Drop Dice

So as I mentioned in the original post about camping for benefits, the campsite is often over looked as a good place to have RP and could provide mechanical benefits for the party. So I am updating it for Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition. Again this should work for any setting using the Dungeons & Dragons rules.

Extend your rations with hunting. The basics are the same think about the game in the area and can be treated as a random encounter. You can also use survival to actively track game or gather food supplies.  Using the chase rules (DMG 252) can also make the encounter more interesting, most animals will have a fight or flight reaction to hunters and most will take to flight making the chase even more important. If the players fail to drop the target with one hit have a chase ensue. As for cooking since D&D5e has streamlined the mechanics for skills you can just let the players say what they are cooking. This may be a great chance to work in their backstory and background, say they come from a land that is like Mongolia, but they are from the lower class. Their food is most likely some sort of delicious grilled food with sauce flavoring or grains and gathering related. Where as if they were from a wealthier background they may not even know how to cook well because of the pampered Noble life they were leading before adventuring. Same food just burned and they may know about some expensive dishes the Urchin could only dream of. Again this can lead to some interesting RP as not every character may love Mongolian Barbecue (for reasons unknown, because it is sooo good).

For an added mechanical benefit to help motivate players you could allow fresh food to give players increased resting benefits for the next day. Normally a long rest restores half of your total Hit Dice after a long rest. So I would give them the normal half total hit dice for a long rest plus one extra.

One of my favorite things from Savage Worlds was the interludes, basically you would get a moment to tell people about you background in character or have the spot light to further develop your character. I mentioned it could be music as well or some other common feature of your worlds campfire traditions. Normally in Savage World this get you a Bennie (think Inspiration). 

I mentioned in that last post that I would give more bennies for more creativity, for D&D I like the idea of awarding the players with Inspiration for this, but keep in mind they can only have 1 Inspiration at a time unless you change that for your table. So I would give inspiration to the player who did an interlude and allow one player a chance to do an interlude each campsite. The rules for what type of interlude from Savage Worlds may still be used if you want to keep it random, if not story-tell.

If you use gear maintenance this would be a good time. I will be putting up a post about gear quality in D&D in the future, I will revisit camping with these gear quality rules in that post.

This by far was my favorite part from the last post. The idea of increased healing is awesome but it should do more than just add hit points since the way resting recover works. I would have it add 1 Hit Dice to those you recover during a rest if they carry a stone from the previous nights hearth with them to the new night's hearth. A prayer to the god of the hearth would be use to bless the  hearth, no spells needed. If using the fresh food option that is up to 2 Hit Dice extra after a long rest.

If you are using the optional healing rules feel free to tweek these to fit the options to your healing rate in game. Since often its a a change in what a short rest/long rest is defined as.