ED4: Wilderness Survival (by any means necessary)

[Telarus_KSC]

There are mentions of fatigue from lack of sleep (shelter) and hunger in the 4th Edition GM's Guide.

Again, I think the dissonance you are feeling comes down to the consequences of a Failed Wilderness Survival roll. If there are no consequences for a failed roll and no limits, you just keep rolling until you succeed (as in my Lock Picking example). But if there are constraints (you only have 4 meaningful chances to find water/food/shelter), then failing to come up with a success at all for the day has meaningful consequences. If the time limit is causing the dissonance, then just think that it takes a minimum of two hours to search for food, water, or shelter and maybe roll a d4+1 to see how long it actually takes.

[Slimcreeper]

Dang man, just don't use the rules. It's not a religious text.

[Telarus_KSC]

This seemed very relevant to this thread. Has some interesting approaches to the problem (limited # of rolls included).

http://honorandintrigue.blogspot.com/20 ... ccess.html

[Baravakar]

[etherial]

[Mataxes]

[Telarus_KSC]

4 Wilderness Survival Tests per day is not totally arbitrary, it is a function of the "three things" that Wilderness Survival is focused on (& the laws of probability). A character lost in the wilderness can be lacking in up to 3 categories of survival necessities. One to Three. Having 4 attempts means that there is a narrow but fair margin of survival, even if you are caught in the wild with no food, no water, no boots, and no shelter. You also have to look at the base difficulty numbers provided.

Let's look at some actual math, in a range of difficulty examples:
A character with PER 5 and Wilderness Survival 5 (skill for now) can roll Step 10, 4 times per day. They need food, water, and shelter.
Woodlands start at Diff 5, Plains Diff 6, Jungles Diff 7. Blood Wood is Diff 10.

So even if this Journeyman-rank non-Adept is caught in the BLOOD WOOD, they have a 50% chance (roughly) on each roll to get the resource they need (if we disregard random encounters). Same thing with an untrained PER 5 character lost in some woodlands.

Each failure after the first forces the character to make a hard choice as what to look for next. If you still need all 3 resources and only have 2 rolls left, that makes the player make a Meaningful Choice.

So with 4 possible rolls, they have roughly a 50% chance (actually~47%) to gather each of the first 2 of the resources, and then if you still have 2 rolls left you have a a whopping ~72% chance of success for the last resource ( for the probabilities).

Now think if you have 6 chances per day. You are almost guaranteed to get 2 rolls per resource needed, bumping those odds from ~47% if your Step is equal to the difficulty number to ~72% for each resource. And if you manage to score 2 successes right off the bat and have 4 rolls left, you have a massive ~%92 chance of pulling one success for that last resource.

I hope this helps.

[Baravakar]

[Mataxes]