Simple Hunting, Foraging, Trapping, and Fishing Mechanics for Wilderness Exploration

While designing Wilderness exploration rules for my OSR game (which I hope to kickstart soon), I was thinking of ways to allow characters to hunt, gather and fish. I wanted to use a d20, as that is the die roll I am generally trying to use as much as possible while designing this game, and d20 adds enough granularity to adjust the probability based on terrain and time dedicated to the task.

While it isn’t easy to actually simulate hunting, fishing, and foraging without creating an entire separate system that would be cumbersome, I wanted to have a simple procedure that allows players to acquire sustenance in exchange for precious time and travel distance. Hunting and foraging can feed a whole party, but come at the cost of reduced travel for the day.

This is what I came up with:

Hunting, Foraging & Trapping

When traveling, you may want to hunt, forage, or set traps to catch food. This will take time out of your traveling day, of course.

Decide whether you will hunt or forage. Then, decide how long you will spend on the activity, measured in hours. For every hour spent, the maximum traveling distance for the day is reduced by 1/8th. Using the chart below, roll a d20 and reference the chart below for the target number for success. Roll once for each hour dedicated to the task (unless noted otherwise):

For trapping, use the hunting procedure, only roll once per day in the morning, with advantage if in Grassland, Woods, or Lush Forest. Trapping requires a trap, which is listed in the equipment section (of my game, at least). If a character has a relevant background, and there are resources available, they may try to make a trap on their own.

The amount of meat hunted or trapped on a successful roll is 1d6 rations. The amount of plants or mushrooms foraged on a successful roll is always equal to 1 ration.

Fishing

When near a water source, there is a good chance of finding fish or other waterborne food sources. Fishing requires fishing equipment (listed in the equipment section

). First, decide how much time you will spend looking for a fishing spot, in turns. Then, roll on the following table to find the quality of the spot, which will have a target number for success:

Next, roll 1d20 for each turn spent fishing. Each time the target number (in parentheses) is hit or exceeded, you caught something! Roll 1d4 per success to see how many rations you harvested.