Dungeons and Dragons has been around for a long time. Its gone through many revisions, changes, art styles, and has been popular, denounced, nerdy, and mainstream again. Its now currently on its 5th official edition, and there is no better time to get into a tabletop game.
For anyone not yet familiar with D&D, picture listening to a story told by someone with a passion for dictation, and instead of hearing about heroic feats performed by legendary adventurers, you and your friends take control of those heroes in the story, and interject your own actions and personal beliefs by rolling dice to determine success vs failure. Trust me, its incredibly fun.
Despite the abundant well-written official content for D&D, many players sometimes want rules or guidelines for something that might not be in the official rulebooks. Crafting guides, potion brewing, taming pets, etc. For this, many avid D&D players will turn to Homebrew content. That is, content created unofficially by fans of D&D. Now there is a ton of homebrewed content out there. Everything from magical items that cause the zombie apocalypse, to adding in new class options based on Jedi from Star Wars.
Today (and for the foreseeable future) I'm going to share with you some mechanical tweaks and additions I have created for D&D, that were designed to feel very vanilla, and that would work incredibly well with the base game, without feeling too eccentric.
Hunger
A large portion of D&D is centered around time passing, and living your life through days, weeks, months, and occasionally, years. While it can be fun to dash from objective to objective, focusing on the more action-centered events, a lot of people also really enjoy downtime, something that can often be overlooks in D&D. Today we're going to talk about food, and its role on an adventure. In most games that overlook minutia, it is assumed that if characters have access to some source of food, they will eat when they are able. This isn't necessary to be narrated by the DM or to spend time on, and really only becomes prevalent when players are adventuring and realize they are out of rations.
According to the Players Handbook (PHB),
"Food and Water
Characters who don’t eat or drink suffer the effects of exhaustion (see appendix A). Exhaustion caused by lack of food or water can’t be removed until the character eats and drinks the full required amount.
Food
A character needs one pound of food per day and can make food last longer by subsisting on half rations. Eating half a pound of food in a day counts as half a day without food. A character can go without food for a number of days equal to 3 + his or her Constitution modifier (minimum 1). At the end of each day beyond that limit, a character automatically suffers one level of exhaustion.
A normal day of eating resets the count of days without food to zero."
This is easy and quick because it allows players to only suffer a penalty when it becomes relevant, and are able to gain a boost to this hunger delay from a relatively unused stat in D&D, Constitution.
What this doesn't allow for however, is the benefit that should be gained from focusing on preparing or ordering food, and keeping your character well-fed. Thus I propose an updated hunger system that is more focused on staying well-fed, rather than not starving.
Here's the summary:
Every character has a max hunger equal to 3 + their Constitution modifier (still keeping CON relevant)
Each dawn your Hunger Points go down by 1
If they ever reach 0, take 1 point of exhaustion for each day they are at 0 (staying true to the vanilla rules)
You must eat the equivalent of 1 meal/ration to increase your Hunger Points
When you are full, you gain temp HP equal to 1 + your CON modifier (making CON even more relevant)
You also gain +1 to initiative for being full (as another incentive to being well-fed)
As a wrap-up, this system still keeps the penalty for not eating for a certain number of days, but now it gamifies it. By keeping track of your character's hunger points, it adds another level of immersion, and also management for your character. In addition, instead of just focusing on avoiding a negative effect for your character (exhaustion), it gives you a positive effect to aim for by making sure you and your party take time to eat, prepare rations, cook food, etc. And its only a small combat boost with a few temp HP and a +1 to initiative, but it still feels effective enough for just eating food.
I am not blind to any downsides this system may cause, such as overcrowding players with more things to keep track of. The elegance of D&D 5e as a whole, is it takes a lot of minutia away from the players, so they can focus on having fun with lightweight systems. By adding another "meter" to keep track of, it means that players who *don't* want to worry about keeping track of hunger and temporary boosts or exhaustion will have to do so. But that is also the beauty of something like D&D. Because systems like this one are modular, you can slot it into your game if it feels like it fits, but if your table doesn't want a more survival-like campaign, then you can add it seamlessly.
But that's all for this post! This is just one of the systems I have been working on and tweaking, and next time we will look at how "Gathering" or collecting items in D&D can be system-ified to make it feel more like a classic RPG. See you next time!
