Forum

First of all: I love the idea behind Consumables in Forbidden Lands.

In my opinion, adding potentially grave consequences to the steady depletion of these four basic resources into the game's core mechanics greatly enhances its "survival" aspect while the randomness of making it a dice roll adds a level of tension to the table that can never (in principle) be fully mitigated by careful planning from the players' part. It's really great.

Having said that, I've started noticing some gameplay issues - I'd like to know if other GMs are also having similar issues with Consumables and how you deal with it.

• Food: One unit of Bread (p. 166) adds 1 die to a character's Food resource, but it has shelf life of just one week (p. 194). Am I expected to keep track of the expiry date of the character's individual dice of Food? Is Food other than Bread (cooked Meat, Fish, Vegetables) even meant to eventually go bad?

• Water: How do you deal with a character with d12 Water in their waterskin who also wants to carry a Barrel (Common, Heavy, p. 184) which contains up to 10 units of Water or other liquid? How about two barrels, does the limit of carrying d12 Water even mean anything? My group has a strong dwarf with the Pack Rat talent.

• Arrows: I have a player whose character has a quiver full (d12) of iron-tipped arrows and he also wants to carry wooden-tipped arrows for hunting. Incidentally, he's also carrying a sling - potentially making this character way better prepared for ranged combat than a normal character carrying only the supposed limit of d12 Arrows. How do you deal with a similar situation in your game? Do you have a hard limit of "d12 Ammunition" that can be then broken into different ammo types in the characters' inventory or do you simply let players having their characters to carry as much ammo as they want? Something in-between?

• Torches: Though there's a decent balance between Torches, Lamp Oil (p. 182) and Tallow Candle (also p.182), these alternative light sources kind of defeat the purpose of not having to track individual resource items in a character's inventory the traditional way. Has anyone come up with interesting ideas to deal with that?

Food: shelf life is only relevant in storage. On a character you only track the resource die, wether it got bad, you ate it or you lost it.

Water: if you have d12 water plus 10 units of water and you roll a 1-2 on the die, you have d12 water and 9 units of water.

These are great points. I think the best way of handling consumables is to not have individual consumable boxes on the character sheet, and instead replace the "Bonus" column for gear with "Resource Die". You can then record anything as a resource by adding it to your equipment list. Multiple quivers, slingstones, etc. 

As for units, I don't see the issue. They drink from their waterskin, and if they want to refill it from the barrel, they simply transfer a unit to a resource die step.

Finally, for food, I wouldn't worry about it. The point of the resource dice is that these questions are meant to be abstracted.

Just realised I answered your questions in reverse order. Sorry!!