Rules Tweak #4 - Got to Eat

This is an oldie but a goodie from the guys over at the At-Will blog. They have so many sweet additions to the 4e ruleset it is hard to quantify. What I am stealing here though isn't that exciting. It is very mundane, but in a good way. Remember my point with this series was to discuss ways to make 4e a bit more gritty, a bit more mundane in truth, to strip away some of the high fantasy fare for a more earthy feel. Again, with the end goal being to use these houserules in a 4e Dark Sun game. Anyways, enough from me.

Here is my slight, slight, slight tweak of Ration Points from the At-Will blog
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Ration Points

Rations represent the basic necessities needed to live –food, water, and the means of getting or storing these items.

Ration Points are used to abstract and collect what the players need to survive into on eas-to-track resource. Instead of spending more time than is necessary with everyone doing seperate book-keeping, Ration Points lump all that book-keeping into one resource.

Ration Points operate on these two simple principles:

Each Ration Point lets the party live comfortably for one day.

Each day the party loses one Ration Point.

To acquire Ration Points:

 Forage (using an acceptable DC for level) per Ration Point

 Buy them (1 Ration Point is equal to 1 gp per party member)

 Any other way the characters are determined to be clever…(i.e. roleplaying out hunts, stealing, or, gulp, cannibalism)

As long as the PCs currently possess Ration Points they suffer no consequences. The first day the party spends without Ration Points, and every day thereafter, they lose two healing surges. These healing surges cannot be regained until they the party has spent consecutive days with Ration Points equal to the number of days without. So if the party went three days without Ration Points, they’d need three days with Ration Points to regain the healing surges lost.

After 3 days without ration points the PCs are weakened until all healing surges are regained. Also, in the case that the PCs have no more healing surges, they instead suffer HP damage in an amount equal to what their healing surge would normally heal.