Hey guys,

I just got the game and preparing my first session as a GM.

I would love to have the survival aspect of the game in focus for the first days or week of ingame time until everything "stabilizes".
How do you track your Foot, Water and Sleep "consumption", Food spoilage etc. in a narrative or otherwise fun way that's not to hard on the bookkeeping side?

I somehow don't want to remind the players the have to eat, drink and sleep almost each day and the game mechaincs are not specific on how to deal with punishing player for not eating.
So I thought, maybe I give them a negative feature "hungry" / "thirsty" / "tired" and therefore a negative dice for their rolls.

Right now I have these two and a half ideas:

#1

In the first 2 days they don't have to eat, drink and sleep. Times were good, body is ok.
I keep track if the player think of eating and stuff. Each player that say: I go to sleep, or I drink some water will get a negative feature.

No food/water will add negatives to "Physical" checks. (Hungry/Thirsty negative feature)
No sleep will add negatives to "Mental" checks. (Tired negative feature)
No water might also add some negatives to "Social" or even all categories to show the importance of water.

Every day they get another negative, unless they sustain themselves. And comsume a "Food Ration", "Water Ration" or "Sleep".
Once they ate, one negative "hungry" feature will be "removed". If they eat something small, like an apple, it won't fix them up. But they will get a positive die for their next check.

If a player get more than 5 of these negative features in one of the categories, they die.

Pros:
They get punished for not taking care of themselfes with negative dice.
Somewhat realistic.
Easier to track, because it's not happing via stress.

Cons:
Not tested - maybe to hard?

#1.1
Same as above but instead of negative feature it will be a trauma of a specific level. Maybe even arbitrary handled?
Like, some random day - the player feel hungry and get a "Severity 1" Trauma. But when should I start make it worse?
Also "Severity 3" Traumas for "Thirst" and "Hunger" are probably not working. At least not for the "healing" side - because you are dead by then.

#2

Instead of negative features, they get 1 stress per day, as long as they are on tier one of their stress tracks and 2 in tier 2, and 3 in tier 3.
(To overcome the the resistance and be able to keep adding stress)

They need to reflect on that stress. And would get a "hungry" / "starving" / "almost starved" trauma.

Categories are as in #1. No food, physical stress, no sleep, mental stress etc.
Small naps or servings just add a positive die to their next check - but do not heal their trauma.
To heal the trauma you need an additional ration per severity (instead of dealing with it for up to a month).

As three traumas might already kill the PC, it's really hard to survive I think.

Pros:
Closer to the rules of dealing with "Damage".

Cons:
No direct punishment on their condition?
Hard to narrate and keep track of because "stress" is not specific on the condition where the stress is coming from.

Do you guys have maybe a better way to deal with this?

Regards

DeadFace

I made a whole host of house rules which included fairly light survival rules.

Give it a look if you like?

I checked it out. Looks solid. I'll get some ideas out of it for sure.

Right now I probably will just add traumas if the don't consume a "supply-ration" instead of stress.
I don't like the idea of them having 1 stress of starvation and 6 on being beaten up - and therefore they get a "beaten up" trauma and
won't starve.

They get a trauma every day as said above. No food, physical trauma. No water, mental, no sleep: social. (for now)
If that would kill them too fast for some reason - I'll just give them a 4th trauma slot because of the added difficulty.

We'll see how it works out for us.

Thanks.

I can kind of understand the discomfort with "different" Stress sources leading to "mismatched" Traumas. But that already can and does happen all the time anyway. So I never saw it as an issue here.

I would anticipate your approach being very lethal depending on how hard you make it to find supplies and get rest, and that's in a system that's already very lethal. But it's worth a shot if that's where you want the focus of your game to be (as opposed to conflict with zombies and humans).

Good luck!