A very long time ago as a Boy Scout I had exactly one lesson on the specific subject of wilderness survival, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains in New Mexico one afternoon. Yet in addition to providing some practical ideas and pulling together a lot of training I’d had in what could be called survival techniques (edible plants, primitive constructions), this one lesson taught me the most essential elements of survival. It broke down in clear terms what it was that had to be done to survive.
I remember that there were five things that had to be secured to survive; I remember what those five things were. The odd thing is that I also remember that they were called the “Five S’s” as a mnemonic, but I can’t figure out how to begin some of them with the letter S. Still, it’s useful information, and I can present to you those five basic necessities of survival. If you’re ever lost in the wilderness and you remember this article, this knowledge might keep you alive long enough to be found. For the moment, though, it has a game application that will appear later in the article.
The first survival necessity that must be provided is water. Obviously you are in danger of dehydration, and potable drinking water is necessary to counter that. However, water has several other survival benefits. It is important for cleaning wounds. Hands must be washed to deter infection. Water is used in food preparation, if only to rinse the things eaten. It may be useful in the event of a fire, and for the treatment of burns. Water is usually listed first.
Fire is also important. It is relatively easy to die of exposure even in moderate climes. Having a way to keep warm is a life and death matter in more survival situations than people realize. Additionally, fire provides the means to sterilize water, to kill germs in food and on utensils, and to cook. The ashes of a fire are also the most practical available treatment against ingested plant toxins and other life-threatening medical conditions that commonly kill lost campers. A fire will also discourage most predatory animals.
You can go some time without food, but the longer you do that the more you will need your fire to fight body heat loss and the less strength you will have to maintain it. Reliably providing food in one form or another is going to matter within days, as merely surviving is a very demanding activity.
Shelter is one need most people would recognize soon enough. Since one of the killers of people in the wilderness is exposure to the elements, anything done to mitigate this improves your chance of survival. A good shelter should keep you dry in the rain, at least. In some areas, it needs to keep you shaded from the sun. The more threatening the elements are, the more protective the shelter must be.
Few people would guess the fifth survival need. I remember at the time of the class being struck with its oddity. In terms of the five S’s, this one is socks, specifically warm dry ones. Facing the threat of exposure, wet feet can cost more body heat than a wealth of other problems. Keeping your feet warm, dry, and protected is a serious part of survival. In particularly cold conditions, frostbitten toes can cripple, making it impossible to maintain the other necessities. Even in warmer situations, cold feet seriously reduce the chance of survival against exposure, and injured feet can spell disaster.
There are certainly other important aspects to surviving in a hostile environment. I once before cited my son Ryan’s comment that the most important thing in life is oxygen. We don’t usually worry about obtaining that in the wilderness, because, as a character on a sci fi show said when a human said he was going to go out to get some air, “We have air in here.” However, air is a potential problem in caves, people can drown in floods or suffocate buried in snow, and there are other imaginable situations in which air could be a problem. Finding specific answers to the peculiar hazards of any particular environment is part of survival, certainly, and should not be discounted. Protective clothes may be important in some circumstances. Sleep is a need the deprivation of which can have serious consequences. In the main, however, those five items are the essentials of wilderness survival.
Surprisingly, they convert fairly easily to survival in other settings. In urban survival, it is still necessary to find water, warmth and cooking facilities, food, shelter, and protection from the elements. How these needs are met will vary significantly within so different an environment, but they are still the same basic survival needs.
I bring this up as another entry in our series on adventure design. Previous entries in the series include Antagonists, Flag Captures, Treasure Hunt, McGuffin, Scavenger Hunts, Spelunking, and Escape. Survival is the design of life and death man against nature stories. They are a different kind of challenge, requiring human resourcefulness and a consideration of how to adapt the environment to meet needs. Whether chosen as an intended scenario or stumbled into by chance events in the ongoing campaign, a survival adventure provides a different sort of game experience.
To design such an adventure, there are several points to consider.
The first is to recognize what might be termed the hazard level in each of the survival needs. Failure to build a fire or a shelter in a tropical island paradise probably won’t result in serious complications for a long time, although failure to find fresh drinking water near the saline oceans and lagoons may be critical. In an arctic setting such as Multiverser’s The New Ice Age shelter and fire must be established within hours if the character is to live, while water is rather abundant and dehydration can be forestalled with minor effort. Thus in examining the climate, the referee needs to work out how rapidly the various environmental problems will wear down the character.
It is important in this connection as a second point to establish clear parameters of how these deleterious effects work. If there is no food, or water, or shelter, what impact does this have on the character mechanically? Does he have to make saving throws, or take damage? Presumably starvation will kill a character. It will do much to him before that. How do the mechanics conspire to cause the death of a character? What does the player know along the way? What impact does it have on the character while still alive?
The third point is to identify resources. The referee should not provide solutions to the needs, either in terms of creating unlikely options within the scenario or in terms of determining the one way the need can be met. Instead, the referee should ensure that there is water, fire, shelter, food, and socks available in some form, most of these preferably in several forms. It is not up to the referee to decide how the problem will be solved. It is essential to this kind of adventure design that there be at least one way to solve it.
In most games, some sort of end point is required. The characters will be rescued, or they will find a way of escape, or the condition will end. A survival story has to come to the point in which survival moves from the present to the past tense: We survived. That inherently means the referee has to know how long it will last, or at least what actions or events will bring it to its end. Merely ending it before the characters die is removing the challenge from it, playing a scenario with no potential consequences. Extending it indefinitely will mean either that the players solve all the problems and turn survival into the routine of living, or that it becomes clear this will kill them eventually. Having somewhere they can reach, or someone who will reach them, or some other way of resolving it is important to the design to avoid these complications.
It is also important to address how the characters would get into this situation. Shipwrecks and crashes are almost cliche for these stories, but they usually work smoothly. Cave-ins or landslides which create major detours and so lead to being lost can be effective also. The survival aspect may be incident to a quest or escape or other adventure design, as the characters find it necessary to travel to or through some environmentally hostile area.
Handicapping the characters can add drama to the circumstances, and even create them. A party traveling through the mountains which suffers an accident in which one or more of its members is injured and cannot negotiate the journey may lead to several staying behind to brave the elements while a small group presses on to alert rescue operations. Even without using the injury to create the situation, an injured leg or other temporary handicap can limit the options available to the characters and force them to think about their situation in more detail.
Of course, characters may die in such a scenario. That’s par for the course, really, as characters might die and do die in all kinds of adventures. It may be more difficult for some to accept, though, that they died because they couldn’t survive, rather than having some glorious death in battle or rescue or other dramatic moment. The very nature of a survival adventure announces that the stakes are high: the character will survive if he succeeds, and thus we know that his failure is serious. Players and referee must be ready for that.
Overall, the survival scenario provides a very different gaming experience, if it can be run smoothly.
Next week, something different.
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M. Joseph Young is co-author of Multiverser and Vice President for Development at Valdron Inc. His many contributions to online literature are indexed for convenience, and he looks forward to discussing these things by e-mail or on our Gaming Outpost forums.
