Are environmental threats really fun?, How much detail is best? Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Since a large percentage of elves are actually native american hipsters, I recently was thinking about the old west, the desert, and how most RPGs really fuck it up from a historical perspective.

When I first moved out to Nevada I had a hard time dealing with the desert heat and dryness in the summer. If I went outside around noon I'd get sunburned and my skin was constantly in distress because of the dryness. After I came back to the US for a 1 month vacation from Micronesia which is a tropical climate I found that I'd acclimated to warm temperatures more and it wasn't as stressful, but nevertheless if I were to do something so foolish as wander straight into the desert and walk in one direction for a full day I'd almost certainly die.

If you think about it, RPGs as well as Western genre movies really screw that up. In old movies cowboys can walk or ride across the desert and show up in town looking great without even having sweatstains. The 1950s Lone Ranger TV show pilot episode had the Lone Ranger in a polyester suit lying out in the sun after being wounded in the middle of a desert and experiencing no adverse environmental effects.

Look then at RPGs. In Fallout your character blithely walks across the California desert without any supplies or water and arrives just fine in distant destinations. It's actually pretty surreal. I haven't really found any games that have detailed statistics for things like hydration, electrolye levels, food and nutrition (i.e. food safety rules and whether or not you're getting all your vitamins, minerals, and protiens), and perhaps even details like body temperature or heat stroke based on how hard you're working and in what conditions.

I've often felt that if I had the magical ability to add something huge to Fallout I'd add a really complex medically researched exposure and survival system so that you'd need to have a lot of the right resources for your trips across the desert. I suspect, though, that maybe a lot of people would find that boring. I mean, if old Westerns didn't care about environmental reality, maybe that means the majority of audiences didn't really care about it either.

What's your stance on having a complex environmental surival engine in RPGs? If you sat down for a Shadowrun game and the GM turned out to be, like, an environmental science PhD, and all of a sudden she was pulling out these extended equipment and supply lists and, like, extra character sheet pages where you record your hydration levels and sun exposure, would your reaction be, "COOL!", or "OH GOD NO!!!"?

I feel like intellectually, something like a desert survival environmental engine would be really interesting and could add more complexity to the game on the planning end. I think I'd react positively, myself. But how would you react?

[Shrike30]

Fallout's "Survival" skill was, theoretically, used to do things like find food and water. If memory serves, it's in-game effect was to reduce the number of bad random encounters, and to start you out in better positions when you had one.

I always worked under the assumption that food and water existed/were carried, you just didn't list it in your inventory because it had no bearing on the game. Things like nuka-cola and lizard-on-a-stick were treats, see... :)

[stevebugge]

It doesn't really have to be all that extreme an environment to kill you if you end up in it unprepared either. I try to keep the mechanical intrusiveness of the environment to a minimum though. That isn't to say I let PC's get away with going to the Artic in their Shorts and T-shirts or only taking one water bottle on a trip in to the desert, I just sort of wing it with the damage and modifiers if they go in to a hostile environment unprepared.

[nezumi]

If it's less complex than combat is now, and only applies to special situations (I've never had a character try to walk from Las Vegas to Los Angeles or anything crazy). But a paragraph of extra rules wouldn't kill anyone.

[SirKodiak]

It depends on the situation and the game. If I were to set a Shadowrun encounter in the desert during the summer, it would most likely be that I wanted the difficult environment to be a factor. In that case, I'd probably just figure out some reasonable layout of supplies for a desert (or arctic, or whatever) run, and if the players had the character have the right knowledge skills or do a reasonable amount of research, just tell them the weight and cost of it, with a general description of the contents. Once they were there, I'd figure they were appropriately taking care of themselves using the supplies; I wouldn't require them to list off every bottle of water they drank.

And, like stevebugge suggested, I'd wing it if they were unprepared. One of my main guidelines, though, would be that unless the players were really stupid, I'd try to avoid having the environment kill them. I'd prefer that the environment simply weakened them to the point that they either had to turn back on their primary mission in order to survive or the environment made their primary mission more difficult.

This ties into my general idea that Shadowrun is about Shadowrunning so outside influences (environment, family, sickness, etc.) should primarily be felt in their impact on Shadowrunning, not as challenges of their own. A rule I'm willing to break in the right circumstances, though.

I will say, that as a player, if a GM tried to introduce a more detailed damage system, and it was focused on hydration levels instead of hit locations, my eyes would roll so fast that I could use them as an inertial guidance system.

[Dewar]

My players already spend hours buying equipment, I don't want them to have to buy a whole bunch more junk just for walking around. It's the future, I figure they can find what they need pretty easily without fussing about it. I do make my players buy basic survival items in D&D though, and if they don't have tents and other etc they loose sleep and get minuses to activity.

[SL James]

[FanGirl]

I don't know if the complex stuff about hydration and things would be fun (I don't have a head for numbers), but I think it would be nice if, just once, an RPG or video game had the need for potty breaks worked in. I have yet to encounter a game that does this (other than the Sims) and I find that very strange. I can understand why game designers would be disinclined to include scatological elements in their games, but relieving oneself is such an important and straightforward part of life - it's difficult to most to understand the intricate nature of human health, but everyone understands what it is when you gotta go. Perhaps I might include a game mechanic for that if I ever GM...I can see it now:

"I go up to the secretary's desk and try to convince her to let us see her boss."
"Okay - *rolls some dice* As you're talking to the secretary, your bladder can't take the strain anymore. For a second, the secretary can only stare, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, at the rapidly-expanding wet spot in the crotch of your pants, but she quickly regains enough composure to shout 'Security!' into her commlink."
"What the hell? Why did you do that?"
"Don't blame me, Mr. Smooth Talker. You haven't been to the bathroom in hours!"

[Critias]

We had a GM do that sort of thing to us, once. It was a D&D game, not an SR one, but the end result was "fuck you, your game, and the horse you rode in on."

[The Stainless St...]

[FanGirl]

Well, it's not really like I'd spring this new element on them without warning....especially since I don't feel like coming up with mechanics for it. I could include it as a potential critical glitch on a social test, though.

[Dawnshadow]

Or you can just say it's "off stage", and assume it falls under normal stuff that doesn't get mentioned, unless something really horrific and terrifying happens.. ie.. you get hit by a force 40 cause emotion (fear).

I mean.. do you go into shaving? Eating (regularly, not just minor roleplay ones)?

[Wounded Ronin]

Well, personally, I think environmental threats are different than bathroom break literalism peril. The reason is that environmental threats could add to the game if you want more meat on the planning end. Bathroom break literalism wouldn't be useful for anything but a pure comedy game.

[Charon]

Isn't that what the Survival skill is for? That's not enough? Come on, there is even a cute table and everything on p.118. What more do you need?!

I for one, do not care about the level of the electrolytes in my PCs. Anything more complex than that mechanic, I would ignore.

[Crusher Bob]

The environment should still be descriptive, even if it is not presenting an in game challenge. You should be decribing the heat, rain, snow, and so on, so that the players know the difference between winter and summer and the environements on, say, Seattle and LA.

The environment can also be used to present choices to the players, without presenting an actual challenge. "If you want to wear your armored long coat in this heat, you will need to drink a lot more water, and people will tend to look at you funny."

[toturi]

Survival skill and other uses for it in Target:Wastelands.

[Dog]

I see environmental survival (like a lot of things) losing it's drama if it's reduced to too many details, then it just becomes frustrating. I don't think we need any more than what's in T:W.

I'm kind of a wilderness survival enthusiast myself, but I don't often impose that sort of thing on the players, unless they ask for it. When I GM, it boils down to this: You gotta respect nature. If the players make a point of telling me that they go looking for a guide, do some research, and buy appropriate clothes, water and food, I leave them alone. But if they blatantly don't bother, hop out of the car in their street clothes and go hiking up the mountain, I hit them with every bad scenario I can think of, and usually don't let them roll their way out of it. Why? Basically because then the characters are ignoring a good role-playing opportunity, not to mention my attempts to provide and orginal scenario. That hurts my feelings. :D

[Nidhogg]

[Wounded Ronin]