Fria Ligans forum

Continuing my look at travel rules (or at least the rules in the Travel chapter): you can only have one character forage/scrounge/hunt in one hex at one time. Other characters must march off to another hex entirely, or simply help the roll.

When foraging (for example), one ration is found for each success. At best a player can roll two dice for two successes. So if you have a party of three or more, you need to have at least one character travelling to an adjacent hex to forage, because the third person's help really isn't helping him at all.

But these are 10 km hexes! Your hex is 100 sq km. The rules need a more practical limit on how heavily you can forage/scrounge/hunt etc. a hex before exhausting it. One aspect of these rules that is very very good imo is that the PCs start the game in poverty: a few rats, a little ammo and water, and no way to keep whatever vehicles they have running for long. Great! But should a 10 km hex really be so small that only one person can search it? It makes sense to say that foragers, scroungers, and so on have to split up, but not to the extent of making them march all morning just to get away from each other.

True. I think a small hex scale would probably be nice (5km seems very reasonable), but unlikely.

One clarification though: the best a player can roll is two dice for FOUR successes.

I don't think forage for edible plants is particularly easy and fishing can take a lot of time for nothing. If you are desperate for food, you should split the work. One person forage, one fishing and one hunting. Hunting can be very rewarding. When we play FbL (Forbidden Lands, similar system), my players do different work over the shifts of the day and they most often spend two shifts getting food, one preparing food (and other things) and one sleeping. It is a problem if no one in the group know what they are doing (no one has survival), but since my players knows that FbL is a survival game, they know what they are doing. Just have to plan things out a little bit.

There has to be food around or otherwise there wouldn't be any people left.

I doubt that many large farm animals remain - to hard to hide from all the hungry mouths moving around - but there has to be some small scale farming of cold tolerant crops like leaf and root vegetables as well as small animals that can feed on scraps like chickens and rabbits.

However food stocks will be so important that it will either be well dispersed, cached and hidden, or it will be held in centralised stockpiles that can be easily guarded.

Thanks to the freezing winter of 98-99 wild foods - plants, animals and fish - will be depleted before the additional pressure of hunting and foraging occurs.

I think that it may well be easier for the players to scrounge and repair items to then barter for food with groups they encounter rather than trying to live off the land. A rifle and some ammo, fuel, or medical supplies will certainly be worth a few rations of food. Or they can take it by force (this is where moral codes can come in).

Just my two cents.

I don't think forage for edible plants is particularly easy and fishing can take a lot of time for nothing.

Foraging for edible plants is ridiculously difficult for little reward, in fact, although it gets easier if you know what you are looking for and where you're likely to find it. Hunting is generally quite inefficient in terms of return for hours spent. Fishing is the easiest way to get food, if you are good at it.

But the point here is that its ridiculously arbitrary to say that only one person can forage a 10 km hex, or that you can't forage the same 100 square km two shifts in a row. A better alternative is a system of diminishing returns if the PCs don't move on: negative DMs to the rolls until they move, reflecting a need to range further afield to find anything.

Though four successes on two dice improves things ... guess I should read that again.

Fishing is the easiest way to get food, if you are good at it.

Grenades! Best way of fishing ever!

In a 10 klick wide hex the chance of anyone hearing it is ... so minimal as to not be worth considering.

Phil McGregor
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Author: Space Opera (FGU); Rigger Black Book #1 (FASA); Orbis Mundi 2, The Marketplace, Ithura & Porthaven, Fantasy Europe (PGD); Road to Armageddon & Supplements, Displaced, Audace ad Gloriam, Farm, Forge & Steam (PGD).

Fishing is the easiest way to get food, if you are good at it.

Grenades! Best way of fishing ever!

In a 10 klick wide hex the chance of anyone hearing it is ... so minimal as to not be worth considering.

Phil McGregor
========
Author: Space Opera (FGU); Rigger Black Book #1 (FASA); Orbis Mundi 2, The Marketplace, Ithura & Porthaven, Fantasy Europe (PGD); Road to Armageddon & Supplements, Displaced, Audace ad Gloriam, Farm, Forge & Steam (PGD).

I think Phil Summerizes it here, hunting will be hard enough under the circumstanses and done mostly by people not actually hunters nor familiar with the terrain. They will have to take shortcuts otherwise considered...plump ?:)

A moose yields three times as much food as a rabbit; 1.5 times as much as a boar??

Are these mutated super rabbits and boars, or some to me hitherto unknown species of miniature moose...?

A moose yields three times as much food as a rabbit; 1.5 times as much as a boar??

Are these mutated super rabbits and boars, or some to me hitherto unknown species of miniature moose...?

Of course when you finally have shot a moose, you only pick the finest part of it, can't be greedy

A moose yields three times as much food as a rabbit; 1.5 times as much as a boar??

Are these mutated super rabbits and boars, or some to me hitherto unknown species of miniature moose...?

Of course when you finally have shot a moose, you only pick the finest part of it, can't be greedy

Ah ... of course!