Dungeons & Dragons: Guide To Foraging

Surviving in the wild is often something dangerous, and not only for the creatures that might lurk around your camp. The main danger tends to be finding a good source of food and water, and in Dungeons & Dragons, this is covered by the foraging system.

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Whenever you are lost in the woods or trying to make your way through a mountainous landscape, foraging is what will keep you and your party alive, especially if you don’t pack enough food. Should you fail to feed your character, you run the risk of getting exhausted, which can eventually become fatal.

Foraging In Dungeons & Dragons

When a character wants to forage for food and/or water, they need to make a Survival check. The difficulty of the check depends on the availability of food in the region, which is determined by the Dungeons Master, although certain otherworldly areas, like the Elemental Plane of Earth, might not have any food to begin with.

Food and Water

DC

Abundant

10

Limited

15

Scarce

20

If successful, the character foraging then rolls a D6, adding their Wisdom modifier to the result. That’s how many pounds of food and/or gallons of water the character finds. Each character in the party can make this Survival check, but it is up to the DM how many times they can do it per day.

Eating

The point of foraging is to have enough food and water to survive, but you might not even need to forage if you packed enough supplies. Consider having enough food not just for you, but for each creature that accompanies you, like mounts.

Size

Food and Water per day

Tiny

1/4 pound/gallon

Small

1 pound/gallon

Medium

1 pound/gallon

Large

4 pounds/gallons

Huge

16 pounds/gallons

Gargantuan

64 pounds/gallons

If your journey through the wilds isn’t long, then you might be able to afford not to eat for a day. This, of course, has a limit: after three days (plus your Constitution modifier) of not eating or drinking, you’ll gain a level of exhaustion, and you’ll gain another level for each passing day that you don’t eat nor drink.

Exhaustion reduces your D20 tests and speed based on how many levels of the condition you have.

You can normally lower your exhaustion by long resting, but not if it was caused by starvation; the only way to lower it in that case is to eat. As usual, once you reach the 6th level of exhaustion, you die.

How To Encourage Foraging As A DM

Most campaigns don’t deal too heavily with resource management, much less one-shots about clearing a dungeon of monsters. If you want foraging to be part of your campaign, be sure to let your players know; they can’t make proper travel preparations if they don’t know what the travel entails.

Of course, there is a limit to how long this system can be useful, since high-level players often have many ways to circumvent the dangers of travel. Even at lower levels, classes like rangers and druids are naturally good at surviving in the wild, making the system almost non-existent.

Consider having the entire party roll the Survival check only once, as a group. That way, resources will be much more limited, making them think twice about tackling the next dungeon, or maybe still doing so with a little exhaustion looming over their heads.

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