How to handle activities like fishing?

General
#1

In my last session, all my players failed their checks to fish and forage in the same hour. Admittedly I didn’t prepare for them to try, so I basically offered to fast forward to the next morning since they had already set up camp, and that they could just eat their rations.

This was unsatisfying even for me, so I came up with a quick system that’s more engaging where they roll 2d6 and add their ability bonus. If they roll over 9 (basically 5-out-of-12 times), they succeed. If they roll over 6 (5-out-of-6 times), they fail but still get something out of the activity. Anything less, and something bad happens.

I wanted to compare to other people’s systems, and saw that someone said that for things like fishing, they don’t bother rolling since their characters are assumed to be competent enough. I didn’t think this principle would apply here! Though, it would feel weird to roll for some activities (eg. foraging) and not others (eg. fishing). Then, the only thing stopping someone from fishing over foraging would be a body of water, or the risk of overusing their fishing pole.

What do y’all think? Has this come up in any of your games? Ideally I want this to be pretty gamey, almost like a fishing minigame, since that’s the vibe I’m going for in my own campaign.

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#2

No roll, but it takes time and you roll a random encounter. So you can get a night’s meal, but with some risk. But then, I’m interested in the less gamey sort of situation.

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#3

That sounds really effective though! I’ve always liked time as the main game ‘currency’ so to speak.

Is there a trade-off between fishing and foraging in your games? For example, does foraging yield less but represent a less risky or less expensive activity (eg. If fishing poles were to have durability)?

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#5

I’d love to see your special fish table! :slight_smile:

#6

No. Honestly, it’s not something that comes up very often, and I’m not particularly interested in having them make granular choices about something like that. I tell the players what the terrain is where they’re camping, if one says, hey, can we hunt/fish/forage I tell them sure, but it’ll take time and then there will be an encounter roll. I ask them some questions about who goes, what they talk about, what they catch etc…, maybe role play out a scene. Then I make the encounter roll, and go from there.

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#7

This is really helpful–I’ve been overpreparing for the wrong parts of the game! Thank you :slight_smile:

#9

I mean, I wasn’t trying to say you’re doing it wrong, just providing a different perspective. If your game is about gathering food and your players find complex dice games to be fun, then thats the right play at your table. When I play OSR games, that’s not what we’re going for. Resource management can be important, but I don’t want to spend a ton of time on how they’re gathered. Just make sure there is a cost/risk , and let them think about whether it’s worth it. We’d rather spend time on adventure, story, and problem solving in the fiction.

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#10

Well said. It is genuinely time consuming to go over specific methods on how the party goes about fishing, hunting, etc. I do however like to inject a bit of fortune into these more mundane tasks - I find it spices things up and tends to take the players off guard, in a good way. A very small chance of catching a particularly rare fish, or stumbling upon an albino version of whatever the logical hunting game would be in the area, and adding the rare item (the fish, or the albino pelt, in this case) to their inventory. Sometimes can make for some quick roleplaying moments.

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#11

There’s a little trick I read on the interwebs many years ago, can’t remember where, about how to really focus on “rulings over rules”. Basically, when you are trying to make a decision about how to play something out (like fishing, for example), come up with a really quick rule, on the spot, as if you were at the table and had to make something up. Write it down.

Then, spend some time working on the issue, maybe 15 minutes, probably less, to come up with a “better” rule.

Then compare the two. Is one faster? Simpler? More in-tune with the rest of the game? Easier to remember? More fun?

If they are both roughly the same, or the one that is better was the quick one, throw them both out. You don’t need to write either down, you’ve proven to yourself that making a ruling at the table is likely to be better and more fun than any pre-written rule that you would then have to go look up.

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#12

It’s still a WIP but I was working on a random encounters table for foraging (I just dump fishing/hunting/etc under “foraging” because I’m lazy). I started working on it as a simple X-in-6 chance to get caught by the land owner or the rangers and need to run away, but then I started adding more things, like a wandering animal, other people passing by and so on. Once it’s ready I’ll post it here.

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#13

There is cool mini game system in Whitehack. It is called “Auction”, but it can be used for anything, from chase scenes to a game of checkers (and I’m sure it can be adapted to fishing). The rules go like this:

The participants roll a d6 each, but hide the results. They make bids that they promise to beat with the quality in a succesful task roll, adding the d6 to the relevant attribute. For instance, someone in a chase with dexterity 12 and a d6 roll of 3 might bid 2, meaning that she promises to roll 15 (12dex + 3 on d6) or below, but also more than 2(her bid). Any contestants have to bid higher or make the final bid of 1 (a “one-bid”). When all have made their final bids, the d6s are revealed and the one with the highest bid rolls first. If she succeeds, she has won the constest, but if she fails, the second highest bidder has to roll. The person with the lowest bid does not have to roll in order to win if everyone else fails. You have to make a bid to participate and have a theoretical chance of beating it. If there are several people if “one-bid”, they roll like a regular contest. The auctions can be roleplayed, by adding description to each bid: “I take a shortcut over the crumbling bridge - 7!”.

Very simple, yet engaging system. If you have questions, don’t hesitate to ask. It took me a couple of tries to get it.

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#14

I like that a lot! Having been on this thread, I think the best idea is simply to cut both rules (the on-the-spot ruling and the fifteen-minute improved rule) since they both come down to saving throws. I think my expectations for how to handle fishing was informed too much by Knave’s rule for foraging—since for foraging you have to roll with disadvantage, shouldn’t fishing be without disadvantage since it’s more intensive and you have a tool?

But it may be way more fun for the players to focus on the fiction and let them succeed on mundane things like this at the expense of time and encounter rolls! Though I’ll still ask what my players think because their main background is either 5e or video games, so if they want minigames for activities like this I’ll be happy to do that for them. I came up with a dice pool minigame in case they prefer to do that :slight_smile: then too it will be helpful to see how they respond to this mechanical choice to inform how I prep for them in the future.

I would love to see this!

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#15

Oh I love this system! It would be fun if the GM were to roll a fish of a particular size (3-18) and the player had to bet on how high/low to roll.

I forget, isn’t there some kind of resource in Whitehack that determines how much you can bid? For fishing, I would be inclined to come up with a bait resource that you use to bet and increase your roll. That is, because when fishing you are mostly competing with the fish you’re trying to catch.

Thank you for this!

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#16

In Whitehack you can use any resource or attribute as the maximum bid (+d6), like HP or strength.
Adding a finite recourse like bait increases the tension of the auctions. You will have to manage your supply of bait, and how much you want to bid to catch a bigger fish for example.

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#17

I got inspired by a post on twitter (long gone, I think it was negative_cone) that was using 5d6 rolled to get a straight set of numbers (1-2-3, 4-5-6, 3-4-5, etc) to determine what you caught. I changed it slightly to use poker dice rules, the five dice you roll are your ‘hand.’

Depending on how good the hand is, you may get nothing (bust or pair), a minor catch (2 pair or three of a kind), a major catch (full house or straight), or something amazing (four or five of a kind).

I like it for obscured systems, where the player doesn’t really know what they’ll get. Mining, fishing, spending the day hunting and skinning, etc. If they say, “I got a 5-2-1-4-6.” Awesome, they found something really good. Sometimes they’ll walk away with nothing, but if they used something like bait, I’d bump them up a step (3 of a kind to full house, straight to 4 of a kind, 2 pair to 3 of a kind, etc.)

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#18

A lot of opinions have been shared already, but I really like including mini games in the campaign I’m running online right now (A west-marches game with Knave). I was inspired to make these cooking and hunting rules from some blogs but I can’t seem to find them. Anyway, since my campaign has some elements of wilderness survival in it I really wanted to push players to carefully consider what they’ll be carrying in their limited inventory slots.

Hunting houserules
Hunting houserules414×625 140 KB

I’d imagine you could make up a similar mini game for fishing. The nice thing about the odds-of-success system is that it can be used for a lot of different sub systems.

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#19

I absolutely love these and how simple they are! This is a really nice medium, and it ensures really that players are prepared to reduce risk :slight_smile: And I love the failure table for cooking! It feels like something like that can be applied to other activities. Thank you so much!

Is there any limit on how much food cooking produces? For example, will that let someone cook for the whole party?

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#20

Yes, I ruled that one person can cook for the whole party; so if a hunt produces 4 rations, one person can cook them and then divvy up the cooked rations among the whole party.

What’s nice about this system is that players can either choose to load up for the dungeon (or whatever adventure they’re pursuing), or choose to take tents, traps and such and be prepared to survive out in the wilderness for a while.

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#21

A while ago I made a Yahtzee-based system for fishing where players can either pull the fish with the hand they have or roll again in hopes of getting a better one. You can only reel in on the best hand you’ve gotten, and the number of rolls you get depends on the quality of the fishing rod. Better explanation here

It’s quite gamey, though I never got to test it out.

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#22

I really like seeing these Yahtzee/Poker rules for fishing! And I especially like how here it’s tied to how many rations you get :slight_smile: At first I was surprised to see that you first roll 1/6 to see if you fish anything at all, but I realized that your system takes place over a turn which is really nice! That way, over an hour you could simply skip the roll because statistically you could succeed once every six turns.

Thanks so much for this!