Reimplementing Outdoor Survival

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Haters will say you can’t 0e-post and 5e-post at the same time.

I’ve talked before about the relationship between Outdoor Survival and the original Dungeons & Dragons as written, namely that D&D only says to borrow the other’s game board rather than any of its rules to simulate surviving the wild. This is why I was surprised when my friend Vodka Gobalsky told me that he uses Outdoor Survival more or less wholecloth with OD&D, and considers it as essential as Chainmail to facilitate a cohesive and satisfying game loop.

Here’s the problem: Outdoor Survival is kind of insane. Just look that card. Three different tracks for thirst, hunger, and life levels—the latter of which I asked Vodka about, like, “Do you substitute life levels for hit points or a proportion of hit points?” To which he said he didn’t because we both know that doesn’t make sense, but more importantly because hit points are an abstraction of combat. As it were, this makes life levels the hit points of survival. But that’s still exhausting to look at.

D&D One, the much-maligned playtest for the Fifth Edition remaster/update (5.5e?), might offer a solution in the form of its new exhaustion rules. Each point of exhaustion is –1 from all d20 rolls and once you exceed 10 exhaustion you die. This makes exhaustion really easy to count and handle, as well as to come up with quick effects. Let’s say that going a day without food results in 1 exhaustion, and going a day without water results in 2 exhaustion.

Then it takes ~5 days without water to die, or ~10 days without food. The latter isn’t really accurate to real life but it gets the point across that death by hunger is slow but consistently exhausting. You’re unlikely to die of hunger because you’re probably going to find food within 10 days, but being hungry sucks and exacerbates every other source of suffering. It makes already dying of thirst even worst. Add to that the inherent exhaustion of exploring the wilderness for hours a day.

By the way, you could replace the 10 with your constitution score or with a passive survival score or whatever, and that would be a really powerful use for constitution, but I haven’t really been down with ability fiddliness for a while.

But wait, there’s more! You’ll want the following tidbits from Outdoor Survival to bring the wilderness to life: your thirst only goes down if you spend the day without traversing hexes with fresh water, and your hunger only goes down if you spend the day without traversing a… food hex. Given our modern conventions, you might decide that the party needs to spend one portion of the day hunting in order to eat if they don’t have rations on hand.

Combine this with some semi-random hex movement like I’ve snuck into FMC Basic (with semi-random movement when not following paths or seeking out landmarks) and you’ve translated the basic dynamics of Outdoor Survival into your D&D campaign without any of the fiddly awkwardness.

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