I'm running a segment for my players where they have to survive a week in the woods without all the gear that they have acquired so far. I made a little system to make figuring out if their day is successful or not a little more interesting than just rolling for survival each day. Is this comprehensive? Is it too difficult? Are there things I should change?
This is what I tell them:
Short rests require food and water to be successful, and you are only allowed one Short Rest each day
Long rests require shelter, fire, food, and water to be successful
During the day, you can do whatever you want as long as you meet the day's requirements. During the night you have to sleep at least eight hours in order to get a full rest, excluding watches. (Each individual character needs eight hours)
There are wild beasts who wander in this area, and they have been given your scent. You have to keep moving in order to remain safe. Three hours of movement guarantee some safety, but six hours guarantees the most safety
The days are split into three segments. You have a list of requirements for each to successfully complete a day. If one of these segments' requirements is not successfully completed, there will be consequences.
To successfully mark off a requirement, each character must fulfill that requirement, there are no group checks. You can help and do things for other characters, so each person rolling for themselves individually is not necessary, but everyone's needs must be met. I have made handouts to help track whether or not the players are successful on each day.
Decisions for who does what or what will happen must be done in character. Any decisions/discussions out of character will automatically fail the attempted check.
This is the behind the scenes:
Water - DC9+DAY survival check
Food - One "meal" = one small creature/enough berries per person (DC9+DAY stealth/survival to find, roll for attacks as normal)
Rest
Rests require DC9+DAY survival check to find a good place to rest
Short rests require a meal and water to be successful
Long rests require shelter, fire, food, and water to be successful
Fire
To make a fire, DC9+DAY survival check
If raining, +5 to the DC
Shelter
DC9+DAY perception/investigation/survival check to find a suitable place to rest
If less than 2 of the above are met, the character gets a point of exhaustion
Movement
Need to move around/change your location for at least three hours of walking. Every three hours of walking must be supplied with one meal to keep the energy up. If not supplied, you cannot move further + get a point of exhaustion. The meal must be supplied FIRST before moving.
Encounters
No matter what, each day will have an encounter. The difficulty will be determined based on how much they moved the previous day.
Easy (light/no combat) - 6+ hours of movement
Medium (semi-challenging combat) - 3+ hours of movement
Hard (difficult combat) - No movement
I have a checklist to make sure each segment of the day (morning, afternoon, evening) has its requirements met.
A successful morning and afternoon must have successful food, water, and movement checks.
A successful evening must have successful food, water, shelter, and fire checks
Does this entire system make sense? I require roleplay between characters to help flesh out things and make it less roll after roll after roll, as well as give the characters a chance to bond since a few of my players have been mentioning that it's hard to find time to force the characters together since so many of them run off and separate. I might add some bonuses for certain really well-played scenes for motivation, like automatic successes as opposed to automatic fails when they don't roleplay.
What do you think? What should be tweaked? I want this to be fun for my characters and add some extra flair to their day-to-day life during this challenge.
If there is only one encounter per day, your Easy/Medium/Hard encounters will all be Very Easy Encounters. The game is designed so that a party can win around 6-8 Medium encounters in one day. Even if there is only one Deadly encounter per day, it will be easily overcome by an alpha-strike of powerful abilities in 1-2 turns. Additionally, one encounter per day will get routine over the course of a week. The players will come to expect it. Hopefully some of them are RP encounters rather than combat, otherwise this is just seven sequential combats of negligible difficulty with long rests between them and some ability checks.
Camping is for Girl Scouts
I'm not knocking girl scouts. But if you're making checks for camping, then note that this is something that children in the modern world who have no outdoors aptitude manage to do very successfully. Camping roleplay is so boring. I have played with a DM who made us do loads of checks around setting up fires, constructing shelters etc. It was excruciating and very boring to play. I used to loathe each time we had to set up camp and waste 20 minutes making ability checks to see if we could make supper successfully. An ability check to make fire? My character can literally throw a firebolt with a cantrip; with a full spell he can set the whole forest alight. How is it entertaining rubbing sticks together, with a possibility that my hero character may fail to light a fire? Note that many spells - Goodberry, Druidcraft etc. and Ranger abilities make the whole survival concept meaningless as well.
The Design
The actual survival part that you have designed boils down to this in terms of gameplay:
The party decide if they are going to move around. They decide how to set up camp (by day 3 expect them to work the same routine daily)
Make a series of ability checks (There's no gameplay revolving around this. A one off to find a place to shelter, sure. On day 5 that is going to feel extremely old.
Following making the checks, there is an encounter.
Repeat 6 times.
The key problems with what you've designed are that there is no actual gameplay, and there is no decision making of consequence to be done on the part of the players. The dice control everything. The players can say they do whatever, but they'll just have to make a bunch of Survival ability checks to determine what happens regardless. It's a full on week-long railroad, but essentially the train isn't moving along the rails. Whether they move or not, they'll still be in the forest.
Overall the system you've designed sounds repetitive and doesn't have anything for the characters to do. The inevitability of a daily encounter takes away any decision making for the players (they won't know this, but it's true). Why can't they travel to a location and get somewhere else? Why are they stuck in this forest for 7 days? Like if I walk in any direction for a week then I'm still stuck in the forest?? What you propose deprives the players of choice.
Buckets of Dice = Failure.
This is something many DMs fail to remember. The more dice you ask players to roll, the higher the certainty of failure. Within every 20 rolls, 5 of them will be a 5 or less, practically guaranteeing failure, so every 4 rolls the players will fail one. Note that as unlikely as it may be, you have also created a system that can kill a player in 6 days simply through bad dice rolls, without any ability of the player to affect it since you can give them 6 levels of exhaustion.
Create Locations and experiences!
My advice would be to only use this as the in-between parts as the characters do other things (and honestly, one Survival check to set up camp is enough for the whole party). Instead of hum drum camping business, create a forest of interesting locations, give the players a map, and let them navigate the forest trails so that survival matters because they're moving somewhere they want to go. Instead of ability checks to set up a camp fire, have ability checks to cut a path through dense brush, or to cross quicksand, or to avoid disturbing a sleeping giant. You can roll a bunch of ability checks to do anything in this fantasy world - so spend them on exciting, intense and fantastic experiences. I promise that what you're imagining - intense roleplay as the characters get wearier and wearier - will simply not pay off if (a) the players aren't making relevant decisions and (b) it just comes down to rolling d20s. And it certainly won't work repeatedly. I have literally played through something very similar to what you're describing and it was the worst part of any D&D game I've been a player in.
I'm running a segment for my players where they have to survive a week in the woods without all the gear that they have acquired so far. I made a little system to make figuring out if their day is successful or not a little more interesting than just rolling for survival each day. Is this comprehensive? Is it too difficult? Are there things I should change?
This is what I tell them:
This is the behind the scenes:
I have a checklist to make sure each segment of the day (morning, afternoon, evening) has its requirements met.
Does this entire system make sense? I require roleplay between characters to help flesh out things and make it less roll after roll after roll, as well as give the characters a chance to bond since a few of my players have been mentioning that it's hard to find time to force the characters together since so many of them run off and separate. I might add some bonuses for certain really well-played scenes for motivation, like automatic successes as opposed to automatic fails when they don't roleplay.
What do you think? What should be tweaked? I want this to be fun for my characters and add some extra flair to their day-to-day life during this challenge.
Encounter Difficulty
If there is only one encounter per day, your Easy/Medium/Hard encounters will all be Very Easy Encounters. The game is designed so that a party can win around 6-8 Medium encounters in one day. Even if there is only one Deadly encounter per day, it will be easily overcome by an alpha-strike of powerful abilities in 1-2 turns. Additionally, one encounter per day will get routine over the course of a week. The players will come to expect it. Hopefully some of them are RP encounters rather than combat, otherwise this is just seven sequential combats of negligible difficulty with long rests between them and some ability checks.
Camping is for Girl Scouts
I'm not knocking girl scouts. But if you're making checks for camping, then note that this is something that children in the modern world who have no outdoors aptitude manage to do very successfully. Camping roleplay is so boring. I have played with a DM who made us do loads of checks around setting up fires, constructing shelters etc. It was excruciating and very boring to play. I used to loathe each time we had to set up camp and waste 20 minutes making ability checks to see if we could make supper successfully. An ability check to make fire? My character can literally throw a firebolt with a cantrip; with a full spell he can set the whole forest alight. How is it entertaining rubbing sticks together, with a possibility that my hero character may fail to light a fire? Note that many spells - Goodberry, Druidcraft etc. and Ranger abilities make the whole survival concept meaningless as well.
The Design
The actual survival part that you have designed boils down to this in terms of gameplay:
The key problems with what you've designed are that there is no actual gameplay, and there is no decision making of consequence to be done on the part of the players. The dice control everything. The players can say they do whatever, but they'll just have to make a bunch of Survival ability checks to determine what happens regardless. It's a full on week-long railroad, but essentially the train isn't moving along the rails. Whether they move or not, they'll still be in the forest.
Overall the system you've designed sounds repetitive and doesn't have anything for the characters to do. The inevitability of a daily encounter takes away any decision making for the players (they won't know this, but it's true). Why can't they travel to a location and get somewhere else? Why are they stuck in this forest for 7 days? Like if I walk in any direction for a week then I'm still stuck in the forest?? What you propose deprives the players of choice.
Buckets of Dice = Failure.
This is something many DMs fail to remember. The more dice you ask players to roll, the higher the certainty of failure. Within every 20 rolls, 5 of them will be a 5 or less, practically guaranteeing failure, so every 4 rolls the players will fail one. Note that as unlikely as it may be, you have also created a system that can kill a player in 6 days simply through bad dice rolls, without any ability of the player to affect it since you can give them 6 levels of exhaustion.
Create Locations and experiences!
My advice would be to only use this as the in-between parts as the characters do other things (and honestly, one Survival check to set up camp is enough for the whole party). Instead of hum drum camping business, create a forest of interesting locations, give the players a map, and let them navigate the forest trails so that survival matters because they're moving somewhere they want to go. Instead of ability checks to set up a camp fire, have ability checks to cut a path through dense brush, or to cross quicksand, or to avoid disturbing a sleeping giant. You can roll a bunch of ability checks to do anything in this fantasy world - so spend them on exciting, intense and fantastic experiences. I promise that what you're imagining - intense roleplay as the characters get wearier and wearier - will simply not pay off if (a) the players aren't making relevant decisions and (b) it just comes down to rolling d20s. And it certainly won't work repeatedly. I have literally played through something very similar to what you're describing and it was the worst part of any D&D game I've been a player in.