Out Of Character

[doctorx]

Josiane is sustained by her Faith.

No, she is! Really!! Please..? ( )

[Eris]

As starvation seems to be a reoccurring theme in this game, I've been thinking a bit about how deprivation should be handled in OD&D based games. I think I'm onto something reasonable now -- stay tuned to find out exactly how your PCs are suffering...

Oh boy! Something to look forward to.

[mgtremaine]

For a second I thought I was playing Net Hack... :p

[waysoftheearth]

Okay guys, those of you who are starving might be interested in my post here.

[sully]

Okay guys, those of you who are starving might be interested in my post here.

Presumably, none of us are currently starving, as we dined on roast mule 24 hours ago, right?

Glad to see Dorgan's 16 CON will count for something.

[waysoftheearth]

I tried to keep it simple and close to Outdoor Survival. But it might be that CON should be more important; especially with regards to food. I think 20+ days without food is pretty crazy -- especially if you think you're going to be physically active!

I'll have to think a bit about recovery rates too.

In the meantime, our PCs have should have been around four days getting back from the abbey at their reduced movement rate, and managed just two meals in that period.
With that in mind, I think I'll have the PCs at their limit of their "grace period". Starting tomorrow (if they don't eat today), they'll be officially deprived.

[mgtremaine]

Well then Highbough and Wen are sad.

Not to nit pick but now that we have food rules we should be given the opportunity to say how we store or carry the food. The assumption that the Murphy Mule had everyones food was an easy ruling but.... I kind of doubt Wen would have put his Elven foodstuffs in that communal pool after just joining the group. Just saying if you got a CON of 6 you probably need to keep you snacks handy..

[waysoftheearth]

From distant memory, I think I had it that folks carried a day worth of supplies with them; leaving the remainder at their base camp, which was just a few hundred yards away AND guarded by two (then) PCs. Who was to know that Envongr would throw himself to the Wolves? Or that Garek the dwarf would turn out to be a Guore?

Now that we have deprivation rules I'm sure the players will see to it that we never need them

[waysoftheearth]

On the "Good News Front", I have migrated my spreadsheets from the dying EditGrid service (due to shutdown May 1st) over to the Google Sheets browser app (which was surprisingly painless--this being partly why I needed to move Hinterlands here in the first place).

So when you view the Vital Statistics page, you're in fact pulling down an HTML page hosted by Google. If that one goes away I dare say we've got bigger problems.

Onward!

[waysoftheearth]

I don't think I'd ever consider surrendering to creatures of a chaotic alignment with evil tendencies to be "perfectly viable". Sounds like a game ender to me. End result of being sold into slavery, until useless, and then killed or tortured for information and then killed.

Can't imagine "let's have a chat, then we'll let you go".

A lot would depend on how it was played and reaction rolls for sure, but one could imagine the PCs being captured and frog marched into occupied Ket, or to the Hinterlands stronghold, and learning what's going on from the inside... not ideal, granted, but not entirely implausible.

Would that approach be more or less risky that direct combat..? Hmmm, hard to say; combat could go either way too. Most players do seem to prefer to "go down swinging" than to be captured though.

FWIW -- Original D&D has this interesting rule for captured PCs:

the charisma score is usable to decide such things as whether or not a witch capturing a player will turn him into a swine or keep him enchanted as a lover.

Plenty of game-play hooks there, but yeah, you don't want to be the guy who gets an unlucky roll.