Following up on a side topic that went came up in
"Use of campfires attracting attention". I had said:
If I want to push more realism and have the PCs take wagon trains and caravans to supply long journeys, I try my best to make it fun for them rather than a constant drag of nitpicking them with details and vulnerabilities.
In practice, I've seen a lot of GMs push back if players try to have an expedition with lots of porters, pack animals, and other support characters for them -- because it comes across as unheroic and breaks assumptions.
There were two responses on the last point,
Those GMs are dumb. We call it an adventuring campaign for a reason. There's a reason it's 30-300 bandits - someone's got to cook the gruel, after all.
Too many gamers have never read the AD&D1e Player's Handbook back section, from p.101 onwards. "THE ADVENTURE" first paragraph tells us to gather information and hire men-at-arms, get mounts and so on if we can.
Pfft on them. My wife and I love logistics: we're the ones who pore over gear for optimum use. We come by this honestly; we met in a combat boffer LARP with many camping events a year. If anyone has any question on the matter, if you're going to be out all day swinging swords in 90+ degree weather, you want to have a good hot meal in your belly made from good food, you want to have slept through the cold rain last night in a dry tent, you want to have had a good night sleep in good bedding, and you want plenty of pure liquid to drink.
By contrast, people who figured they were young and tough, wrapped themselves in a cloak, dined on a half-bag of Doritos, tried to sleep on a hillside without shelter, no change of clothing ... nope. Didn't fight so well.
So yeah: if I'm a PC, I'm going to pay attention to logistics. If I can afford it, I'll absolutely pop for a pack mount, quality camping gear, good food. A GM who "pushes back" on that is a campaign I'm walking away from.
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Fundamentally, the clash here is between fictional narratives like The Lord of the Rings and the like - where a few adventurers go it alone - versus historical expeditions which would typically have at least a dozen people or even several dozen including servants, guides, and the like.
As I see it, the key difference in assumptions is that a large and well-equipped expedition is much
slower and
less stealthy than adventurers on their own. Historically, fatigue, disease and getting lost were the deadliest dangers. In RPGs, these rarely feature - and instead there are wandering monster attacks.
I did something a little like this in a previous campaign - which was a post-apocalyptic game along the lines of The Living Dead. The PCs were shepherding the last of civilization to safety underground while a dragon apocalypse ravaged the surface world. So the PCs had an entourage of non-combatants they were leading.
D&D adventures tend to assume lone adventurers - especially in having stealth or speed required. Some specific issues:
(1) In many game worlds, powerful wandering monsters make the wilderness effectively unsurvivable for an unstealthy expedition with vulnerable non-combatants. In my post-apocalyptic game, this was a feature rather than a problem -- the group faced unacceptable losses because there was no choice. In other games, it may take more explanation for why things are how they are.
(2) Some adventures have an imposed time limit, like "in X days the enemy's plans will succeed" or similar. This
(3) If there is no time limit per se, some modules turn into a longer-term war of attrition rather than the more normal room-by-room approach. For example, a module like Steading of the Hill Giant Chief could turn into something more like a siege or series of guerrilla attacks over weeks rather than going through rooms round by round. A module like Tomb of Horrors might be more like an archeological expedition taking several days per room.
Thoughts?