to a full kitchen. Maybe they're granola bars, or maybe it's jerky... maybe even smoked fish. 

I try to use Rations as sort of a "catch-all" term for any variety of foods the party is carrying, if only to save them the trouble of needing to micromanage every little nut and berry they've gathered through their adventure. But rations could be any variety of food items, and it would be good to encourage players to think a little bit more about what they're carrying.

Lembas Bread is cool.  That's reason enough for me.  I'm playing heroic fantasy, and that's pretty much what D&D was built for.  When out in the wilds, the foraging rules are a good thing because it gives the poor Ranger a little time to shine.  There's a poll right now down in Tips & Tactics and the Ranger is the least popular class by far.  When you're doing heavy duty exploration is about the only time that Rations really make any difference, and while there are rules for starvation, it's really only a threat, it's easily preventable most of the time, and in only the worst cases would character actually starve to death.  As far I'm concerned having my character starve to death isn't a fun way to die.  If I've gotta go, I want to go down fighting.

Rations are fine as is, and in real life, you can definitely live off of rations. Dried beans and processed grain can last at least half a decade or more when stored properly, and they are a cheap source of carbs and protein. Brown rice, which are pretty easy to spoil compared to more processed grains, can still last at least six months. Hardtack can last practically indefinitely if you keep it reasonably dry and they are pretty easy to make. Jerky, dried fruits, dried vegetables, nuts, and pemmican can all last at least a year or two, and these are all pretty easy to make as well.

A person needs an extremely poor diet for at least a month for scurvy and beri beri to develop. For a healthy human, they need to consume nothing but hardtack for at least a month before the body's stores of vitamin C and thiamin completely run out, so eating only hardtack for a few days is not going to cause any major health issues. And if the PCs are also consuming jerky, dried fruits, nuts as described under rations, the meal is balanced enough that I highly doubt they are going to suffer long term negative health consequences.

I do not think how the game handles rations is lazy, and what is essentially buying groceries for two to three weeks definitely does not count as abuse in my opinion. If modern day college students can survive off of canned soup and pasta/ramen, adventurers in a fantasy world eating jerky, dried fruit, hardtack, and nuts would be having quite a fancy meal and a far better diet in comparison.

When you think rations also think about things like dried peas and beans, smoked/sun dried/salted meats, and things like the native american’s pemmican (a tube of solidified melted animal fat with dried berries, meat and veggies as well as seasonings  much like sausages that stayed good for weeks to months). Sausages, hard cheeses, flour, salt, maybe even sugar as well as things like salt or sugar cured hams. All foods from before refrigeration that were meant to stay good for months through the winter and provide solid nutrition the whole time. There is a reason rations are encumbering  but they are nutritious and shouldn’t be causing exhaustion. Yes if your traveling overland you probably want to liven up the diet with fresh meat and foods but rations should get you there as long as you have enough. It’s when you brought 10 days rations and it’s now day 15 that you have problems.