Talk:Attrition-based Campaigns (3.5e Variant Rule)

Initial Thoughts

These would make for a possibly more "realistic" game, and I can see them well-suited to a low-magic campaign, but could also would be less fun, unless everyone in the party loves micromanaging their inventory by tracking food, water, and other supplies, as well as constantly checking their weight and carrying capacity (unless the party is traveling with a pack animal, for which they must also now track food and water). If players want that, more power to them. But as a DM I find that it's easier to assume (within reason) that everyone has accounted for these things and let everyone focus more on the adventure. There are other ways to immerse the players into your world that aren't constant dealing with perishable items. Again, that's my personal preference, so your actual mileage may vary.

It's interesting that you throttled back on healing, food creation and needs for nourishment but not death and resurrection. If ever there was a ruleset that cried out for harsher penalties for dying and the banning of Death-as-Revolving-Door at higher levels, this would be it.

"Features like Fast Healing and Regeneration are restricted to healing only 2 hit points per hit die per day total." Wow, suddenly trolls and hydras just became stupidly easy to kill. Since those and similar monsters are designed to give players encounters that are more difficult to overcome just by straight hacking and slashing, this rule throws their concepts out the window. Something to consider.

"All creature types now need to eat. Constructs live on coal or wood and oil or water, undead eat blood, bones, or specific organs, outsiders eat souls, and so on." Hmm. This seems like it would be really straining to implement and would involve a lot of extra work reflavoring the basic mechanics of quite a few monsters. For example, almost all methods I know of for trapping and using souls are universally evil in nature. Sorry, solars, archons, and other good outsiders, you now have to harvest and consume souls to survive. Good luck with that.

Lastly, the Time Limit section seems unnecessary. Time sensitive objectives are inherent in many quests, and the examples given seem to belabor really obvious points. Unless the party is evil or chaotic stupid, no one's going to put the famine relief mission on hold and go run a week-long side quest. If they actually DO something along those lines, there are consequences. This is not something that we need alternate rules for, this is basic DMing. If consequences AREN'T happening, your party is probably off the rails anyway, and the game has bigger problems.

That's all I got for the moment. Spanambula (talk) 06:56, 10 August 2013 (UTC)