Episode 9 - Survival and Scotch

In this episode of Dungeons and Dark Roast, the hosts discuss survival as a mechanic and survival style campaigns in Dungeons and Dragons. They explain that survival is a wisdom-based skill check and can be used to follow tracks, hunt wild game, and guide a group through different terrains. They also mention that survival campaigns, such as Rime of the Frostmaiden and Out of the Abyss, focus on the players trying to survive their environment and often involve elements like extreme weather, lack of resources, and the need to make survival checks. The hosts also touch on the effects of exhaustion and madness in these campaigns and emphasize the importance of session zero to prepare players for the mental and physical challenges of survival campaigns. Welcome to episode 9 of Dungeons and Dark Roast. Listen in on tonight's episode as we talk about survival and scotch. Be sure to like and follow us on Instagram and Facebook for all of our updates and recipes. Listen every Wednesday on Spotify and Amazon Music for our latest episodes. Hello, welcome to Dungeons and Dark Roast. I'm Axis. And I'm Alex. We're two Dungeon Masters for D&D 5e here to talk about the chaos of our adventures and the coffee that gets us through it. Let's talk about survival tonight. And when I talk about survival, we're talking about two different things. We're going to talk about survival as a mechanic, and we're going to talk about survival style campaigns. These are the campaigns that are a little more RP-heavy, a little more thought-provoking, and a little less, you know, dungeon-crawly, a little less murderhobo-ish. Survival is wisdom-based, and it's a skill check. If you're looking at your character sheet, it is going to be the very last skill at the bottom. And most of the time, it's going to be taken, like, by your rangers, your druids, maybe somebody who is a halfling might take it because they're used to being in the wilderness, things like that. Survival tech, specifically, is to follow tracks, hunt wild game, and guide your group through different terrains. You can use it for tracking, you can avoid natural hazards with it, and that is what a survival check is going to be for, versus a nature check. And I know sometimes DMs can get these confused, right? If it deals with a plant or the world around you, it's nature. If you're trying to get somewhere or find something specific, it's survival. Exactly. And, you know, kind of the way I think about it, you know, I was a Girl Scout when I was little, more on the tracking through, you know, poison ivy, because my survival skills were rolling a natural one. Yeah. Then I was a scout leader for my son while he was in scout, and I think of survival that way. You know, we're teaching different pathways and looking at broken sticks on a path and looking at animal tracks and looking at those different things, whereas, you know, like you said, the nature side of things is, you know, you're looking to identify those poison ivy leaves. The Underdark, or in parallel universes that don't have sunlight as a way of tracking the direction you're going, so it also helps you not get lost. Right. Even if you're running something like the Frostmaiden campaign, where everything is frozen, and like, I don't know if you've ever been to the Northeast. I grew up in Washington, D.C., where things actually get covered in snow, but- No, thank you. I'm fine. I will stay right here. So when you get into this situation, the snow will create this layer, and it does not matter if it is overcast outside, it does not matter if the sun is shining bright in the sky, it creates this blinding effect where it reflects up off of the snow, and you cannot see anything. I have never needed sunglasses more in my life than when I was skiing, and that's saying a lot when I live so close to the equator in Texas, and I know that's not actually close, but it feels like it when it's so hot. Oh yeah, no, the sun is definitely trying to kill us 24-7. Even when the sun's not up, it's still trying to kill us. It's planning, it's plotting, it's rolling stealth checks. At least we're not in Alaska, right? I don't know, Alaska? Boom, moving on. You know, and that kind of leads us into the second half of this. We've defined a survival trick, and how you would use it, both as a player and a DM, but let's talk about some of these survival-based campaigns. I think you actually mentioned the two most well-known for 5e, Rime of the Frostmaiden and Out of the Abyss. I would say that any campaign that takes on any kind of travel aspect could be turned into a survival campaign, but I also think Rime of the Frostmaiden and Out of the Abyss, you are trying to survive the campaign. It's not delve into some ruins, it's not you're going to go kill a dragon. You're trying to actively survive your environment. In Rime of the Frostmaiden, it's overcast, there's a blizzard almost 24-7 in-game. Out of the Abyss, you're in the Underdark, you don't have any way of tracking where you're going, the passageways are always shifting, and near the beginning of the campaign you don't even have any food or water. So you're trying to do all of the things in Dungeons and Dragons that you normally would, but you don't have the resources that come naturally, you know, starting out in a village. I've found that survival campaigns, if there's going to be casualties, it's usually within the first couple of chapters. Right. And that's because they weren't paying attention or they don't understand, which I think any good DM has explained it and they're going to understand, but maybe they just don't get the gravity. Sometimes it's just not your thing as a player, and that's perfectly fine. The first session for the Out of Abyss table that I'm running, we had some confusion on what rolls we had to make. Well, we had to make a survival check to not get lost. We had to make a survival check, do you find rations, do you find water? And you know, we had some really bad rolls and people almost died in the first session because you're covering days and days worth of distance, so you have to make those rolls every single day. Well, and I think every campaign in D&D has some sort of survival aspect to it, you know, so you've got Rime of the Frostmaiden and you've Out of the Abyss, and honestly, kind of a bridge to those that's kind of in between that survival campaign and the dungeon crawl is going to be, you know, of course, one of my favorites, Tomb of Annihilation. Half of that campaign, if not more, is surviving the jungles of Chult. It's got that hex crawl for the jungle portion. Yeah, okay. It does, and it's not only are you surviving the T-Rexes and all of the dinosaurs or, in my party's case, a giant crocodile attack, but also you're trying to simply survive the heat. Yeah. And it is so excessively hot that exhaustion becomes a condition that players have to deal with. I feel like exhaustion and survival go hand in hand often. Madness, too. Madness is the underdark version of exhaustion. So exhaustion in 5e as a condition is measured in six different levels. Sorry. Please continue. I love exhaustion because life comes at you fast, people. It does. And for any of you out there who are parents, you have experienced real-life exhaustion. This is no joke. So the six different levels of exhaustion are, at the first level, disadvantage on ability checks, followed by your speed being halved, you know, and that's if you're up for 24 hours or whatever, or you're walking through difficult terrain. I mean, it makes sense. If you've ever actually done a lot of physical exertion, you know what that feels like, to not be able to move as quickly as you want to. On the third level, you've got disadvantage on attack rolls and saving throws. So your mind is just not quite there anymore. On 4, your hit point maximum is halved. At this point, your body itself is physically breaking down. On 5, your speed is reduced to zero. So you no longer have the physical energy to move at all. You're conscious, but you're essentially comatose without being unconscious. Right. Right. And 6 is death. You know, so exhaustion can be a big deal, especially if you're not paying attention to it. And these become long-term effects if you are starving because you don't have rations, if you're freezing, or if you're in scorching temperatures, or any kind of special kind of condition. Exhaustion can play a factor in any D&D campaign, but specifically, there are these campaigns, again, like Out of the Abyss and Rime of the Frostmaiden, that are specifically designed on this mechanic. If you look at the exhaustion entry in the player's handbook or the basic rules, whichever you have, you can read it and the entry on madness almost in parallel, and you realize that exhaustion deals with the physical, while madness affects the mind. So in certain campaigns, you're not only becoming physically exhausted, you're slowly losing your sanity at the same time. Yeah. As a character, it begins to take its toll, but at the same time, even as a player, you're starting to get into the psychological aspect of, okay, this is bad because there's not a lot I can do if I don't make these rolls. Right. And it can become scary. I mean, people become attached to their characters and things like that. And so it's very, I roll back here, this is why it's very important to have a session zero, and to know that you're going to get into a campaign like this, because it can be mentally taxing, both in game and as an actual player, because you become attached to these characters and you fall in love with them. And it actually kind of leads into a funny story back in my Curse of Strahd days. And I've told this story in the past in a former episode, but I had a player who was so bent on her own survival that she left her entire party to die by simply completing the mission and running away. And that was because she had fallen in love with her character and she didn't want anything to happen to it. And so she turns around and she completes the objective and she's like, peace out, bye. That is a true concern. But like so many other things in D&D, madness and exhaustion and damage, they're not permanent. You know, exhaustion can be solved by, okay, if you're going to run away, that's fine. Run away as a group, run away as a party, catch a breath, recover, get your exhaustion removed, cast a couple spells if you've got a couple stacks of madness, and go back to it. I mean, the solutions are not that difficult. You've got, you know, calm emotions, you can use those on other players to get rid of stacks of madness. All of the restoration spells, all of the healing spells will get rid of your exhaustion. Right. You know, taking a short rest, finding an alcove, and, you know, taking 10 or 15 minutes and being able to do that short rest, and I say 10 or 15 minutes, it depends on your campaign, that's obviously not the book recommendation. But like, of course, it always depends on you as a DM and what works for you. I was going to say, hey, we're the DMs, we can make the rules up whenever we go. Exactly. We can make the rules. Yeah, we can make the rules. Books are like, more like a suggestion at this point, so. This is why I always do house rules on Season Zeros, which I think we're going to do a whole episode in Season 2 with one of our guests about house rules. And so, that's for another episode, but yes, you know, you can get your players to do a couple of different things. And as a DM, you can guide them into those things and say, hey, well, maybe you could do this, or hey, look, here's this brightly lit alcove with a cute little kitty in it that looks like maybe it's got a quest. In my campaign, it would probably be like an anglerfish, where the light is just a cute little kitty, but it's really like, the entire alcove is the mouth of some horrifying monster. See? And this is why no one ever rests. Survival. It's survival. It's a survival campaign with me. It's always survival. Always. Always. You know, but you've got players who are on the flip side of this, though. I had a player once who was so hellbent on ensuring everyone else's survival because they took being a healing cleric so very seriously that at the end of, spoiler alert, guys, there is a shambling mound in the death house in Curse of Strahd, okay? It's one of my favorite monsters. It's one of my favorite miniatures that I've ever painted, and this cleric was swallowed by the shambling mound. He was consumed. Well, you don't instantly die, but he was so hellbent on saving the rest of his party that he didn't heal himself and died to a shambling mound, which I feel like is not something you should do. Now, see, I didn't come here to be attacked, because I'm running a Curse of Strahd table currently. Okay. I lost my self-insert character to that very famous shambling mound, so I had actually- Was it a cleric? No. He was a fighter. Okay. I predicted it for him to die at some point in the death house anyways. The shambling mound ate my character, and I failed all of my rolls. Right. My party tried to get me out, but they didn't have time. There was no reaction time. I was consumed, and bam, bam, bam, my character was dead whether I wanted it to happen or not. Right. It's like the ultimate Venus flytrap. Yeah. And it was humiliating, and I did not come here to be attacked about the shambling mound. I apologize. Rude. Rude. We're eating away at a shambling mound. Rude. Get good. Rude. Unnecessarily rude. Which is funny that you homebrewed your own character and then killed it in that way, and you and I had never even talked about that same storyline. I know. As soon as you mentioned it, I was like, yeah, who dies to the shambling mound? Yay. You do. Speaking of, we do have a homebrew of the week, and I wanted to do something that was a little boozy and a little warm because we talked about the Rime of the Frostmaiden so much, and every time I just think about that campaign or look at the cover of that campaign, it just makes me cold. Oh, no. It's just cold. It is. You start with survival gear. I mean, come on. Yeah, and I actually personally had hypothermia once, so I feel like I've never been warm again. Crazy. What is this warm drink because I'm getting cold? Okay, so this is going to be the Saint Survival, and I say that because if you think about up in the mountains, they used to have St. Bernard's who would have whiskey barrels for people who ended up being caught in the snow and they needed to have that whiskey. For the Saint Survival, you're going to have a heated toddy glass, and you're going to add one teaspoon of brown sugar and boiling water. Stir the mixture to dissolve the brown sugar. You're going to then add one ounce of a fine scotch whiskey. For this one, I did it with my husband's Glen Libet because that's what he really likes, and so Glen Libet Founder's Reserve is what we had on hand, and you stir that in. Add your freshly brewed coffee. This one, you can use whatever coffee you like, and then you add a layer of whipped double heavy whipping cream, so you just whip it up until it turns into whipping cream. Put it on top, and you grate a little nutmeg on top of the cream and serve it that way. It all sounds really delicious. I have one question. What is a toddy glass? It is going to be, it's kind of like between a coffee mug and a rocks glass. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. Bierstein. Like a miniature version, like a Hobbit version of a Bierstein. Okay. Okay. Okay. So this one's not super sweet, not at all. Actually it'll probably be a little warm going down in all the different ways, but that way you can have the saint survival, and that could be at any point, either summer night next to the fire, or even in the winter. Sounds like something that you'd want to drink while you're playing Rhyme with the Frostmaidens, so I understand it. That would definitely get me through, for sure, if we're running a whole bunch of survival checks. Or if you're drinking so much of it, you may just pass out and forget you're playing, so. Who knows? Who knows? It might be what I drink when we're at the convention, June 7th through the 9th, for Fan Expo, to just, at the end of the night, when we have survived the day. I love the idea that you think I'm going to be mixing my liquor with anything. Well, this is only at the end of the day. We will not be- I know. I know. Thank you all so much for listening to episode nine, and sticking with us for nine episodes. We couldn't be more grateful, and we do look forward to seeing you at Fan Expo, June 7th through the 9th. And don't forget to check us out on Spotify, Amazon Music, Facebook, and Instagram, and now on Twitter. Ooh, we're on Twitter. Thank you, guys. Take care.