Topic: How successful is a "Successful Forage" roll?

[Dunadan]

The party (5 characters) is traveling through a wilderness. One PC has reasonable forage skills and wants to forage for food.

I'm asking for input on the following...
- can he forage while traveling? (reduced movement rate? negative modifier to forage skill?)
- if he is successful in his forage roll how much food is gained (in mandays)?

Would it be reasonable to assume a successful forage roll would provide enough food for a single person for a single day (ie one manday of food)? So that the character could sustain himself in the wilderness, but not a whole party.

My reasoning is that a successful roll isn't going to yield 5 mandays of food. The PC can't expect to "forage while traveling" and supply the whole party with an unending supply of food.

Any input welcome...

[jdale]

School of Hard Knocks suggests that basic usage of the skill takes 4 hours -- so it would take time away from travel but not necessarily kill your entire day -- and that each additional person to be fed will increase the difficulty by one. The base difficulty depends on the environment, e.g. forest, jungle, and coastal environments are fairly rich so Light difficulty, grassy plain or swamp is Medium, savanna is Hard, etc. If one attempt fails, he could then make another attempt at the cost of losing the rest of the day.

Those seem reasonable to me. You could get lucky (or really know what you are doing) and find a bounty, but that harder. Foraging will require being on the move, and while to some extent you need to follow the lead of the environment, you can probably travel in the general direction you want to go. So you still make net progress but it's slower. You definitely aren't going to turn up much foraging while traveling on a road though, it's going to slow you down somewhat.

You could be generous and allow some hunting in tandem with the foraging, e.g. by the other members of the party.

[Spectre771]

You seem to be on the right track.  Foraging is for one person to find the sustenance needed for himself, not for a party but I don't think it's for a day's worth of sustenance.  It's only for the equivalent of one meal to survive or to find an ingredient that is needed.  The full description is in RMC-II. 

For herbs and poisons, the item description details the locale, the difficulty in locating, and the number of doses normally found when discovered.  That would answer part of your question as to quantity.  I often have players foraging for healing herbs like Abass and Draaf.  Fortunately for them, those are pretty abundant and I only make them spend an hour to dedicated foraging.

The act of foraging requires dedicated time spent to foraging and not traveling or any other activity.  It is still a dedicated activity just as Midwifery, First Aid, Second Aid, etc. are.  There's a difference between digging up plants to see if there are potatoes under there and walking down a market street looking for the food at the stalls.  Technically that is foraging too, but in the wild, the food needed isn't on display.  It has to be searched for, dug up, plucked from a tree after climbing it.  Even searching for mushrooms requires going off the beaten bath to hunt for them.

[Grinnen Baeritt]

For me the act of successfully foraging is simply subsisting on what you find, with the "Base" being what's needed (Food and Water) to survive one day.

That, in itself, can be very subjective.. Let's say you find a source of drinkable water, is it a puddle or a stream?  Is it the remains of recently slain creature? Is that creature a elephant or a mouse? Do you find rough barely edible plant matter (grass) or an Apple tree? All could enable you to survive, but some might allow survival for more than one day or serve to feed more than one person but ONLY for one day. The point here, is that the magnitude of the possible success is generally a random factor, which is heavily influenced by the availability of certain factors, ALL of which are under the control of the GM. The skill check result is reflective upon that pre-set availability. Therefore, if the GM knows that there is little to no food/water in an area then the roll will be at a severe penalty or the results of an otherwise successful roll will simply net less.

Now, *how* and "why" the character forages must also be figured into the chance of success. Foraging by it's very nature does requires movement... and is essential for repetitive successful attempts. The direction is not so important, but the speed of travel is.. so the faster the person travels the less effective they are... or they? Bear in mind that unless they are either completely sense-blind or rendered thoughtless of action, a player should be allowed to instinctively call upon the knowledge that their character has of their surroundings. Any amount of reasonable knowledge will enable a character to identify common fruit, and distinctive plants whilst moving better than someone who simply wanders around aimlessly in a set specific area with no idea of what can be found or, indeed, what can be done with what is found whilst doing so.

Thus travelling at a walking speed whilst knowledgeable about what could possibly be found in an area should allow foraging for survival at no penalty to the overall distance travelled for the day especially if the characters prime focus is travel. Better rolls simply net more stuff or better stuff.

Foraging can also discover, un-looked for boons, like herbs appropriate for the terrain type. Whether the character knows what it is another matter.

Other skills also reflect upon the utility of the Foraging attempt, Flora, Fauna & Herb lores. The Survival skill may also modify the difficulty set by the GM. 

   

Basically, If that requires 4 hours of nothing but foraging.. that is a basic roll, and that's what's achieved. However, other factors need to be introduced in to the success (or failure) of the attempt.

[intothatdarkness]

I always varied this based on terrain and environment. Four hours of foraging in an area close to a creek, for example, is going to turn up much more in the way of food than foraging for the same amount of time in the desert or a high alpine region. I tend to reflect that by (as JDale suggests) reducing the difficulty, but I also reduce the time required.

As always with these things, quite a bit of it depends on how hard you want to be as a GM and how foraging contributes, or doesn't contribute, to the adventure.

[Hurin]

Yes, how hard and how realistic you want to be as GM will really have a big effect on what you think is appropriate.

But just for some perspective: my wife and I usually go for walks with our kids on the weekends. We live out west, where there are a lot of deer. We frequently see them in the valleys, often quite close to us, even when we're walking somewhere else. If I were a good hunter, I could bring one down and feed my family for several days with it. My wife also knows a lot about plants, and can tell us which berries to eat and which to avoid. Were we living in medieval times, I doubt we could depend on this knowledge and these opportunities to support ourselves entirely, but there definitely would be some times that we bagged a deer and ate well for several days with just one good foraging roll. So I would be hesitant to do something so mechanical as saying, 'A successful foraging roll = one man-day of food'. I'd prefer to do something like:
--a very high success = you bagged a deer;
--a lower success = you found some berries;
--a failure = you found nothing;
--and a critical failure = you ate the wrong berries.

[Jengada]

Yes, how hard and how realistic you want to be as GM will really have a big effect on what you think is appropriate.

But just for some perspective: my wife and I usually go for walks with our kids on the weekends. We live out west, where there are a lot of deer. We frequently see them in the valleys, often quite close to us, even when we're walking somewhere else. If I were a good hunter, I could bring one down and feed my family for several days with it. My wife also knows a lot about plants, and can tell us which berries to eat and which to avoid. Were we living in medieval times, I doubt we could depend on this knowledge and these opportunities to support ourselves entirely, but there definitely would be some times that we bagged a deer and ate well for several days with just one good foraging roll. So I would be hesitant to do something so mechanical as saying, 'A successful foraging roll = one man-day of food'. I'd prefer to do something like:
--a very high success = you bagged a deer;
--a lower success = you found some berries;
--a failure = you found nothing;
--and a critical failure = you ate the wrong berries.

I am more of Hurin's mind on this. First, I don't want to consume my playtime with foraging rolls if it's not going to advance the plot. Second, if a character has a rural/nomad/forest/subsistence background, they presumably know how to do this in their home area. Going to a new area may make a small or big difference. In my own campaign, one of the characters is a nomadic hunter. I never bother with tracking food when they're in that character's native ecosystem. They're soon to be leaving that, but unless they go into high altitudes or desert, I wouldn't make them roll for food.
Foraging for a specific item, whether food, herb, or poison, I would definitely pull up info on that item's abundance and make them make some rolls.

[Dunadan]

Thanks for all the input guys. I'm thinking this way...

1 - Foraging for herbs is different from foraging for food. PC states what herb he is looking for. Roll is made based on herb difficulty/climate/locale.
2 - Foraging for food. (Use table from SoHK). Success = 1 manday of food. Extra manday of food for every 10% above success.

And add some story telling around the rolls...

[Hurin]

Thanks for all the input guys. I'm thinking this way...

1 - Foraging for herbs is different from foraging for food. PC states what herb he is looking for. Roll is made based on herb difficulty/climate/locale.
2 - Foraging for food. (Use table from SoHK). Success = 1 manday of food. Extra manday of food for every 10% above success.

And add some story telling around the rolls...

The right way is whatever way works best for your group Dunadan.

You can definitely do herbs as you say -- that is, you can require the PC to state what herb he is looking for. Personally, I prefer to just let them make a foraging check to find whatever herbs are out there, and then roll randomly to see what herb(s) they find. We now have charts for that for Shadow World and I think Middle Earth too. So you can do it either way.

[brole]

To my knowledge hunter gatherers would spend about 7 hours a day foraging, in these successful communities this would yield enough for the foragers themselves and extra eg. food for children.

So 7 hours partial success or 4 hours full success would sustain the forager.

RM2 includes fishing in the foraging description, although I would break fishing into its own skill with different stat bonuses.

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