Endure, and Realism

Rules-light and focused on ordinary people, the center of Endure as a survival RPG is, quote: “Its Endurance economy. Endurance helps characters succeed and keeps them going, but is always depleting. If you are out of Endurance, you have to rely solely on your cunning and luck of the roll — and often it is not enough to survive. You need time and resources to recover Endurance, so the game ebbs and flows between tense action and quiet downtime.”

A lot of games have a mechanic like this; they call it Luck, Fate, Conviction, or similar. It’s a resource that can be spent on improving die rolls when you need it most. What makes Endure a survival RPG is that the difficulty of various tasks are high. Easy tasks require rolling over 8 on 2d6, which means on average a player will need to spend at least one or two Endurance to succeed on something easy.

You regain Endurance by resting/eating, and with an Endurance score of 10, that means you can reliably achieve only to three-to-five risky things every day…one of which is likely hunting or scavenging for food.

Difficult? Very. Realistic? Yeah, I think so. In dangerous situations, survival is usually more luck than anything else.

Survival mechanics are not often represented in RPGs, which is perhaps one of the more unrealistic parts of the medium. Not realistic? How do I mean? Let me illustrate with a very simple and commonplace occurrence in most RPGs; namely, setting up camp. Everyone’s gotta sleep sometime, don’t they?

Don’t they?

Well…no, not always. In fact, bothering to consider “sleep” at all is often an outgrowth of the rules. In D&D, for instance, a “long rest” is how characters heal and regain the use of spells and abilities. According to the rules, a long rest requires at least six hours of sleep, but that’s all part of the narrative. If the D&D economy reset didn’t expressly demand sleep, then would anyone ever bother “sleeping?” How many movies have you seen with scenes of the main character asleep? If you have, it’s only because they are about to wake up from either a thematically-important dream or a narratively-important ambush.

How many games have you played where eating has played a significant role? Got them written down? Good. Now think hard about why those meals were important. Were they important because if you didn’t eat your character would starve? Or were they important because this meal was with the Duchess who gave you the iron key, and that meal was with the man who you charmed into getting the secret password?

To ask the question yet again, have you ever gone to the bathroom in an RPG?

Gamifying reality has long been the goal of game-designers, both analog and digital. In real life, if you don’t eat, drink, and sleep, you die. Simulation games try to encourage eating, drinking, and sleeping through bonuses, penalties, and similar incentives for a character to behave “realistically.”

The alternative is to hand-wave it, assuming that your characters are able to scrounge enough food to eat and find a ditch to sleep in without input from the player. Basic necessities are the character’s problem, that they can deal with how they see fit. I talked about this a bit in my discussion on result rolls and how we skip boring bits.

But it’s more than just eating, sleeping, and bathrooming. Consider long-travel: in a simulation game, traveling long distances requires purchasing supplies and managing resources. How much food? What weather gear? A cart? A horse? Ford the river or caulk the wagon? Talk to any hiker about how much planning goes into a day-long hike, and you’ll get a fraction of what multi-day travel requires.

More narrative games do not consider this type of strategic planning significant. The point isn’t to force the players to plan a trip, the point is what happens on the trip. The game tests what do they do when the harpies attack, not whether or not they packed their insect spray.

Shall we talk about Rangers?

The ranger class has always been a bit of an awkward duck. It has undergone many revisions and iterations across multiple IPs and games, from the excels-at-nothing jack-of-all-trades in Might and Magic to the overpowered-at-killing-only-one-kind-of-thing of D&D.

We can all imagine what a ranger is; a warden of the land, a druid-type who protects the forests with bow and sword. A survivalist who knows the land like a fighter knows war or a captain knows their ship. We can imagine a ranger with animal-companions, with an assassin’s eye and a hunter’s step, knowing as much about herbs as a wizard knows about the arcane forces of the aether…

That certainly seems a useful skillset for a band of wandering adventurers, doesn’t it? Nature is full of dangers for city-dwellers. Survival can be as much an interesting challenge in the woods as it is in the dungeon.

But is survival fun?

One of the biggest problems with the ranger archetype is that it potentially subverts and overcomes a whole subset of rules that are otherwise worth ignoring. Imagine the struggles a group of players may have in foraging in unfamiliar woods and fighting off dangerous wild animals. If they survive, they inevitably arrive at their destination tired, beaten, and half-starved. Survival is a whole separate aspect of adventuring that city-thieves, book-smart wizards, and monastic priests won’t be equipped to handle.

So most GMs get rid of it. They hand-wave long travel, saying it either costs a flat fee to join a wagon train or you just get where you’re going without much headache. Then you can get on with the fun part of the game: everything that isn’t long travel.

Or, you could have a ranger in your group. Then they can handle all the survival aspects of travel, and you can get where you’re going without much headache.

You see the issue? The ranger solves a problem that most GMs don’t bother with. Similarly, if a campaign were centered on an archipelago a “sailor” class isn’t necessary; even if they come with a boat, boating skills, and a collection of boat-related bonuses, if you don’t have a sailor in your party the GM isn’t going to make everyone swim.

Now, I personally think long-travel, meal management, sleeping arrangements, and keeping track of day-by-day minutiae can be fun if it’s a solid and well-designed minigame — but minigames aren’t realistic. They represent reality, rather than model it. A tent doesn’t give anyone a +2 to anything in the real world. Yes, it’s “easier” to survive in the wilds with shelter, but “easier” covers a whole plethora of complexities.

Realistic survival would involve the struggles of finding suitable land to camp, putting up the tents properly, protecting the food from wild animals, lighting a fire, hunting for fresh water, repairing and maintaining the wagons, tending the animals, setting up a watch rotation, checking the map to plan the next day’s travel, taking stock of the remaining supplies, judging and adjusting ration amounts, cooking and eating, making sure everyone has time to relax and possibly chat, getting enough quality sleep, cooking and eating breakfast, packing everything up again, scouting ahead to find a suitable path, avoiding potholes, tending to any twisted ankles, adjusting pace to keep up the schedule, finding good places to pause and catch your breath, and finding another suitable place to camp and start the whole process all over again.

Could that be fun? Sure! It could also take multiple sessions, and if the players just wanted to get to the tomb and fight the zombie-lord, it could be infuriating.

This is not entirely on the same Story/Game spectrum we’ve been using, but it’s very close. Chester Bolingbroke, the CRPG Addict, explains his Cabbage Theory of Realism in his final post on Might and Magic III, the Isles of Terra. While his purview is exclusively Computer games, the theory still stands. (Naturally, as most CRPGs of the time were devoted to recreating the TTRPG experience) The more abstraction we accept in the rules, the more narrative shoulders the burden of what happens next. The more “realism” in the system, the more accurate detail we need to support it.

Is realism worth having in your game? I can be; realism ensures everyone is on the same page. Especially in games with fantastical settings or abstract systems, “realism” provides a common baseline; a reference so players do not have to guess at what results are “reasonable.” Can my character jump across this ravine? Probably not in the real world, so likely as not here without help. Can I take on a two-ton lizard that breathes fire? Not if all you have is a rusty sword and a circular plank of wood. If there are certain expectations from the game’s genre or game-tone, “realism” can help keep people grounded.

At the same time, sometimes realism can be boring. Sometimes it’s fun to just cut loose and feel free from the confines of realistic consequences, and feeling a tug on our “feeling hungry” leash can break the flow of the game.

And, not to leave it unsaid, so much of RPGs aren’t realistic. Sometimes a single muscled hero can chop of the head of a seven-story bahemoth. Sometimes a martial artist can leap across the grand canyon with a single bound. Dragons, magic, laser-guns, ancient conspiracies, Elder Gods, otherworldly sciences…realism is overrated. That’s part of the reason why we play, isn’t it? We play to adventure, to kill monsters, to gain levels, to loot dungeons, to overcome adversity…

We play to feel powerful.

Next time, I’d like to talk about empowerment.