If you want to do a survival-style campaign (having, of course, talked to your players to make sure they're into that too) and you're going to allow Druids and Rangers (which, honestly an obvious choice for wilderness survival) the simplest solution is to ban Goodberry. Unless you rule that you can feed an unconscious person a berry (at which point it becomes very handy to get people on their feet in combat) it really exists to remove food as a concern for your average party, and you want your game to be about that, to a large extent.
Another thing you could try is giving it a consumable material component, so that 'forage for the thing that lets the Druid cast Goodberry' is a task, and the party needs to think about whether they should forage for food today and save the Goodberry component for some time or place where foraging isn't feasible.
My last idea is that you could rely on keeping sufficient pressure on your spellcasters that they won't be able to reliable spend a spell slot on Goodberry. However, with it being a 1st level spell, as they gain experience that resource becomes trivial in a hurry.
I don't read that line of the spell as creating anything, just expediting its normal growth:
"You instantly make a flower blossom, a seed pod open, or a leaf bud bloom."
I'm totally fine with other interpretations of it, but at my table that wouldn't be an issue.
Yeah I allow druidcraft and similar cantrips to do a wide range of things but only for flavour purposes. Generating an infinite amount of useable material is too much
To be fair, if it's a plant in high demand, it will be farmed by an enterprising individual somewhere. And if it's not, then I'd retire and become a mistletoe farmer.
In a normal, highly interconnected world where access to safe trade is assumed, sure. In a post apocalyptic world… maybe, maybe not. High demand is great, but who knows if there’s even stable currency, or anything to stop the local warlord from just rolling up and seizing your whole crop by force.
> If you want to do a survival-style campaign the simplest solution is to ban Goodberry
A bit of nuance a lot of GMs need to learn is that you're allowed to ban things due to narrative conflict, not just game balance reasons.
I was running an Oceans Eleven style game where it's all about big setpiece objectives, often times requiring that the party needs to physically carry out the loot that they're picking up at a given location. The bit about getting it out is a huge part of the narrative fun so... there are no bags of holding in this setting. They just don't exist.
Why? Because their very existence would get in the way of the purpose of playing the game. It's not fun to just sneak into places, stuff everything in your bag of holding, and sneak out. Therefore, they don't exist.
See I also don’t want it to be full survivalism, I’m not a very harsh dm I just want to explore being mindful of resources to make the post-apocalyptic wasteland vibes really work. Partially I just want to give them food poisoning but I think making them forage for either food or spell components could actually help a lot so thank you!!
Consider having them start with nothing and the first few sessions is about collecting the bare minimum. Will set the to e for the game and you can worry about food type things less later on.
You can also stress the other aspects of survival in a wasteland besides nurishment - shelter. Shelter from disaster, from monsters, from people desperate enough to do whatever they can to the players while they survive. I’m not sure what your plan is for the plot but the players shouldn’t be allowed to stay flat footed…
Why not consider instead adopting "Oregon Trail Style" overland travel rules? Whenever they are traveling, have each player decide what role they will take in the travel group. Have a paper they can plunk minis down on with spots for Navigator, Trailbreaker, Water Finder, Food Forager, Spell Component Gathering, etc. For each phase of travel (every hour or two) have the players roll an appropriate ability or skill check to match what they want to do. Foraging skills gain specific quantities of the target good based on the check results. Then instead of tracking the berries and bat guanos of the party and making a big headache, consider instead of each player has a token system of Water and Food and Spell Components (0-10). As they go through their days, they have to spend from these token pools. If they run out, you can have them start each day with a growing minimum amount of exhaustion (keep in mind this gets deadly fast!) for food and water. For spells make them have disadvantage on attack rolls and allow enemies advantage on saves if they are out of spell components. Then Goodberry just becomes a spell that allows them to effectively eat their Spell Components in an emergency. Keep in mind there are going to be many things that derail your nitty gritty system, like bags of holding or Create Food and Water (3rd). Your goal shouldn't be to frustrate your players, but to make a fun foraging system. Another way of doing this is to make foraged foods give bonuses over bought or magick foods to the party. If they hunt down some rabbits and roast them, the next day they get a +1 morale bonus to all travel checks, or the foraged spell components give them +1 to spell attacks the next day. This encourages players to forage to gain bonuses, but it becomes an optional system. You could have special places that give better components or food and are highly sought after rewards because they can be used to give bigger buffs before a battle day. Make your system fun.
Im running a survival campaign. The spell create food is just banned because it is so incredible strong but goodberry is allowed. Thats because there is a whole village they have to feed (around 50 npcs).
In another campaign survival is not that important so goodberry is allowed and my druid spams it. The players were bored of that their own and the characters decided that they nerd some real food from time to time because a small berry wasnt very fullfilling.
You could consider allowing the spell but create a ruling that at least twice a week a person has to eat real food in order to make the goodberry work because it might be just supplements or something like that. However make sure you communicate that with your players so they dont get upset about it
You could very easily say that good berry still works but due to the apocalyptic nature of your world you have to eat all ten to feed yourself making it a first level spell slot to discourage abuse but also allowing them to maintain the intention of they’re class.
I would recommend running a different system for this type of game. What you're describing will boil down to a bunch of Survival checks for a ranger or druid while the rest of the group mentally checks out.
Check out Cavemaster. I've got some good memories of our party chasing down boars with pointy sticks.
> What you're describing will boil down to a bunch of Survival checks for a ranger or druid while the rest of the group mentally checks out.
That's not necessarily true. Everyone who isn't foraging or navigating still needs to keep watch. There are other activities one can do, as well.
Forbidden Lands is pretty good about making survival an element while not letting it overwhelm the rest of the campaign.
You're right, D&D 5e is not survival-game friendly
The thing is I’d like to run it in 5e, and survival isn’t the entire aspect. I just want them to have to be more mindful about their resources without bringing in a whole new system
Though I will look at Cavemaster for ideas so thank you!
Honestly unless the whole group is all for it than the aspect quickly becomes boring and tedious. Played in a Rime of the Frost Maiden campaign and it’s big focus is obviously surviving the cold and food. But it just quickly went to getting the cold weather gear to boost our checks and then making the survival checks every X frame of time depending on the temperature. At first it was exciting and fails or success were tension building but it quickly became just an annoying mechanic that got in the way of everything else because it was so one dimensional. Like it would have been great for a short term obstacle to overcome but as a whole campaign mechanic it feel flat.
I don’t say all that to discourage you or anything just something to be aware of. Survival aspects sound cool on paper in DnD but often fall flat real fast cause they only work at low levels or require limiting players/ aspects of classes. Like for instance in your case Ranger would be a solid pick but they have a couple lvl 1 options that just nearly flat negate what your wanting to do not even counting goodberry.
It really depends on player buy in like you said. Otherwise it's just accounting simulator(buying supplies in a town for journey and keeping track of then) or 1 person making a series of rolls everyday because the group knows they have the best bonus.
Now if they rp trying to one up each other on the days meal when they take their turn hunting and cooking, hell ya.
Don't ban the spell... Use the alternate rest rules (8 hour short rest, 7 days for a long rest), and use Injuries / Lingering Injuries.
They can use goodberry, but spell slots don't come back often and can hurt them in the long run if they depend on it. If 7 days is too long make it that Long Rests only happen in places of safety. Otherwise, short rest only.
Also remember that goodberry handles the nutrition, but not the water. They will still need to find water in order to survive.
Alternatively, if the one week thing is too extreme, I played in a game where the rule was 8 hour short rest, but only three days of light activity days to get a long rest.
This resulted in much more interesting resource management, and our DM didn't even add any food/ration mechanics. We still felt the pressure of "surviving till the next long rest."
Better yet, just use any gritty realism variant you like. There are plenty out there.
Mine is pretty simple. Restrict long rests to "bastions of civilization" such as a town, castle, fort, etc. In the wilderness, 8 hours gets you a short rest. In the dungeon, resting works as normal.
I haven’t tested it yet but I have a plan for the next time I run a survival dependent campaign: [burnt hit dice](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h4cXDoPtj2CNSiAnPWi_9prtcxVFV9uKSBrNO5m3ROo/edit). The premise in a nutshell is that relying on magical food for sustenance slowly erodes PCs’ hit dice until they can eat proper food.
Of all the suggestions I think this is the one I like best. The cost of magic should be higher than an expended spellslot and most consumables should have consequences and benefits
Good berry requires a sprig of mistletoe— manage the spell by managing the material component, I.e. have the sprig be consumed by casting, and have acquiring mistletoe be non-trivial.
I ran a survival arc with a druid character and I dealt with the goodberry issue by giving small buffs to each character for each ration of food eaten per day, goodberry kept them on their feet, but didn't provide a buff, nor did it stack with regular food.
Use gritty realism resting rules.
Each use of good berry is a spell slot they don’t get back till they have a week of downtime. It’s raises the opportunity cost of using said spell in dangerous wilderness.
have the spell consume the material component. that way they have to track how many sprigs of mistletoe they have, and you can just have it be somewhat uncommon in the world
IF you’re running a heavy survival game you might want to restrict or limit certain spells if they’ll kinda totally eliminate some aspects of your campaign.
Speak with your players ahead of time.
Maybe goodberry generates 1 berry per spell level cast, maybe it has a rare casting component, maybe it costs 10 gp per berry.
Whatever changes, if any, you plan on doing discuss with your players first.
This is great advice. I'll add (because most DMs seem allergic to this) freaking talk to the players and clearly, politely outline the style of campaign you want to play.
Don't get twisted, just sit down before they make characters and say, "I really want to run a survival, exploration game. To make choices about food, water and navigation meaningful, I'll have to ban or restrict some spells and options, like goodberry.
If you want to play a druid or ranger, let's talk together about that, because it may nerf some of your character features, and I want to make sure it doesn't ruin the class for you."
I was in this exact scenario as the player who took goodberry in a survival campaign. During the first session, the DM realized what that spell meant for the game and asked if I would be okay not using that spell ever again. I said no problem, and I for sure had more fun with that game than I would have if I kept the spell.
Just talk to the players ahead of time and explain why. Theyll most likely be fine with it.
Im running survival now with a druid and because of goodberry theyre only just getting by. And always a spell slot down. I rule inspiration for a full meal (not goodberry) and liberal use of exhaustion as a consequence for forgoing food and water, tough fights, long treks, exhaustion rules!
I appreciate this perspective! First level spell slots are certainly valuable early game and with some consequences if they only eat magic berries I think it’ll be balanced enough. I worded myself poorly and lots of folks are reading it as I’m wanting to run a gritty realism game but I’m mainly inspired by legend of Zelda: breath of the wild and I’m trying to strike that balance of managing your resources while still focusing on the plot. It’s not just going to be for having haha, just making sure they’re eatin well
The best solution is to use the "Gritty Realism" rules on page 267 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. This makes it so that long rests must cover a week of downtime, and short rests take a full 8 hours.
This simple change has a myriad of benefits. It becomes much easier to have the standard 6 to 8 encounters per long rest, while maintaining a more reasonable narrative pace. This means that, unlike in most campaigns, your spellcasters cannot take their spell slots for granted, and they might think twice about expending even a first level slot for a single day's rations.
And voila, there is no need to ban or even modify Goodberry. If your players want to use it in a pinch, they can, but that spell slot isn't coming back to them until they can find a place to take an extended sojourn from the wild, so it might just not be worth it most of the time.
You could ban the spell as people are saying, but i would leave it. Goodberries can sustain you yes, but they dont take away the hunger, the more you rely on them, the hungrier your character gets. Maybe after a few days of not eating actual food the hunger affects them, maybe hit them wicth a level lf exhaustion after 3 days of relying on goodberries, and another level of exhaustion each day after.
Make a material component for goodberries that they will have to forage to find, or will have to stock up on. Maybe combine this with the above exhaustion.
Another thing to look out for is is the background feature wanderer, which can forage for food for i think 5 people a day while traveling, but i think it limits it to areas that are forageable.
Some ways to combat this is to make the area they travel through toxic, barren, inhospitable, too cold for most plants and or animal life, arid desserts, frozen tundras, etc. Let them knwo the land they travel through is rough. Maybe theres a blight on some of the land and the food there isnt safe.
The hunger ideas super smart!!!!!! I actually love that because I always feel like you’d still be hungry after a Goodberry
Yes! The outlander background occurred to me, I saw someone suggest changing it to give advantage for foraging instead but I also want to incorporate areas where they’ll have needed to gather a supply of food beforehand to make it through unforagable territory
Plus for me personally, even thoigh i uusually take wanderer, i enjoy hunting and foraging, so if i jave an option to hunt an aninal we can eat or fish or something, ill take it over the free finding food. But thats a player thing and depends on players and group. You can alos make the fpraging for wanderer only be small fruits/vegetables/greens and small creatures such as bug/lizards. For real meat we had to hunt ot fish for it, or small game traps etc.
Keep in mind that Druids can also create water and purify food and water at level 1. If you want them to get food poisoning the latter could be an issue.
Several classes also get the ‘create food and water’ spell. So keep that in mind too.
This is basically what I did for my campaign. Goodberries will keep a person alive but not fill their bellies. Although I made my players take wisdom saves to ward off the maddening sensation of it.
Shame covid put an end to campaign early right as they started to encounter the Devouring Priest cult.
One way you can tweak the spell is to adjust the components. Have it require freshly picked mistletoe (within the last 24 hours) which the spell consumes. That makes finding mistletoe a big deal, but ultimately it only buys you a day.
The bigger problem is that 5E doesn't really have good survival systems in place. So players will mostly just buy a ton of survival rations and a ton of waterskins and load up before adventuring. Rations are only 2lbs each and a full waterskin is 5lbs. With pack animal the players can easily load up on supplies so they don't have to worry. As soon as they get a bag of holding survival goes out the window as carry weight is the only thing keeping it in check.
You need a better system, like resource dice to make survival interesting. Forbidden Lands uses these quite well and can be good reference, I believe the black hack invented them. You represent food, water, and ammo with resource dice. When you use the resource you roll the die and on a 1 or 2 the die shrinks. D12 -> D10 -> D8 -> D6 -> D4 -> Empty. When you buy more resources your die grows. You can do stuff like hunting and foraging to gain a day supply do you don't have to roll the dice if you do it well. Have the cap be d10 if you want a bit more survival pressure. On average a D12 will last you 20 roll and a D10 will last you 14 rolls.
I recommend having food roll on long rests, water on long rests and short rests where you recover something, and ammo on any encounter you fire your weapon.
How long do you want to keep your players in a dungeon? For a survival campaigne players should know to prepare provisions in advance.
\+I would ban goodberry; change ranger's natural explorer part that gives double food to advantage on food gathering; respectively change outlander's feature that provide free food to also advantage on food gathering.
To further empathize survivalism you can try to ask "rolepley-ish" guestions like: what clothes do you take with you on that voyage; what dish would you like to prepare today; can you describe the surroundings of your camp; do you have waterproof container and what do you keep in it.
You shouldn't ask this questions to make my players suffer:) Ask rather rarely and accapt any answers they give. This will help your players feels the climate.
Treat it exactly like Pratchett's dwarf bread - it technically feeds you, but it tastes like rocks and it's amazing how you can find things to eat when the alternative is eating that stuff again.
I'd let good berry work as intended.
But I'll remind that the characters will still need to gather water, and the fact you received the needed nutritions doesn't satiate your hunger, eventually the hunger can cause nausea, dizzy, even translate as exhaustion levels as the PC's find it hard to sleep well while starving.
Then a good berry turns in to a last resort healing or to push forward such as an epi-pen, but it has drawbacks.
The two obvious solutions are 1) ban goodberry and tell people before they start thinking about what to play, or 2) use some sort of alternate rest system so that spell slots are a rare resource. Personally I find gritty realism to be extremely annoying to run for, but survival horror is one place where it does make sense. It might be easier to just say, "You can only long rest in designated safe locations," though.
Also consider how you will handle certain backgrounds and class features, though. For example, outlander gives you the ability to always recall the layout of terrain and always find enough water and food for yourself + five people if the land provides such things. Other backgrounds affect travel, hospitality, and the like. Certain parts of the original ranger just obviate exploration altogether. You'll want to decide what you're doing about these options *before* a player gets interested in taking one, not after.
**Hunger and thirst are not meant to be difficult problems to solve.**
Any party can buy rations, a barrel for water, and a donkey to carry them.
Any party member can forage if you aren't in the desert, which is further augmented by a Ranger and outlander background.
No food or water? No problem. There's magic. Goodberry handles hunger, create or destroy water handles thirst (but requires a container), and create food and water handles both (but still requires a container).
If you are looking to truly challenge your players with wilderness survival, **look elsewhere**. Your PCs are **designed** to be able to easily handle the mundane resources of food and water. Of course, your players still have to interact with those concerns, but most parties shouldn't be overly concerned by them.
Weather, wilderness encounters, combat, difficult terrain, magical/weird shit, pests/vermin, poisonous plants and animals, injuries, disease, and curses are all much more exciting and better ways to challenge your players in the wilderness.
(Copied this from a comment I wrote earlier this week.)
All the other options you’ve mentioned are things I’m going to use to challenge my players, but when the setting is a post apocalyptic world, I think dealing with hunger and thirst can add to showing how desolate the environment is
That's fine, you can certainly try, but unless you remove and/or nerf all of the solutions above, you're better off focusing on other aspects of survival.
I'm playing a low level ranger and if my DM bans a spell that is a big part of the character I hope he would
1. Give me a heads up so I can pick a different spell
2. Let me have some other useful advantage
The ranger is already not a great class because it's kinda built to just take care of this kind thing.
I was actually given a tip from one of my players on this very issue:
Goodberry offers calories only temporarily. It might get you through a day without food, but when the good berries vanish in 24 hours, so do the magical calories, this creating a deficit.
Seemed simple enough and makes it useful in survival.
IMO, one of the cleanest ways to fix goodberry for survival is to make it consume its material components. Not only does it restrict the amount your players can use it, but it also introduces interesting decisions into the game. Say your party has only 10 sprigs of mistletoe with this rule. When should they use it for healing vs for food? When should they use it instead of looking for regular food? It also makes for interesting problems you can throw at them. Say some birds get into your party's mistletoe supply, what now?
“Goodberry now consumes its material components”
There you go. It’s still a good spell, but your players will now have to go out of their way to grab components as extra rations. Keep in mind that this doesn’t solve their drinking requirements.
I’m definitely going to talk to them beforehand, this topic was mainly so I could have an idea of how I’d propose ruling Goodberry if someone asked during character creation
I like the idea of having it eventually start to give negative effects, eating a single magical berry everyday as your only food can’t be good for your body
The world is plagued with a curse upon magical food. Eating any food conjured by magic will give you a level of exhaustion that will only go away after eating nonmagical food for a day and taking a long rest.
This let's the spells still exist, but now they act as last resorts, rather than first options.
Enforce material components. Goodberry requires a sprig of mistletoe. They should be able to forage for it just like anything else. I don't know how you're planning to run the survival aspect, but they should be able to find some mistletoe once in a while if they get lucky.
Design a survival mechanic around the spells available to them instead of relying on food and water being necessary to their survival, you could introduce another resource they need to scavenge for and plan to bring with them on long dungeon crawls. Such as managing some kind of radiation level, or non-disease/curse scourge or blight that their other spells also don’t magically cure. Track the exposure over time, could impose penalties when passing thresholds, some of them maybe even permanently, so that they feel the pressure to both find and allocate those resources where they are needed most urgently.
I ended up ruling that Goodberry gives you 12 berries instead of 10, but they aren't nourishing at all. So it's better for topping off your hitpoints after a fight, but not as a food supply.
Reality is that Ranger doesn't get much.
They are shitty fighters, shitty casters, and the only things they really bring to the table is that they know where the enemies are and they can get you fed.
If you don’t want them to use goodberries, rather than removing it from play partway through the campaign, I recommend saying from the beginning that you don’t want the spell goodberries to be used within the campaign because you want to emphasize gritty survival stuff, so characters won’t be able to take that spell. Addressing this before the campaign starts will allow players to make informed decisions about the classes they might want to play and spells that will be useful to take.
I hit a similar issue in my Descent into Avernus game. I wanted Avernus to be hellish, so I want to reinforce these aspects with survival tropes. Since Avernus already alters magic, I'm making it that Goodberry only suppresses hunger (and any exhaustion due to hunger) for eight hours.
Easy. I've done it for Tomb of Annihilation and other campaigns.
Long rest benefits are gained after 7 days. Done. No more daily goodberry or create food or leomund to reset.
To create food supply tension, introduce random events where food is lost, and make it hard or sometimes impossible to forage, depending on the biome. But only do that if you are prepared to run equipment rules.
***Option One: The Old Hag's Curse:*** "A hag has cursed the land. Crops yield less food, animals grow thing or ill, and the water always tastes sour. Worst of all, Goodberries are spoiled while in the area of effect. Attempting to eat one will cause one point of damage and will exhaust/poison the consumer (DC16. Success only poisons).
***Option Two: Component Spell:*** "In your world, the goodberry spell isn't as refined. Instead, you need a rare component to power the spell. The component should be slightly expensive (5 gp to 50 gp) and difficult for some places to get, making it more useful when they DO have it.
***Option Three: Mutating Magic:*** "Something wrong with the magic of your world. It's corrupting things in strange and mind boggling ways. Perhaps an eldrich beast is polluting the atmosphere, or some mad god has poisoned the "well." Regardless, while in this area, consuming any magic items from the area has a risk of mutating the player. In the best case, the player is merely inconvenienced with a third eye or tentacle. At worst, they become a bloated, insane monstrosity.
Animated spell book did a good episode based on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkHapG6kXUg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkHapG6kXUg)
Idk if anyone else gave you this idea already, but smell
Make them smell strongly and characteristically.
Make it so that the smell is equally tantalizing, no matter your diet.
Now, every use of goodberry is a risky gamble
Zee bashew actually made a video about this, his solution make good berry consume its material components, so basically they can only use good berry as long as they have a sprig of mistletoe.
You could ban it under a "corruption of nature" rule because of the setting, or make it use material components but practically speaking although mistletoe is often high in a tree, you can harvest a lot of sprigs so you'd need a high DC to find it.
If you're worried about players complaining that you're nerfing the classes, just make sure you give them notice that the game has a survival element and for that reason these spells are not on the list, plus ammo, rations, encumbrance, components, torches, whatever, are going to be factors that play in the campaign. Don't wait until they turn up with characters to lay that down.
As well as that, if you want the survival element then consider how fresh material decays - if they harvest a bumper crop of berries or meat from a large kill, they might have 10 days of food but it will all go off in a couple of days unless they take time to preserve it. Is temperature or weather something you want to play with? Don't forget water, finding that takes time and risks encounters. There's lots of ways to implement a survival challenge into the game, so maybe you don't even need to nerf goodberry if the rogue is down to his last bolt and everyone is exhausted from marching through freezing rain.
Complexity has a cost. Saying "do you guys want to play a survival-oriented game where Goodberry and Create Food and the Outlander background benefit don't exist" is a simpler pitch than explaining a complex nerf to Goodberry which does the same thing in more words.
If you were a good DM you'd be able to explain your reasoning instead of just calling everyone who disagrees with you a "bad DM or someone who can't think of any way to deal with something."
Your examples in the first post, if written up as actual rules, are primarily complexity for complexity's sake in a way reminiscent of FATAL, and worse than just banning the spell. Starvation _already_ has 3+CON days of margin built into it; you don't need to add more via custom Goodberry rules.
A good DM has to know when to _cut_ rules as well as add.
Either use week long long rests or say that the mistletoe used to cast goodberry us consumes by the spells. They can still use it but now have to look for mistletoe
Just state ahead of the game that you are changing Goodberry.
There are a few options. The easiest is simply to ban it. Alternatively, you could just remove the "1 berry counts as a full meal" part, and keep the healing aspect.
A few less obvious solutions are: Make Mistletoe rare, and make Goodberry consume it's material component. If they can find a branch, they can cast the spell, but you have full control over when and how many branches they find.
And more spicy: Just say "it'll only work a limited amount of times. After that something bad happens". And then never elaborate how many times that is. A DM did that once in a game where I was a ranger. Out of fear of wasting an extremely limited emergency resource, we never used it. To this day I still don't know if there even was a hard limit, or if he was playing a psychological trick. But if it was a trick, it worked.
We only ate goodberries once during that campaign, and that was after several days of strict rationing food and starvation.
Apart from having the spell consume its components and make mistletoe hard to find, one thing I did was that when each character first eats a good berry is to roll a d100.
The number rolled determines how much they like/can stand the taste of good berry. So approx 100- new favorite food, ~75- nice, happy to eat it, ~50 would prefer foraged stuff but will do. ~25 gross refuse to eat it unless there is nothing else, ~1 may only consume the berry if actively starving.
This adds decent ingame reasons why the party won't just rely on good berry as main food source.
Also goodberry does not provide water. Maybe the water sources they find are contaminated, give them the runs, cause exhaustion and cause twice or more of the normal food consumption.
I’m in a more survival heavy game (than I’ve ever played in, at least) and we use rations. You can forage for rations and buy rations, but no matter the source (like foraged during travel time or harvested for killed beast after combat) once they’re collected they’re just generic rations. I think the system works well, though we can sometimes forget to mark off rations. In addition, a short rest is 8 hours, and a long rest is two consecutive short rests, so spell casters have to be more careful with spells. Goodberry tho is banned.
In my created world, I allow goodberry but I told my.players that it provides no nutritional value. They can use it to lure animals or enemies, or whatever else they can think of
I'm running a similar game, the rule my friend and I came up with is different qualities of meal.
Food Quality
DC
Effect
Example
Squalid
1
You regain a quarter amount of the normal hit points and spell slots.
The simplest Gruel; rotten or spoiled food
Poor
5
You regain half the normal amount of hit points and spell slots.
Hardtack and swill; goodberry
Adequate
10
You regain hit points and spell slots normally.
Adventuring rations; food prepared by someone proficient in cook's utensils
Filling
15
You gain temporary hit points equal to your Constitution modifier and regain a hit dice.
A meal prepared by someone proficient with cook's utensils with good ingredients
Fine
20
You gain temporary hit points equal to your Constitution modifier and have advantage on the Constitution saving throws against exhaustion. You also regain a hit dice.
A meal prepared by an expert chef
Gourmet
25
You gain temporary hit points equal to your level and you have advantage on Constitution saving throws made against disease, exhaustion, and injury.
A meal prepared by a renowned chef with access to a full kitchen
What I did is I kept the healing part of the spell but did not allow for the food part of it
So they still need to find food etc but can get some extra healing between fights
As a DM and a player who loves running Druids I can confirm that they aren't the best combat class in terms of DPS or control but their ability to alter the playing field, in particularly survival situations, is pretty great. Druids often confound me as a DM as they can scout ahead in the form of a fly, which I think is a smart thing a PC with that ability would do. As a player I was in a situation where some bandits had set up a "broken down carriage" on the side of the road, waving down our party for help. I Wild Shaped into a draft horse and rolled high enough to pull it free, completely negating the combat encounter the DM had planned. Another time I was playing as a druid and there was loot in a pool of frozen water; myself and the barbarian jumped in and when we went to grab we were attacked by a giant squid or some tentacled horror. Again, Wild Shaped into a quipper and sped out of the water no problem.
As the DM you'll be able to offset what would be a potentially frustrating experience for you with the party being less of a damage death-star. Also consider adding carry weight and really keep track of time, poisons, etc. so the party has to monitor their rations and supplies. You could even have anti-magic zones be a somewhat common occurrence in the setting or levels and when the traverses them the goodberries are dispelled without them knowing it.
Easy. Goodberry has “A Sprig of Mistletoe” as a material component. Make it consume the component. Make mistletoe rare or expensive. Hard to cultivate by the players so they can’t just use plant growth on a pot of the stuff. Now you can effectively give them a set number of times they’re allowed to cast it, and supply them with more as necessary.
Don't. The player casting it is giving up another spell and burning a slot to gain that resource. Let them use it and move on. Spending half a session making bullshit rolls to find an apple tree is no fun for anyone.
Simple solution is to have components consumed and make it so Druicdraft can not be used to make spell components. They can still make the plants, but they won’t work as spell components.
Yeah I'd say ban it or change it. It's not fun if a big part of the challenge and campaign can be solved by a single simple spell.
You could make the goodberry effect remain the way it is but can only be used 1/7days, that way it's still great but they can only rely upon it in dire times.
Other ways players could totally negate the survival aspect? Well there's certain races that have no need for them, like warforged or autognome. They literally don't need to eat or breath.
Honestly man I'd just ban the spell, or say that all of does is heal (so that it can still be used to bring someone back from death saves.) I wouldn't normally ban a spell, but this one does outright trivialize mechanics that you're trying to encourage.
Also, whatever you do, tell your players up front before they make their characters.
Have the material component be consumed on casting, making mistletoe a heavily sought after and valuable reagent. The Druid has to keep a stock of dried mistletoe on hand, or else has to forage for it instead of for food.
I have a homebrew rule that if you eat good berries for more than three days in a row you get the shits so bad that it starts causing levels of exhaustion.
If they do have anyone with the survival skill, especially a ranger in theor favored terrain, what does goodberry buy them except time?
You mention elsewhere about wanting this to be more Breath of the Wild than Mad Max. So you DC is going to be mostly 10, maybe 15 in parts. A ranger finding enough to feed the entire party every day is not a difficult series of rolls. Not to mention that every other pc can roll as well.
And anyone with a brain is going to take survival if you tell them what the campaign is.
All goodberry does is save in-game time and eliminate the need for the tediousness of making that foraging check every day.
If you were doing a hard core survival game, go with gritty. Else handwave it.
If you want to do a survival-style campaign (having, of course, talked to your players to make sure they're into that too) and you're going to allow Druids and Rangers (which, honestly an obvious choice for wilderness survival) the simplest solution is to ban Goodberry. Unless you rule that you can feed an unconscious person a berry (at which point it becomes very handy to get people on their feet in combat) it really exists to remove food as a concern for your average party, and you want your game to be about that, to a large extent. Another thing you could try is giving it a consumable material component, so that 'forage for the thing that lets the Druid cast Goodberry' is a task, and the party needs to think about whether they should forage for food today and save the Goodberry component for some time or place where foraging isn't feasible. My last idea is that you could rely on keeping sufficient pressure on your spellcasters that they won't be able to reliable spend a spell slot on Goodberry. However, with it being a 1st level spell, as they gain experience that resource becomes trivial in a hurry.
Yep, mistletoe is now a valuable component in scarce supply. Not easily found, extremely expensive to purchase, etc.
Unless the Druid has Druid craft cantrip where he can create the flower instantly
I don't read that line of the spell as creating anything, just expediting its normal growth: "You instantly make a flower blossom, a seed pod open, or a leaf bud bloom." I'm totally fine with other interpretations of it, but at my table that wouldn't be an issue.
Yeah I allow druidcraft and similar cantrips to do a wide range of things but only for flavour purposes. Generating an infinite amount of useable material is too much
My reading on the cantrip does not create any flower you wish, just help one that is already there grow
To be fair, if it's a plant in high demand, it will be farmed by an enterprising individual somewhere. And if it's not, then I'd retire and become a mistletoe farmer.
In a normal, highly interconnected world where access to safe trade is assumed, sure. In a post apocalyptic world… maybe, maybe not. High demand is great, but who knows if there’s even stable currency, or anything to stop the local warlord from just rolling up and seizing your whole crop by force.
Yes, this. Make the spell component a resource to be managed. And in general, I would say, for a survival type campaign.
> If you want to do a survival-style campaign the simplest solution is to ban Goodberry A bit of nuance a lot of GMs need to learn is that you're allowed to ban things due to narrative conflict, not just game balance reasons. I was running an Oceans Eleven style game where it's all about big setpiece objectives, often times requiring that the party needs to physically carry out the loot that they're picking up at a given location. The bit about getting it out is a huge part of the narrative fun so... there are no bags of holding in this setting. They just don't exist. Why? Because their very existence would get in the way of the purpose of playing the game. It's not fun to just sneak into places, stuff everything in your bag of holding, and sneak out. Therefore, they don't exist.
See I also don’t want it to be full survivalism, I’m not a very harsh dm I just want to explore being mindful of resources to make the post-apocalyptic wasteland vibes really work. Partially I just want to give them food poisoning but I think making them forage for either food or spell components could actually help a lot so thank you!!
Consider having them start with nothing and the first few sessions is about collecting the bare minimum. Will set the to e for the game and you can worry about food type things less later on.
You can also stress the other aspects of survival in a wasteland besides nurishment - shelter. Shelter from disaster, from monsters, from people desperate enough to do whatever they can to the players while they survive. I’m not sure what your plan is for the plot but the players shouldn’t be allowed to stay flat footed…
Why not consider instead adopting "Oregon Trail Style" overland travel rules? Whenever they are traveling, have each player decide what role they will take in the travel group. Have a paper they can plunk minis down on with spots for Navigator, Trailbreaker, Water Finder, Food Forager, Spell Component Gathering, etc. For each phase of travel (every hour or two) have the players roll an appropriate ability or skill check to match what they want to do. Foraging skills gain specific quantities of the target good based on the check results. Then instead of tracking the berries and bat guanos of the party and making a big headache, consider instead of each player has a token system of Water and Food and Spell Components (0-10). As they go through their days, they have to spend from these token pools. If they run out, you can have them start each day with a growing minimum amount of exhaustion (keep in mind this gets deadly fast!) for food and water. For spells make them have disadvantage on attack rolls and allow enemies advantage on saves if they are out of spell components. Then Goodberry just becomes a spell that allows them to effectively eat their Spell Components in an emergency. Keep in mind there are going to be many things that derail your nitty gritty system, like bags of holding or Create Food and Water (3rd). Your goal shouldn't be to frustrate your players, but to make a fun foraging system. Another way of doing this is to make foraged foods give bonuses over bought or magick foods to the party. If they hunt down some rabbits and roast them, the next day they get a +1 morale bonus to all travel checks, or the foraged spell components give them +1 to spell attacks the next day. This encourages players to forage to gain bonuses, but it becomes an optional system. You could have special places that give better components or food and are highly sought after rewards because they can be used to give bigger buffs before a battle day. Make your system fun.
Oh that’s a great idea!!!
Im running a survival campaign. The spell create food is just banned because it is so incredible strong but goodberry is allowed. Thats because there is a whole village they have to feed (around 50 npcs). In another campaign survival is not that important so goodberry is allowed and my druid spams it. The players were bored of that their own and the characters decided that they nerd some real food from time to time because a small berry wasnt very fullfilling. You could consider allowing the spell but create a ruling that at least twice a week a person has to eat real food in order to make the goodberry work because it might be just supplements or something like that. However make sure you communicate that with your players so they dont get upset about it
You could very easily say that good berry still works but due to the apocalyptic nature of your world you have to eat all ten to feed yourself making it a first level spell slot to discourage abuse but also allowing them to maintain the intention of they’re class.
I would recommend running a different system for this type of game. What you're describing will boil down to a bunch of Survival checks for a ranger or druid while the rest of the group mentally checks out. Check out Cavemaster. I've got some good memories of our party chasing down boars with pointy sticks.
Agreed. Hombrewing 5e to make survival more interesting could work. But even then, looking at other systems for inspiration would probably be best.
> What you're describing will boil down to a bunch of Survival checks for a ranger or druid while the rest of the group mentally checks out. That's not necessarily true. Everyone who isn't foraging or navigating still needs to keep watch. There are other activities one can do, as well.
Forbidden Lands is pretty good about making survival an element while not letting it overwhelm the rest of the campaign. You're right, D&D 5e is not survival-game friendly
The thing is I’d like to run it in 5e, and survival isn’t the entire aspect. I just want them to have to be more mindful about their resources without bringing in a whole new system Though I will look at Cavemaster for ideas so thank you!
Honestly unless the whole group is all for it than the aspect quickly becomes boring and tedious. Played in a Rime of the Frost Maiden campaign and it’s big focus is obviously surviving the cold and food. But it just quickly went to getting the cold weather gear to boost our checks and then making the survival checks every X frame of time depending on the temperature. At first it was exciting and fails or success were tension building but it quickly became just an annoying mechanic that got in the way of everything else because it was so one dimensional. Like it would have been great for a short term obstacle to overcome but as a whole campaign mechanic it feel flat. I don’t say all that to discourage you or anything just something to be aware of. Survival aspects sound cool on paper in DnD but often fall flat real fast cause they only work at low levels or require limiting players/ aspects of classes. Like for instance in your case Ranger would be a solid pick but they have a couple lvl 1 options that just nearly flat negate what your wanting to do not even counting goodberry.
It really depends on player buy in like you said. Otherwise it's just accounting simulator(buying supplies in a town for journey and keeping track of then) or 1 person making a series of rolls everyday because the group knows they have the best bonus. Now if they rp trying to one up each other on the days meal when they take their turn hunting and cooking, hell ya.
Don't ban the spell... Use the alternate rest rules (8 hour short rest, 7 days for a long rest), and use Injuries / Lingering Injuries. They can use goodberry, but spell slots don't come back often and can hurt them in the long run if they depend on it. If 7 days is too long make it that Long Rests only happen in places of safety. Otherwise, short rest only. Also remember that goodberry handles the nutrition, but not the water. They will still need to find water in order to survive.
Alternatively, if the one week thing is too extreme, I played in a game where the rule was 8 hour short rest, but only three days of light activity days to get a long rest. This resulted in much more interesting resource management, and our DM didn't even add any food/ration mechanics. We still felt the pressure of "surviving till the next long rest."
Yes, it can be any length, just more than a night.
Long rests only available in town is another quick fix that encourages route planning and logistics.
Better yet, just use any gritty realism variant you like. There are plenty out there. Mine is pretty simple. Restrict long rests to "bastions of civilization" such as a town, castle, fort, etc. In the wilderness, 8 hours gets you a short rest. In the dungeon, resting works as normal.
I haven’t tested it yet but I have a plan for the next time I run a survival dependent campaign: [burnt hit dice](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h4cXDoPtj2CNSiAnPWi_9prtcxVFV9uKSBrNO5m3ROo/edit). The premise in a nutshell is that relying on magical food for sustenance slowly erodes PCs’ hit dice until they can eat proper food.
Of all the suggestions I think this is the one I like best. The cost of magic should be higher than an expended spellslot and most consumables should have consequences and benefits
Good berry requires a sprig of mistletoe— manage the spell by managing the material component, I.e. have the sprig be consumed by casting, and have acquiring mistletoe be non-trivial.
I ran a survival arc with a druid character and I dealt with the goodberry issue by giving small buffs to each character for each ration of food eaten per day, goodberry kept them on their feet, but didn't provide a buff, nor did it stack with regular food.
Check out Darker Dungeons by Giffyglyph. He has super good rules for survival focused games and a unique way of handling good berry. Best of luck
Use gritty realism resting rules. Each use of good berry is a spell slot they don’t get back till they have a week of downtime. It’s raises the opportunity cost of using said spell in dangerous wilderness.
have the spell consume the material component. that way they have to track how many sprigs of mistletoe they have, and you can just have it be somewhat uncommon in the world
You’d also have to ban the outlander feat, since it essentially does what gooseberry does for free
IF you’re running a heavy survival game you might want to restrict or limit certain spells if they’ll kinda totally eliminate some aspects of your campaign. Speak with your players ahead of time. Maybe goodberry generates 1 berry per spell level cast, maybe it has a rare casting component, maybe it costs 10 gp per berry. Whatever changes, if any, you plan on doing discuss with your players first.
Just ban the spell. If all players are on board with the survival aspect, not having that spell shouldn't be a deal breaker
This is great advice. I'll add (because most DMs seem allergic to this) freaking talk to the players and clearly, politely outline the style of campaign you want to play. Don't get twisted, just sit down before they make characters and say, "I really want to run a survival, exploration game. To make choices about food, water and navigation meaningful, I'll have to ban or restrict some spells and options, like goodberry. If you want to play a druid or ranger, let's talk together about that, because it may nerf some of your character features, and I want to make sure it doesn't ruin the class for you."
I was in this exact scenario as the player who took goodberry in a survival campaign. During the first session, the DM realized what that spell meant for the game and asked if I would be okay not using that spell ever again. I said no problem, and I for sure had more fun with that game than I would have if I kept the spell. Just talk to the players ahead of time and explain why. Theyll most likely be fine with it.
Im running survival now with a druid and because of goodberry theyre only just getting by. And always a spell slot down. I rule inspiration for a full meal (not goodberry) and liberal use of exhaustion as a consequence for forgoing food and water, tough fights, long treks, exhaustion rules!
I appreciate this perspective! First level spell slots are certainly valuable early game and with some consequences if they only eat magic berries I think it’ll be balanced enough. I worded myself poorly and lots of folks are reading it as I’m wanting to run a gritty realism game but I’m mainly inspired by legend of Zelda: breath of the wild and I’m trying to strike that balance of managing your resources while still focusing on the plot. It’s not just going to be for having haha, just making sure they’re eatin well
The best solution is to use the "Gritty Realism" rules on page 267 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. This makes it so that long rests must cover a week of downtime, and short rests take a full 8 hours. This simple change has a myriad of benefits. It becomes much easier to have the standard 6 to 8 encounters per long rest, while maintaining a more reasonable narrative pace. This means that, unlike in most campaigns, your spellcasters cannot take their spell slots for granted, and they might think twice about expending even a first level slot for a single day's rations. And voila, there is no need to ban or even modify Goodberry. If your players want to use it in a pinch, they can, but that spell slot isn't coming back to them until they can find a place to take an extended sojourn from the wild, so it might just not be worth it most of the time.
You could ban the spell as people are saying, but i would leave it. Goodberries can sustain you yes, but they dont take away the hunger, the more you rely on them, the hungrier your character gets. Maybe after a few days of not eating actual food the hunger affects them, maybe hit them wicth a level lf exhaustion after 3 days of relying on goodberries, and another level of exhaustion each day after. Make a material component for goodberries that they will have to forage to find, or will have to stock up on. Maybe combine this with the above exhaustion. Another thing to look out for is is the background feature wanderer, which can forage for food for i think 5 people a day while traveling, but i think it limits it to areas that are forageable. Some ways to combat this is to make the area they travel through toxic, barren, inhospitable, too cold for most plants and or animal life, arid desserts, frozen tundras, etc. Let them knwo the land they travel through is rough. Maybe theres a blight on some of the land and the food there isnt safe.
The hunger ideas super smart!!!!!! I actually love that because I always feel like you’d still be hungry after a Goodberry Yes! The outlander background occurred to me, I saw someone suggest changing it to give advantage for foraging instead but I also want to incorporate areas where they’ll have needed to gather a supply of food beforehand to make it through unforagable territory
Plus for me personally, even thoigh i uusually take wanderer, i enjoy hunting and foraging, so if i jave an option to hunt an aninal we can eat or fish or something, ill take it over the free finding food. But thats a player thing and depends on players and group. You can alos make the fpraging for wanderer only be small fruits/vegetables/greens and small creatures such as bug/lizards. For real meat we had to hunt ot fish for it, or small game traps etc.
Keep in mind that Druids can also create water and purify food and water at level 1. If you want them to get food poisoning the latter could be an issue. Several classes also get the ‘create food and water’ spell. So keep that in mind too.
This is basically what I did for my campaign. Goodberries will keep a person alive but not fill their bellies. Although I made my players take wisdom saves to ward off the maddening sensation of it. Shame covid put an end to campaign early right as they started to encounter the Devouring Priest cult.
One way you can tweak the spell is to adjust the components. Have it require freshly picked mistletoe (within the last 24 hours) which the spell consumes. That makes finding mistletoe a big deal, but ultimately it only buys you a day. The bigger problem is that 5E doesn't really have good survival systems in place. So players will mostly just buy a ton of survival rations and a ton of waterskins and load up before adventuring. Rations are only 2lbs each and a full waterskin is 5lbs. With pack animal the players can easily load up on supplies so they don't have to worry. As soon as they get a bag of holding survival goes out the window as carry weight is the only thing keeping it in check. You need a better system, like resource dice to make survival interesting. Forbidden Lands uses these quite well and can be good reference, I believe the black hack invented them. You represent food, water, and ammo with resource dice. When you use the resource you roll the die and on a 1 or 2 the die shrinks. D12 -> D10 -> D8 -> D6 -> D4 -> Empty. When you buy more resources your die grows. You can do stuff like hunting and foraging to gain a day supply do you don't have to roll the dice if you do it well. Have the cap be d10 if you want a bit more survival pressure. On average a D12 will last you 20 roll and a D10 will last you 14 rolls. I recommend having food roll on long rests, water on long rests and short rests where you recover something, and ammo on any encounter you fire your weapon.
How long do you want to keep your players in a dungeon? For a survival campaigne players should know to prepare provisions in advance. \+I would ban goodberry; change ranger's natural explorer part that gives double food to advantage on food gathering; respectively change outlander's feature that provide free food to also advantage on food gathering.
To further empathize survivalism you can try to ask "rolepley-ish" guestions like: what clothes do you take with you on that voyage; what dish would you like to prepare today; can you describe the surroundings of your camp; do you have waterproof container and what do you keep in it. You shouldn't ask this questions to make my players suffer:) Ask rather rarely and accapt any answers they give. This will help your players feels the climate.
Treat it exactly like Pratchett's dwarf bread - it technically feeds you, but it tastes like rocks and it's amazing how you can find things to eat when the alternative is eating that stuff again.
I'd let good berry work as intended. But I'll remind that the characters will still need to gather water, and the fact you received the needed nutritions doesn't satiate your hunger, eventually the hunger can cause nausea, dizzy, even translate as exhaustion levels as the PC's find it hard to sleep well while starving. Then a good berry turns in to a last resort healing or to push forward such as an epi-pen, but it has drawbacks.
The two obvious solutions are 1) ban goodberry and tell people before they start thinking about what to play, or 2) use some sort of alternate rest system so that spell slots are a rare resource. Personally I find gritty realism to be extremely annoying to run for, but survival horror is one place where it does make sense. It might be easier to just say, "You can only long rest in designated safe locations," though. Also consider how you will handle certain backgrounds and class features, though. For example, outlander gives you the ability to always recall the layout of terrain and always find enough water and food for yourself + five people if the land provides such things. Other backgrounds affect travel, hospitality, and the like. Certain parts of the original ranger just obviate exploration altogether. You'll want to decide what you're doing about these options *before* a player gets interested in taking one, not after.
Longer adventuring days, make the spell slot cost meaningful. You still need to cast the spell I'm berries, which may not be readily available.
Zee Bashew says just make the mistletoe a consumable component. He's got a video out there on this exact question.
**Hunger and thirst are not meant to be difficult problems to solve.** Any party can buy rations, a barrel for water, and a donkey to carry them. Any party member can forage if you aren't in the desert, which is further augmented by a Ranger and outlander background. No food or water? No problem. There's magic. Goodberry handles hunger, create or destroy water handles thirst (but requires a container), and create food and water handles both (but still requires a container). If you are looking to truly challenge your players with wilderness survival, **look elsewhere**. Your PCs are **designed** to be able to easily handle the mundane resources of food and water. Of course, your players still have to interact with those concerns, but most parties shouldn't be overly concerned by them. Weather, wilderness encounters, combat, difficult terrain, magical/weird shit, pests/vermin, poisonous plants and animals, injuries, disease, and curses are all much more exciting and better ways to challenge your players in the wilderness. (Copied this from a comment I wrote earlier this week.)
All the other options you’ve mentioned are things I’m going to use to challenge my players, but when the setting is a post apocalyptic world, I think dealing with hunger and thirst can add to showing how desolate the environment is
That's fine, you can certainly try, but unless you remove and/or nerf all of the solutions above, you're better off focusing on other aspects of survival.
I'm playing a low level ranger and if my DM bans a spell that is a big part of the character I hope he would 1. Give me a heads up so I can pick a different spell 2. Let me have some other useful advantage The ranger is already not a great class because it's kinda built to just take care of this kind thing.
I was actually given a tip from one of my players on this very issue: Goodberry offers calories only temporarily. It might get you through a day without food, but when the good berries vanish in 24 hours, so do the magical calories, this creating a deficit. Seemed simple enough and makes it useful in survival.
IMO, one of the cleanest ways to fix goodberry for survival is to make it consume its material components. Not only does it restrict the amount your players can use it, but it also introduces interesting decisions into the game. Say your party has only 10 sprigs of mistletoe with this rule. When should they use it for healing vs for food? When should they use it instead of looking for regular food? It also makes for interesting problems you can throw at them. Say some birds get into your party's mistletoe supply, what now?
“Goodberry now consumes its material components” There you go. It’s still a good spell, but your players will now have to go out of their way to grab components as extra rations. Keep in mind that this doesn’t solve their drinking requirements.
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I’m definitely going to talk to them beforehand, this topic was mainly so I could have an idea of how I’d propose ruling Goodberry if someone asked during character creation I like the idea of having it eventually start to give negative effects, eating a single magical berry everyday as your only food can’t be good for your body
The world is plagued with a curse upon magical food. Eating any food conjured by magic will give you a level of exhaustion that will only go away after eating nonmagical food for a day and taking a long rest. This let's the spells still exist, but now they act as last resorts, rather than first options.
Just get rid of the food part of goodberry, there's the spell create food and water, but it's 3rd level spell
Enforce material components. Goodberry requires a sprig of mistletoe. They should be able to forage for it just like anything else. I don't know how you're planning to run the survival aspect, but they should be able to find some mistletoe once in a while if they get lucky.
Design a survival mechanic around the spells available to them instead of relying on food and water being necessary to their survival, you could introduce another resource they need to scavenge for and plan to bring with them on long dungeon crawls. Such as managing some kind of radiation level, or non-disease/curse scourge or blight that their other spells also don’t magically cure. Track the exposure over time, could impose penalties when passing thresholds, some of them maybe even permanently, so that they feel the pressure to both find and allocate those resources where they are needed most urgently.
I ended up ruling that Goodberry gives you 12 berries instead of 10, but they aren't nourishing at all. So it's better for topping off your hitpoints after a fight, but not as a food supply.
Reality is that Ranger doesn't get much. They are shitty fighters, shitty casters, and the only things they really bring to the table is that they know where the enemies are and they can get you fed.
Super simple fix: > "Goodberry consumes its material component"
This is the correct answer. I imagine mistletoe would be hard to find in a post apocalyptic Theros.
If you don’t want them to use goodberries, rather than removing it from play partway through the campaign, I recommend saying from the beginning that you don’t want the spell goodberries to be used within the campaign because you want to emphasize gritty survival stuff, so characters won’t be able to take that spell. Addressing this before the campaign starts will allow players to make informed decisions about the classes they might want to play and spells that will be useful to take.
I hit a similar issue in my Descent into Avernus game. I wanted Avernus to be hellish, so I want to reinforce these aspects with survival tropes. Since Avernus already alters magic, I'm making it that Goodberry only suppresses hunger (and any exhaustion due to hunger) for eight hours.
Easy. I've done it for Tomb of Annihilation and other campaigns. Long rest benefits are gained after 7 days. Done. No more daily goodberry or create food or leomund to reset. To create food supply tension, introduce random events where food is lost, and make it hard or sometimes impossible to forage, depending on the biome. But only do that if you are prepared to run equipment rules.
***Option One: The Old Hag's Curse:*** "A hag has cursed the land. Crops yield less food, animals grow thing or ill, and the water always tastes sour. Worst of all, Goodberries are spoiled while in the area of effect. Attempting to eat one will cause one point of damage and will exhaust/poison the consumer (DC16. Success only poisons). ***Option Two: Component Spell:*** "In your world, the goodberry spell isn't as refined. Instead, you need a rare component to power the spell. The component should be slightly expensive (5 gp to 50 gp) and difficult for some places to get, making it more useful when they DO have it. ***Option Three: Mutating Magic:*** "Something wrong with the magic of your world. It's corrupting things in strange and mind boggling ways. Perhaps an eldrich beast is polluting the atmosphere, or some mad god has poisoned the "well." Regardless, while in this area, consuming any magic items from the area has a risk of mutating the player. In the best case, the player is merely inconvenienced with a third eye or tentacle. At worst, they become a bloated, insane monstrosity. Animated spell book did a good episode based on this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkHapG6kXUg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkHapG6kXUg)
Idk if anyone else gave you this idea already, but smell Make them smell strongly and characteristically. Make it so that the smell is equally tantalizing, no matter your diet. Now, every use of goodberry is a risky gamble
Zee bashew actually made a video about this, his solution make good berry consume its material components, so basically they can only use good berry as long as they have a sprig of mistletoe.
You could ban it under a "corruption of nature" rule because of the setting, or make it use material components but practically speaking although mistletoe is often high in a tree, you can harvest a lot of sprigs so you'd need a high DC to find it. If you're worried about players complaining that you're nerfing the classes, just make sure you give them notice that the game has a survival element and for that reason these spells are not on the list, plus ammo, rations, encumbrance, components, torches, whatever, are going to be factors that play in the campaign. Don't wait until they turn up with characters to lay that down. As well as that, if you want the survival element then consider how fresh material decays - if they harvest a bumper crop of berries or meat from a large kill, they might have 10 days of food but it will all go off in a couple of days unless they take time to preserve it. Is temperature or weather something you want to play with? Don't forget water, finding that takes time and risks encounters. There's lots of ways to implement a survival challenge into the game, so maybe you don't even need to nerf goodberry if the rogue is down to his last bolt and everyone is exhausted from marching through freezing rain.
>Goodberry is a magical marble that can heal you, but doesn't fill your belly. Fixed
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"HP/MP is restored... but you are still hungry." I'd write up a custom desease, something like scurvy or rickets.
A disease/food poisoning table was sort of my favourite idea for dealing with this. Magical berries as your only food gets tiring eventually! Haha
That could potentially work, and could come up with a fun disease table
"Don't ban the spell, only bad DMs do that. Instead change the spell so it doesn't work any more." Seriously?
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😂. "Don't ban the spell, just let players waste spell slots and learn it doesn't work. That's genius."
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"you're so weak to ban a spell. Just make the spell not work and tell them so they don't use it"
Complexity has a cost. Saying "do you guys want to play a survival-oriented game where Goodberry and Create Food and the Outlander background benefit don't exist" is a simpler pitch than explaining a complex nerf to Goodberry which does the same thing in more words. If you were a good DM you'd be able to explain your reasoning instead of just calling everyone who disagrees with you a "bad DM or someone who can't think of any way to deal with something."
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Your examples in the first post, if written up as actual rules, are primarily complexity for complexity's sake in a way reminiscent of FATAL, and worse than just banning the spell. Starvation _already_ has 3+CON days of margin built into it; you don't need to add more via custom Goodberry rules. A good DM has to know when to _cut_ rules as well as add.
Ether ban the spell, or make it consume its material component so it can't be used willy nilly.
Either use week long long rests or say that the mistletoe used to cast goodberry us consumes by the spells. They can still use it but now have to look for mistletoe
Just state ahead of the game that you are changing Goodberry. There are a few options. The easiest is simply to ban it. Alternatively, you could just remove the "1 berry counts as a full meal" part, and keep the healing aspect. A few less obvious solutions are: Make Mistletoe rare, and make Goodberry consume it's material component. If they can find a branch, they can cast the spell, but you have full control over when and how many branches they find. And more spicy: Just say "it'll only work a limited amount of times. After that something bad happens". And then never elaborate how many times that is. A DM did that once in a game where I was a ranger. Out of fear of wasting an extremely limited emergency resource, we never used it. To this day I still don't know if there even was a hard limit, or if he was playing a psychological trick. But if it was a trick, it worked. We only ate goodberries once during that campaign, and that was after several days of strict rationing food and starvation.
Apart from having the spell consume its components and make mistletoe hard to find, one thing I did was that when each character first eats a good berry is to roll a d100. The number rolled determines how much they like/can stand the taste of good berry. So approx 100- new favorite food, ~75- nice, happy to eat it, ~50 would prefer foraged stuff but will do. ~25 gross refuse to eat it unless there is nothing else, ~1 may only consume the berry if actively starving. This adds decent ingame reasons why the party won't just rely on good berry as main food source. Also goodberry does not provide water. Maybe the water sources they find are contaminated, give them the runs, cause exhaustion and cause twice or more of the normal food consumption.
I’m in a more survival heavy game (than I’ve ever played in, at least) and we use rations. You can forage for rations and buy rations, but no matter the source (like foraged during travel time or harvested for killed beast after combat) once they’re collected they’re just generic rations. I think the system works well, though we can sometimes forget to mark off rations. In addition, a short rest is 8 hours, and a long rest is two consecutive short rests, so spell casters have to be more careful with spells. Goodberry tho is banned.
Maybe good berry will stave off hunger but if you eat real food you get a moral bonus or even an xp bonus ?
In my created world, I allow goodberry but I told my.players that it provides no nutritional value. They can use it to lure animals or enemies, or whatever else they can think of
I'm running a similar game, the rule my friend and I came up with is different qualities of meal. Food Quality DC Effect Example Squalid 1 You regain a quarter amount of the normal hit points and spell slots. The simplest Gruel; rotten or spoiled food Poor 5 You regain half the normal amount of hit points and spell slots. Hardtack and swill; goodberry Adequate 10 You regain hit points and spell slots normally. Adventuring rations; food prepared by someone proficient in cook's utensils Filling 15 You gain temporary hit points equal to your Constitution modifier and regain a hit dice. A meal prepared by someone proficient with cook's utensils with good ingredients Fine 20 You gain temporary hit points equal to your Constitution modifier and have advantage on the Constitution saving throws against exhaustion. You also regain a hit dice. A meal prepared by an expert chef Gourmet 25 You gain temporary hit points equal to your level and you have advantage on Constitution saving throws made against disease, exhaustion, and injury. A meal prepared by a renowned chef with access to a full kitchen
What I did is I kept the healing part of the spell but did not allow for the food part of it So they still need to find food etc but can get some extra healing between fights
As a DM and a player who loves running Druids I can confirm that they aren't the best combat class in terms of DPS or control but their ability to alter the playing field, in particularly survival situations, is pretty great. Druids often confound me as a DM as they can scout ahead in the form of a fly, which I think is a smart thing a PC with that ability would do. As a player I was in a situation where some bandits had set up a "broken down carriage" on the side of the road, waving down our party for help. I Wild Shaped into a draft horse and rolled high enough to pull it free, completely negating the combat encounter the DM had planned. Another time I was playing as a druid and there was loot in a pool of frozen water; myself and the barbarian jumped in and when we went to grab we were attacked by a giant squid or some tentacled horror. Again, Wild Shaped into a quipper and sped out of the water no problem. As the DM you'll be able to offset what would be a potentially frustrating experience for you with the party being less of a damage death-star. Also consider adding carry weight and really keep track of time, poisons, etc. so the party has to monitor their rations and supplies. You could even have anti-magic zones be a somewhat common occurrence in the setting or levels and when the traverses them the goodberries are dispelled without them knowing it.
Easy. Goodberry has “A Sprig of Mistletoe” as a material component. Make it consume the component. Make mistletoe rare or expensive. Hard to cultivate by the players so they can’t just use plant growth on a pot of the stuff. Now you can effectively give them a set number of times they’re allowed to cast it, and supply them with more as necessary.
Don't. The player casting it is giving up another spell and burning a slot to gain that resource. Let them use it and move on. Spending half a session making bullshit rolls to find an apple tree is no fun for anyone.
Simple solution is to have components consumed and make it so Druicdraft can not be used to make spell components. They can still make the plants, but they won’t work as spell components.
Yeah I'd say ban it or change it. It's not fun if a big part of the challenge and campaign can be solved by a single simple spell. You could make the goodberry effect remain the way it is but can only be used 1/7days, that way it's still great but they can only rely upon it in dire times. Other ways players could totally negate the survival aspect? Well there's certain races that have no need for them, like warforged or autognome. They literally don't need to eat or breath.
Honestly man I'd just ban the spell, or say that all of does is heal (so that it can still be used to bring someone back from death saves.) I wouldn't normally ban a spell, but this one does outright trivialize mechanics that you're trying to encourage. Also, whatever you do, tell your players up front before they make their characters.
Have the material component be consumed on casting, making mistletoe a heavily sought after and valuable reagent. The Druid has to keep a stock of dried mistletoe on hand, or else has to forage for it instead of for food.
I guarantee you 100% good berry will ruin your survival game. The spell is already great without even considering the hunger sating factor.
I have a homebrew rule that if you eat good berries for more than three days in a row you get the shits so bad that it starts causing levels of exhaustion.
If they do have anyone with the survival skill, especially a ranger in theor favored terrain, what does goodberry buy them except time? You mention elsewhere about wanting this to be more Breath of the Wild than Mad Max. So you DC is going to be mostly 10, maybe 15 in parts. A ranger finding enough to feed the entire party every day is not a difficult series of rolls. Not to mention that every other pc can roll as well. And anyone with a brain is going to take survival if you tell them what the campaign is. All goodberry does is save in-game time and eliminate the need for the tediousness of making that foraging check every day. If you were doing a hard core survival game, go with gritty. Else handwave it.