Rules: Survival And Food Gathering Applied

Let's Making Food.

Yesterday, I wrote about scrounging or foraging for special food that gives bonuses and the like, and today, I decided to test this system, and eat my own dog food. Let's see if the random numbers I pulled out of "feel's ok to me," produce satisfying results.

Case Study

My players are on an island, and they have noticed some megafauna. Giant flies, birds, etc. So  thinking about my modifiers from yesterday, when I think of a fly, I think of insanely evasive. So let's see, a steak made from giant fly flesh (yum?) would probably be something that gives an evasion bonus. I consider +1 dodge a -3 penalty because Enhanced Dodge is a 15 point advantage that I considered, for better or for worse, somewhat mundane. To make it last a reasonable time, maybe a half an hour, is -4 for 10x duration. So the total penalty for finding a giant fly that has muscles that exude this wondrous property is -7, or -4 (half rounded down) in their natural habitat. Let's see if we can include some modifiers though to make it a bit cheaper. First off, eating flies is fr*aking gross, or maybe it isn't in your culture, so let's say that the activation requires an HT roll to not throw up immediately, that's a 10% discount. Let's also say that it has the Biological modifier for another 10% discount, that means it costs an FP to swallow it. Finally, cashing in on the gross factor, let's extrapolate that a Nauseated disadvantage is -30 points from the fact that it is a +30% modifier to Affliction. So a temporary nausea is a -30% limitation, but let's put a limitation on the limitation, and make it resistable, by an HT+4 roll, which is a -50% limitation, reducing it to -15%. So, altogether, this fly steak now gives us

Enhanced Dodge 1 (-35%)[10] (Biological, -10%; Requires HT Roll, -10%; Temporary Disadvantage, Nauseated, Resistable by HT+4, -15%, Fixed Duration, 3 Minutes, +0%)

I was quibbling over whether it made sense to put in the extended duration here, which would make the overall penalty to Survival smaller, which might be good in some places, but I don't like it, so not this time! This reduces the penalty to find the monster to -6 in strange places, and -3 in native locations. Let's see what this comes out to:

Fly Steak (-6/-3)

This steak horrifies you and you don't know if you can will yourself to eat it at all, but you heard the people talking say that if you can force it down, it can temporarily give you the agility of a fly. Make an HT roll to not instantly vomit, and then an HT+4 roll to resist nausea. If you succeed at the first, you have Enhanced Dodge 1 for half an hour. If you succeed at the second, you stave off nausea, otherwise, you become sick as well for the duration. Consuming counts as a meal for starvation purposes, but consumes 1 FP for physical exertion. If you have a Cultural Familiarity for a culture that normally eats insects or you have Cast Iron Stomach, you get a +2 bonus to both HT rolls, if you have Squeamishness, you get a -4 to both HT rolls.

Other Thoughts and Conclusion

I think, for food that comes from a beast that you have to fight, if you found the beast just as a random encounter, maybe you automatically get the penalty for trying to find the food cut in half... it's right there in front of you. In this case study, that would make the penalties -3 and -2 respectively. You still need to roll Survival, Naturalist, Surgery, etc. to butcher the thing, so that's what we can apply this penalty to. I think Techniques would be ok to buy down the penalty for hunting particularly favored ingredients, I think I'd go with making them Average difficulty just as a cost consideration. In this case, I feel like the penalty is about fair, but the time limit might need some adjusting because a half hour almost makes it not feel worth it. Maybe I should associate it with the granted advantage instead of handling it specially which will lower the penalty in turn? Ah well, flies are gross.