Its been my experience that RPGs are usually pretty poor at portraying this kind of challenge.  I mean, if the enemy is an orc, or a horde of orcs, its all good. But if your enemy is "the sea", or "the mountain", or a snowstorm, or even a volcano, its much more difficult to make this fun.

Why should this be so? I mean, the struggle for survival is an essential part of games, and man vs. nature is something that is a very common theme.  From what I can recall, I have had only ONE really good adventure that was only man vs. nature, and that was in my Roman campaign when vesuvius erupted.

So why is this? And how can one make it so that these kinds of games are more exciting?

RPGPundit

Advancing an hypotheses here, it could be because the typical rule set doesn't cover such things. We're shown how to present combat, but not scenics. My advice is to go out and look. Look at what is going on around you. Not only when it's good outside, but also when things are inclement. Experience a rainstorm, and the aftermath. And learn how to put your experiences into words.

GM: The rain is coming down hard now. Solid sheets of water hiding all more than a few feet away. Everything you have is getting soaked, even those protected by oilskin or wax.

Player: I'll cast a Secure Shelter.

GM: The material component is ruined. You need to get undercover, and the nearest is the forest a mile away. The horses are begining to buck. Riding checks to regain control at -2.

Why doesn't Man vs. Nature do well very often in gaming?  I'd venture that it's a simple case of antagonism.  If the enemy is an orc (or a horde of them) then that can be fought, killed, beaten.  Nature can't be defeated, you can't kick nature's ass.  PCs vs. Nature = Nature Wins, run like the little bitch you are.
Of course, this is presented from the POV of someone who views the problem antagonistically.  For those who don't see it antagonistically, the thrill of challenging nature and surviving (nay, even prospering!) can be interesting with a good GM.

If I ever actually goddamn finish it, said conflict is one of the absolute biggest in my game.  A Song in the Dark is a post-apoc game, with an intended focus on survival.  Your characters are tryign to survive in a world where food is scarce as hell, there's no damn sunlight, the weather is all fucked, and your fellow humans, the wildlife, even some of the plants, are trying to kill you, because they're as starved as you are.

I've always found the concept of the players fighting simply to survive to be very appealing, because it's a very primal thing, something everyone understands at the absolute deepest of levels.  You need food, you need shelter, and you need to keep the mutated wolverine from devouring you and your young.

No grandiose ideologies or abstract social concepts or questions of good and evil.  Just living.

I love it.

Funny enough I think nature is a great antagonist, it can't  (mostly)* be fought it can't be killed it can only be endured. From weather, to terrain, to whatever. I have it come up from time to time in my fantasy games, as well as others. I think part of the problem is some games seemed to reward combat in excess of other uses of skills (say "Survival") and that means that what is rewarded is what players want more of--I tend to reward players more generally, so threats of call kinds can come at them--from survival needs like food, and shelter, to facing the weather in a terrible winter, I even had players face a plague in one past campaign,and there attempts to fight it (with magic, they believed it was magical too--it wasn't though just nasty old disease)



*But never understimate things that ARE natural that can be fought: floods can be diverted with magic/time and planning, forest fires can be fought, and so on.

Wolvorine and J. Arcane raise some good points. I think it's because nature is not perceived as malicious as such there is a lack of emotional investment in said encounters. Mythusmage also has it right regarding the rules.

How I deal with it depends on the kind of natural disaster/event. A coming storm for instance brings out the worse in humanity before - desperate folks trying to leave the area - , during - rescuing folks from all sorts of trouble- , after - looting, crime etc.

This way the effects of nature seem more real. Not only is surviving nature dangerous, but also those who depend on it for survival

I mean one of the main antagonist of IHW is nature....

Regards,
David R

I can't really agree with the assumption. In my games, nature often is an opponent. And I'm probably not the only one. Big sections of the WotC nature supplements (Stormwrack, Frostburn etc.) concerned themselves with the dangers of overland travel. IIRC the Wilderness Survival Guide had lots of that stuff, too.

Scorching deserts, snowstorms (Caradhras, anyone?), humid jungles... The scenery is all there.

There _are_ two factors that play against this. The first one is the level of magic and/or technology the players have. If you can build a totally secure shelter, create food and cure disease, nature looses much of its danger.

The second one is the touchy-feely hippy nature drek, i.e. it's not against nature, we're "one with nature". Yuck.

I think it's all about people's perception of what is fun.  Most gamers seem to want to game in order to do things that they can't do in person; so they kill monsters or have kewl powerz or pilot a starship.  I would imagine the thrills of surviving in a harsh environment are even less appealing than playing a peasant or some other low-life Warhammer-style peon.

I've long since nurtured fantasies of running a proper ice-age game where people have daily calorie-intake needs and interacting with other tribes in order to get new inventions that make that food intake easier.

Though admittedly this is because I think gaming is all about economics.

If you look at movies and books, it's not a huge genre. In a movie it'll often be a brief montage and in a book, a scene setting device secondary to the meat of the matter. Even Scott of the Antarctic had an unhealthy obsession with Amundsen. In RPG terms, you could play that as a contest between Scott and Amundsen as much as Scott vs The Big Ice.

I'm also inclined to think that such a game would boil down to resource management. An environment cannot, after all, realistically react to your actions in a dynamic way.

Ned

But that's why you'd have other tribes or groups with food and skills that you'd want to learn.  It would make the group want to go out and engage with other people in order to make their lives easier (or just attack and kill them for all that meaty brain protein).

But then the  conflict is based around getting those skills or knowledge from those other groups, not battling the environment (if I understand your point correctly). It's not "How can we survive the plague?" but "How do we convince the Gamumbo people to share their plague cure with us?" The environmental problem is the trigger point for the larger adventure.

Without the Gamumbo people and their cure, the adventure is just a matter of "Well, we'd better isolate the sufferers and stop eating the meat of the crapulent bird." There doesn't seem to be a conflict in the traditional dramatic sense.

Ned

Essentially it's all economics.

You need X amount of food a day in order to survive.

Now, you can spend your time trying to hunt mammopths and if that pays off you're okay for a while but it can also result in you being hungry AND injured, meaning that the rest of the group have to pick up that much more food in order to keep you alive.

However, as in the real world, technology can make it much easier to produce more food with the same amount of effort... so maybe you learn how to make a bow and arrows, or how to plant seeds or how to butcher your animals more efficiently.  You have to interact with other groups to get these, but you can also choose not to.

It's all about the economics of poverty, the easier it gets to produce food, the more easily your group can support the sick and injured and eventually people who don't do ANY food gathering at all such as shamans, the elderly, artists or warriors who protect the group.

The conflict stems from keepinmg your group alive and helping it thrive and become a village and maybe eventually more.

I think part of it is the difficulty (likely entirely avoidable) of stopping it just being a series of rolls.

For a start, many games have a survival skill, which makes it a one roll event.

"I made my survival roll" "ok, you find shelter and some game for today, roll again the next day" is not the stuff that great drama is made of.

If you have a survival skill, it seems fair that players will roll it, the trick to making survival interesting is making it more than just a few dice rolls.

Oh, and that Secure Shelter thing would really annoy me.  That's the entire point of that spell, I would feel rather nerfed if I couldn't use it on the only occasion when it was of any relevance.

@ Mr Analytical: Well, that just sounds like resource management to me. Not that that can't be fun, but really you end playing Civilization or some such.

Quote from: Mr AnalyticalThe conflict stems from keepinmg your group alive and helping it thrive and become a village and maybe eventually more.

But that's not a conflict, in the dramatic sense. A conflict arises when two forces want diametrically opposed things: two guys love the same woman or two nations want the oil wells; one nation wants to spread their faith, the other wants to remain secular; the Quintano people want the cure, but the Gamumbo people want to keep it to themselves.

The problem with "environmental conflicts" is that the environment doesn't want anything. It's just there. If you insulate your house, the cold doesn't find new and crafty ways to get in. If you kill enough mammoth to see you through the winter, the winter doesn't find ways to make you hungrier. As such, the environment is not an interesting or engaging opponent.

One way to make vs. the environment more interesting is to make it a battle against your self. This tends to be the focus of True Life Tales of Derring Do -"At that moment, I thought that all was lost and was ready to lie and accept my fate. Then, I thought of dear Daisy, waiting for me in Stoke-on-Trent and found the will to carry on."

In RPG terms, I think you can see elements of this (or of its reverse) in The Dying Earth RPG - temptations are environmental hazards and there is a system of conflict to see if you succumb. Of course, in TDERPG, the GM acts as a deliberately hostile environment, sprinkling it with moral traps to be fallen into so I dunno if that's environmental opposition, as such. In HeroQuest, the environment IS personalised, to an extent, so it might work in that game (especially in a shamanistic, stone age setting).

I think that vs. the environment is a trigger, not a game in itself. Challenges from the environment park off real conflict by making resources scarce or shaking up the old order. Off the top of my head, check out The Survivors or The Day of the Triffids. Both of those use vs. the environment as their background, but they dramatise it through inter-personal conflict. Ditto classical westerns. People fighting against people is always interesting. Installing loft insulation, less so.

Ned

Quote from: BalbinusI think part of it is the difficulty (likely entirely avoidable) of stopping it just being a series of rolls.

Or Rolemaster-style skill bloat: "Okay, I managed my Find Herbs, scraped through on my Prepare Herbs but fumbled my Use Herbs. Back to the drawing board!"

Or: "So, I got a critical on Insulate Loft, but fumbled my Seal Windows. I guess we're going to take three points a day cold damage until I get a chance to re-roll my Purchase Lagging skill for the boiler."

Edit: And speaking from experience of these kinds of boy scout games in D&D and Rolemaster, I can confirm that it's fucking boring and after a couple of hours you're simply gagging for something to kill.

Ned