Wildcrafting

I am chagrined to say that I did not have wildcrafting/foraging rules in my game until earlier today. Maxwell's question prompted me to look, realize my problem, and begin fixing it.

The first problem is definitional. As I outlined in my previous posts, there are two different ways to use this skill. The first, and more common one, is to harvest food from the wilderness, as part of travelling through a location. The second use entails reliably harvesting food from an area over time. Most forage rules only offer a way of dealing with the first, but I'd like to expand the use of this skill.

I am inspired in this approach by Alexis' Hex Generator 2.0 which, drawing from his Civ IV posts, lists different food sources in wilderness hexes. Each source contributes 1 or more food which then sustains predator populations. It's an elegant top-down system (literally, as large hexes are divided into smaller and smaller ones until we reach an approximately 3mi hex), but I wanted something a little more bottom up.

Anyone can pull a bunch of grass from the ground and eat them. Wildcrafters, first and foremost, know what plants are safe to eat (and what parts of those plants are safe to eat), as well as how to find them. Different environments present different levels of risk.

Being simplistic, I have three categories of risk, high, moderate, and low, which reference both the prevalence of innocuously poisonous plants as well as the threat of local predators. The Sahargeen jungle, a rain forest, is high risk for both of those reasons. The scrubland beyond the jungle's edge is far less risky as there are fewer predators and few toxic plants. Low-risk areas require Apprentice Wildcrafting, moderate-risk ones need Journeyman Wildcrafting, and high-risk regions call for Specialist Wildcrafting. Attempting to forage beyond your level of competency requires a check, and failure indicates that either the forager gets a random encounter while alone in the wilderness or the harvested food is potentially poisonous.

Food availability depends upon the environment, its vegetation and topology. Each foraged region provides a number of "nodes", renewable sources of food - a game track, a berry patch, a gloomy mushroom grove, an excellent fishing spot, etc. The number of nodes varies, as one might expect.

Dense: 3-7 nodes

Moderate: 2-5 nodes

Sparse: 1-3 nodes

Dead: 0-1 nodes

I use a modified 2d6 roll with the highest possible outcome on the two most extreme results on each end (2,3,11,12), and then reducing the number of nodes found by 1 moving towards the center until reaching the minimum value. This gives a consistent 1/6 chance of getting the maximal result, but strongly varies how much one might find in the middle.

We say that 1 node provides enough food for 1 person and we're done.

Sort of. If all we care about is that first usage of wildcrafting, then we are done. But I want to make this skill more useful, so we need to complicate the model by introducing the idea of overharvesting.

Staying in one location and continuing to forage depletes local resources and teaches animals to avoid the area. It's not a sustainable practice. A common guideline I've discovered in the interwebs is to harvest 25% of what is present. If we take that literally, then in feeding 3-7 people, we are drawing from 12-28 nodes.

OK, so there is a lot more food present than is being harvested. What does the original number signify, then? It is the amount of food that can be harvested in a day's work, drawing equitably from a subset of the nodes available. The wildcrafter needs to choose how much food they wish to harvest, knowing how much food is available before the area is depleted and needs a year to recharge.

Thus, if the party will be staying in an area for a while, they can't just set up camp and stay there - foraging will eventually remove all of the available food. Travel time to other areas to harvest reduces the time available to actually forage, commensurately reducing the amount of food acquired, as well.

Obviously, I'll need to run this at the table to see how it works, but I feel like this is a workable solution. I think Master and Grandmaster Wildcrafters would be able to do more with what they found, essentially increasing the number of nodes available.