That book was still referenced in a lot of 2nd edition material, because it was compatible. Holding one's breath, treading water, jumping, etc. were actually adopted in the core books in 2nd edition (Jumping is in proficiencies in the PHB and, I think, holding breath and treading water are in the DMG). I've actually used the holding breath rule quite a bit (especially with monsters like the aballin. It's called living water and is a monster that will draw monsters into it to drown them and uses that rule specifically for its way to attack, because it doesn't do actual damage when it attacks) :P It was kinda funny that the book is sitting right next to me, because I was using the rules for quicksand in my game just the other day LOL!
I grew up on Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s and early 1990s. When the Wilderness Survival Guide was published ... I don't think it looked all that great to me, even as I was looking through it at the Toys R Us where I usually bought role-playing games. I'm pretty sure that I only bought it out of habit, because I had purchased all of the previous D&D and AD&D game products I had ever seen. Over the course of several years, my AD&D Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Unearthed Arcana, and several other books all eventually fell apart. The bindings of the books totally broke, all of the pages came loose, I eventually photocopied them and put them in binders. Meanwhile, my Wilderness Survival Guide remained in near-perfect condition, practically the same as the day I bought it. To me, that pretty much says it all. My copies of the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, Manual of the Planes, and one or two other rulebooks similarly stayed in like-new condition as well. I do agree that it had great artwork, though.
But can you smell their stench from the water flowing by and identify them by it? That's the kind of information these books sought to disseminate originally (but of course, not this one because it's too specific). What's your rulling DM? 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I started playing 1st ed. in 1981. Over the years we added the UA, WSG, DSG, as they came along. After a while, it got to be ridiculous trying to keep a smooth game going with all the rules additions/modifications--so we went back to using just PHB, DMG, and MM, with a few things drawn in from the FF and MM2. For my group and myself, those 3 core books cover what we got into AD&D for in the first place. Also, we really enjoy out calm, peaceful "discussions" about some of the vague inconsistencies that these later books tried to correct. For us, it's all about having fun and not trying to add too much of the Laws Of Physics into everything.
Hi Mike, we agree completely! We mainly use those basic books as well with just a few others as supplements. As long as everyone playing is having fun, that's all that should matter. Keep your sword arm free!
I like the art in survival guide, the natural hazards and the worried looks of my players when I get the book in my hands. But in general I agree with you two. Cheers
Most of the descriptions of wilderness types wouldn't be that interesting, but there are some like cold desert that you wouldn't necessarily think of. How long it takes to drown/how long you can hold your breath is interesting. We had a local woman go to trial because she left her car with two little kids with inadequate clothing in weather that got colder. One kid died of hypothermia, one had both feet amputated.
Yay! We're back! After watching.. Yeah, might not be the first to go for. I dig the randomness like with the tornado chart. I think it actually looked pretty good for producing the randomness that might create emergent play while leaving room for the DM to come up with the specifics. Definitely not a fan of having a strict role for everything which seems to mark the demise of every edition.
I feel like it's easier to research many of these topics online now. When the book was published, you might need to look up several books as sources to find the different info.
When these books were published you couldn't find the information listed within their pages, even if you had access to a library and / or encyclopedia. 😉👍
Yeah, I bought this and the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and quickly decided they were useless, but they remain in my collection for the same reason you have them. lol :-) They are simply collector's items for me, now. My group also plays a mix of AD&D 1e with B/X... and even nuggets of 5e that the DM liked. heh An amalgam system is probably always best. :-) Use the bits you like... and push the game forward quickly. Our unwritten rule is that if you can't grab a book and find a rule regarding whatever you are doing within about a minute, just make a call and go with that. Don't let the game screech to a halt... especially regarding something like fishing in a creek. ;-)
It's useful to understand, but the books were written during a time when the rules were being developed too, so their tables and systems aren't great. In my opinion, you'd have to alter them to get them to work decently with any other edition practically. When I was running 2e, I used them as guidelines for making decisions in my games, but I hardly ever used their actual tables. But it definitely gave me something solid to base my decisions upon! 😉👍
I find some stuff in the book useful with BFRPG system as some things (flying mounts, random encounters for different terrain types, etc) are are pretty basic in that system and this book rounds them out a bit. But yes, limited for sure.
Your point about them using a lot of pages to essentially say nothing (explaining basic ideas like what a desert even is) is really reminiscent of some of the 2e supplements, where it really feels like they are just trying to get paid by the word. I remember reading the various class handbooks some time back and shaking my head at the fact that the book (namely, the Ranger's Handbook in this case) was explaining me such revolutionary concepts as what tents, sleeping bags and dogs were. Not even some specific game ideas about them, but just literally the concept of basic trekking equipment and animals. This was a really weird tone that they adopted back then, probably because they sometimes really did not have much to say but wanted to sell some books.
That's really what it seemed like to me. There was some good information in those books from time to time, but overall they were a real disappointment. Why things went that way - corporate decision, lack of creativity among staff, whatever - I never could figure out. Whatever the reason, those books were a bad decision by TSR (in my mind).
It was because... That basic information was largely unavailable to the populace as a whole. You could go to a library and research it for days and still not find what you were looking for. Only an encyclopedia could provide you with what you were looking for back then, and while it might tell you what a dog was, or a tent. It certainly didn't tell you how fast you could walk across ice, how long someone could hold their breath underwater, or how much weight a horse could pull. 😏👍
When that book came out, there was no internet and no way for the majority of the populace to truly understand the Wilderness that they were supposed to be describing to their players. I agree that it's not the best designed system(s), but they're an excellent foundation for making good judgment calls by the DM. Back then, the only source for anything close to this information was an encyclopedia, and most of those entries didn't touch what can be found within the Wilderness Survival Guide. Personally, I used the book as a guideline, but rarely, if ever, actually used it mid-session (even though it was used daily as a part of my pre-game preparation). 🤷
The overview of what each environmental is actually good but only in the sense that it is from a time before the internet was common and to people that don't leave the cities of only live a area that is just one climate & environment .
Exactly. These books were written during a time prior to the internet and when an encyclopedia was the only easy way to learn most of the basic information. Nothing covers what these books detail, even today, in my opinion. Their rules and systems are just outdated due to improved knowledge and core rules changes over the years.
I started with 1E and have since returned to it. All these years later I can still get by with just the PH, DMG, MM 90% of the time. Occasionally I reference Fiend Folio or Deities and Demigods but very, very rarely.
It seems like a missed opportunity for wilderness play. Today I'm looking for supplemements on hexcrawling, exploring, getting lost and all cool potential tools for DMs for populating such regions, domain play, etc. etc.
I seem to remember it was mainly a consolidation of Dragon Magazine articles. If you don't like it, it is good bookcase ballast to fill out the collection.
The Wilderness Survival Guide is the /most/ important 1e release for me as an OSR referee playing within LotFP's semi-realistic tone. - I don't care about the player's handbook because I'm using something that looks like BX plus a load of house rules from blogs - I mostly don't care about the DMG past internalizing the discussion on time and open table play because the hireling and downtime information is nice but already covered by something like ACKS or similar - Since I'm only playing with humans, and only four classes (with race as class), the front half of UA isn't relevant, and I'd much rather use LotFP's Eldritch Cock and Vagina's Are Magic along with the three spellbook releases from Lost Pages than the UA spells. - Veins of the Earth covers /some/ of the same space as the DSG, albeit with far less depth and a different flavor. - In a world where Clerics are atheist vampire hunters and a "cursed amulet" is equally likely to be radioactive as to be touched by black magic, Deities and Demigods and Manual of the Planes aren't much help But hexcrawling rules? In the OSR mainstream, these trend towards simple abstracted resource usage simulation (Errant is one example). That lack of diegesis within a hex is a problem if we're aspiring towards the play cycle variously called Context > Choices > Consequences [Daniel J. Bishop] or Information > Choice > Impact [Chris McDowall]. But since you talk about changing things in the middle of resolving them to fit the DM's story (the cardinal sin of OSR play, e.g. "No Paper after Seeing Rock" [Blorb Principles]) I suspect you have different priorities. Not every subsystem is a winner here, but if you're already tracking encumbrance, keeping track of a static number representing how warm your clothes are is hardly onerous. You can absolutely rule this on the fly, but the issue is when you have to rule something similar again, will your rulings be well calibrated? When the physics of the world is effectively player facing instead of passing through the DM's head as part of the resolution step, the players can make intelligent choices in advance, because coherence will be maintained.
Your favorite section, flying mounts, is something I'd find easy to rule at the table - you're violently thrown off and die within the first ten seconds almost invariably.
Eh... idk I kinda like the sorta item save they give buildings to handle tornados. Sometimes I feel making things random even though you might not normally think about that adds a certain organic quality to it. But I do think HP might do it better. The thing about dice rolls is it's swingy, so this big huge building even though it's made of weaker material is solid, it would be weird if it went anywhere. I would probably suggest a middle ground between the book and your HP idea. Where it's still sort this pseudo item save, but everything has a DC, and you need not necessarily roll for any one building. It gives you more freedom with material of the building, and the structure of the building maybe playing into the DC you set. And the best part is it would all be up to you and you can do it on the fly instead of being bogged down by rules and tables. You could do this in a somewhat later edition style, where depending on how badly the check is failed tells you how much damage is sustained, just in a sorta vague way. You do make a good point with there being sucha thing as too much dice rolling. I guess i just like what I think they were going for with that.
Nice to see you again, Warlock! You inaugurated overlayed pictures and it's definitely cool! It might take you more time to edit, but it gives the video a lot of accessibility more. Great! As to the book...I've always wondered what it might have been about, while finding its title so weird. From what I see I basically agree with you! But this makes me think to mr. Kask...in one of the latest videos from "his cellar" he mentions classes by provocatively asking: how many of them do you need?!?!? And then he starts listing: sorcerer...it's a magic-user, witch...magic-user, warlock...again, magic-user!!! And so on... The point is D&D is like hide and seek: once you master its root concept, if you don't critically lack imagination, you don't need any rule book (this sounds familiar, btw ;)). The rest is marketing, unless you base your books on lore. That is an entirely different type of content which people might find useful to have in good amount. Aaaand now that you opened it up you should carefully close this Pandora's box regarding the history and success of D&D based almost entirely on hundreds of books we never needed! ;) :D KYSAF
Really good point, Marco! Once you understand the basic concept - the rule books really aren't needed. Mr Gygax's famous quote always springs to mind, "The secret we should never let the game masters know is that they don't need any rules."
Supreme Overlord here. Lol 🤓😆 Thnx for this! I literally use it only for the NWP's and their associated descriptions. Nostalgia at the table for me too...Lol
The extended encumbrance rules for animals and vehicles are very useful, as are the many new proficiencies if you use those (I do, particularly for NPCs.) The rest is as needed depending upon a particular survival situation you want to use.
Wilderness and Dungeoneers guide were the only 2 books I bought off the shelf as a teen (rest were used). Honestly, only bought them because of the covers and they were the latest releases. Still have them for the warm nostalgic fuzzies.
Is there a reason they're treading water instead of doing a dead man's float. Holding breath is actually one I would want to know. There's a range depending on physical health and training.
I think I still have that book. I can not remember if I used it before. I do like the art work though. It's nice to have a collection of the books too.
I tend to agree with you guys. In some cases, in some books, the hand holding and explaining gets a bit out there. But then we also live in a world where we NEED to put on plastic bags warnings that it might suffocate your baby. Wargames have rules, role games have guides. There isn't a single design, not one turn of phrase in any role game book that is absolute. But eventually they need to put something on the page. Since 1st edition AD&D, they have pumped out book after book where it has been more about selling us a book than enhancing the game. Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneers Survival Guide are likely best printed from a modified pdf file. Some of it is indeed unneeded fluff. The much hated (I don't hate it) 4th edition made only one mistake, it was too much of a battle game. If the battle took all session, so what. But D&D hasn't been a wargame since Chainmail. Anyway, in the end, there are as many gamers that want to game out the wilderness in specific detail. and there are plenty who think the wilderness is an annoying intrusion to getting to the next monster hackfest. Lost in a desert, can be deadier than the deepest dungeon. A freezing blizzard can be more unforgiving that a 20th level monster. The jungle hides many dangers, and most of them are just the terrain trying to kill you.
I think the only DM I've known who made much use of this book was one who spent most of their life living in the middle of a dense city. As someone who's spent a lot of time hiking, walking outside in various weather conditions, use to swim a lot, and just having lived in a more hilly and mountainous forested temperate biome and in a barren sandy desert, and spent a while in an open plains area, the vast majority of stuff in the guide that comes up falls into the realm of "Common sense" rulings for me. But I can definitely see it having utility to someone who is running a game set in an environment they've never experienced, or who doesn't have the sort of life experiences to be able to say off-the-cuff "If you try to move that fast across the ice you're going to fall." or "If you go out into a blizzzard dressed like that you'll be dead before you can set up a camp."
the info on climate and terrain types wasn't so out of place in the years before the web and wikipedia. Plus little-ish kids were buying and using these books (bought the 1E PHB when I was 10) and geographical education isn't a particularly strong feature of the American education system. But yeah, looking at it as an adult, feels like a cash grab! Knowing the history and financial position of TSR by 1985, Unearthed Arcana and every book afterwards was pretty much a cash grab. Thanks Lorraine Williams and the Blume brothers!
Not THAT bad. It's got some great late AD&D first edition artwork. And there are some sections that make you think. But if I had to use my D&D books for TP after the apocalypse, it would go first.
@@theoldwarlockWhen you look at the amount of useful info in the PHB or MM, it’s hard to understand how TSR could make this the same length book. That being said, Kim Mohan was a fine contributor to and editor of Dragon magazine for years. He also left TSR with Gary when the split happened. For those reasons, I always feel a little bad when people trash this book. I think the same applies to Niles and Grubb with those other two weak books.
Was this sort of the start of non-weapon proficiencies for the ADnD game to 2e? I'm way more of a B/X kind of guy and I think I would prefer the general percentile table of trade skills in the 1e DMG and simply rolling under, applying a bonus/penalty if the situation called for it. I have the wilderness survival guide and reading it was more useful to consider useful distinctions like personal/actual temperature, how easily different pack animals spooked, etc. That being said I have NEVER cared for the idea of giving inanimate objects hit points, it tricks people into thinking they are meat points rather than an abstraction that covers fighting prowess, damage reduction, dexterity, etc. Besides, a simple item saving throw list like the one in the 2e DMG has served me really well for any edition I run.
If you were going to run a wilderness exploration game, what book(s) would you use? They can be from any edition. Weirdly, this video kind of convinced me that maybe I should look at the Wilderness Survival Guide. The stuff like wind chill and tornado damage actually sounds pretty cool to me. What makes this even weirder is that I saw my older brother's Wilderness Survival Guide decades ago and was never interested in it.
I wish I had a good suggestion, but I really don't. I've used some things from the 3rd edition DMs Guide. It's much more limited than the WSG and very hex based, but it's got some good things on storms, other weather, acclimation and such. You might see if you can find a PDF of that guide. Possibly on DriveThruRPG.
My advice would be to use their book to develop your own (faster) rules and tables. That's what I did to a certain extent. The parts that I use daily in-game, I photocopied for easy usage (i.e. quick access), just in case I needed them, but my goal was always to open 0 books during sessions (it ruins the flow and fun).
@@tyree9055 That was my original plan. I'm considering using cards so that people don't get the same weather back-to-back two days in a row. I was planning to have some sort of event deck, and I'm not sure if I want the weather deck to be incorporated into it. The "cards" might be a simple computer program rather than actual physical cards. My main problem at this point is that I'm working on too many projects while still needing real life necessities. Even though I had asked about this forever ago, I'm still not up to this point yet.
@Steven Fletcher There is an entire weather system in the WSG. But, it's difficult to use, as is, so I used it to predetermine the weather for my players 30 days ahead and sort of winged it from there.
I think this book is valuable at giving you ideas if you have no clue how to handle some of these very specific things. Not necessarily running them how the book says, but taking them as suggestions for a new DM who might struggle with these areas of a campaign.
I think you're right, it definitely does give some inspirations for ideas of how to play and what to do! Thanks for the comment! Keep your sword arm free!
Although I generally share your opinions, some things are worth pointing out here. The elementary nature of the material was conducive to laying a framework for suburban teen boys who may have not had real life context. Systems were always understood to be optional. This book encouraged players to add a wilderness dimension to their game. Also ad&d was meant to introduce consistency to the game for purposes tournaments and for inter campaign character transferability. This material allows for common ground regarding resolution of outdoor adventures.😊
Definitely my least favorite of the 1e era. I remember this book and the dungeoneering one hung around in shops long after the rest of the other books were impossible to find.
One redeaming factor in this book...the TSR art was aproaching its zenith during this late "first edition" era.
That book was still referenced in a lot of 2nd edition material, because it was compatible. Holding one's breath, treading water, jumping, etc. were actually adopted in the core books in 2nd edition (Jumping is in proficiencies in the PHB and, I think, holding breath and treading water are in the DMG). I've actually used the holding breath rule quite a bit (especially with monsters like the aballin. It's called living water and is a monster that will draw monsters into it to drown them and uses that rule specifically for its way to attack, because it doesn't do actual damage when it attacks) :P It was kinda funny that the book is sitting right next to me, because I was using the rules for quicksand in my game just the other day LOL!
Is the aballin that unnamed water monster in Temple of Elemental Evil? The one that had incredibly powerful illusion and wish type magic
I grew up on Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in the 1980s and early 1990s.
When the Wilderness Survival Guide was published ... I don't think it looked all that great to me, even as I was looking through it at the Toys R Us where I usually bought role-playing games. I'm pretty sure that I only bought it out of habit, because I had purchased all of the previous D&D and AD&D game products I had ever seen.
Over the course of several years, my AD&D Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, Unearthed Arcana, and several other books all eventually fell apart. The bindings of the books totally broke, all of the pages came loose, I eventually photocopied them and put them in binders. Meanwhile, my Wilderness Survival Guide remained in near-perfect condition, practically the same as the day I bought it.
To me, that pretty much says it all. My copies of the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide, Manual of the Planes, and one or two other rulebooks similarly stayed in like-new condition as well.
I do agree that it had great artwork, though.
That seems to pretty much be the story we've heard. My own copy is, as you say, near-perfect.
Boil your water if Orcs are upsteam.
Pro tip!
And use the stream as a toilet if kender are downstream. 😈
But can you smell their stench from the water flowing by and identify them by it?
That's the kind of information these books sought to disseminate originally (but of course, not this one because it's too specific).
What's your rulling DM?
🤣🤣🤣🤣
No matter what edition I favor ruling over rules. I think it gives things to keep in mind even if you don't use its rules.
I started playing 1st ed. in 1981. Over the years we added the UA, WSG, DSG, as they came along. After a while, it got to be ridiculous trying to keep a smooth game going with all the rules additions/modifications--so we went back to using just PHB, DMG, and MM, with a few things drawn in from the FF and MM2. For my group and myself, those 3 core books cover what we got into AD&D for in the first place. Also, we really enjoy out calm, peaceful "discussions" about some of the vague inconsistencies that these later books tried to correct. For us, it's all about having fun and not trying to add too much of the Laws Of Physics into everything.
Hi Mike, we agree completely! We mainly use those basic books as well with just a few others as supplements. As long as everyone playing is having fun, that's all that should matter. Keep your sword arm free!
Rocky Mountain hiiiiiiiii, guys! (little John Denver greeting to my fellow mountain dwellers)
Hey FL! We hope all is well. Thanks for the mountain dweller "hi" sign.
I like the art in survival guide, the natural hazards and the worried looks of my players when I get the book in my hands. But in general I agree with you two. Cheers
Still better Wilderness survival rules than 5e...
Most of the descriptions of wilderness types wouldn't be that interesting, but there are some like cold desert that you wouldn't necessarily think of. How long it takes to drown/how long you can hold your breath is interesting. We had a local woman go to trial because she left her car with two little kids with inadequate clothing in weather that got colder. One kid died of hypothermia, one had both feet amputated.
I thought it was ... ok. Maybe not the best, but hey, anything for a hex crawl!
Yay! We're back!
After watching.. Yeah, might not be the first to go for. I dig the randomness like with the tornado chart. I think it actually looked pretty good for producing the randomness that might create emergent play while leaving room for the DM to come up with the specifics. Definitely not a fan of having a strict role for everything which seems to mark the demise of every edition.
I feel like it's easier to research many of these topics online now. When the book was published, you might need to look up several books as sources to find the different info.
When these books were published you couldn't find the information listed within their pages, even if you had access to a library and / or encyclopedia.
😉👍
Yeah, I bought this and the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and quickly decided they were useless, but they remain in my collection for the same reason you have them. lol :-) They are simply collector's items for me, now. My group also plays a mix of AD&D 1e with B/X... and even nuggets of 5e that the DM liked. heh An amalgam system is probably always best. :-) Use the bits you like... and push the game forward quickly. Our unwritten rule is that if you can't grab a book and find a rule regarding whatever you are doing within about a minute, just make a call and go with that. Don't let the game screech to a halt... especially regarding something like fishing in a creek. ;-)
That seems like a reasonable rule to use! The flow of the game and the overall experience should be the number one priority. Keep your sword arm free!
I'd love to see an overview of the dungeoneer's survival guide. It's one of the few AD&D books I don't own/haven't read.
It's on the list but will be later in '22. Thanks for the suggestion!
Windchill plus water? How to calculate wind chill? That's what I would want to know.
It's useful to understand, but the books were written during a time when the rules were being developed too, so their tables and systems aren't great. In my opinion, you'd have to alter them to get them to work decently with any other edition practically.
When I was running 2e, I used them as guidelines for making decisions in my games, but I hardly ever used their actual tables. But it definitely gave me something solid to base my decisions upon!
😉👍
I'm not much at fishing, so I would use the fishing table. It seems like the most useful information is whatever you as the GM are less familiar with.
I find some stuff in the book useful with BFRPG system as some things (flying mounts, random encounters for different terrain types, etc) are are pretty basic in that system and this book rounds them out a bit. But yes, limited for sure.
Your point about them using a lot of pages to essentially say nothing (explaining basic ideas like what a desert even is) is really reminiscent of some of the 2e supplements, where it really feels like they are just trying to get paid by the word. I remember reading the various class handbooks some time back and shaking my head at the fact that the book (namely, the Ranger's Handbook in this case) was explaining me such revolutionary concepts as what tents, sleeping bags and dogs were. Not even some specific game ideas about them, but just literally the concept of basic trekking equipment and animals. This was a really weird tone that they adopted back then, probably because they sometimes really did not have much to say but wanted to sell some books.
That's really what it seemed like to me. There was some good information in those books from time to time, but overall they were a real disappointment. Why things went that way - corporate decision, lack of creativity among staff, whatever - I never could figure out. Whatever the reason, those books were a bad decision by TSR (in my mind).
It was because... That basic information was largely unavailable to the populace as a whole. You could go to a library and research it for days and still not find what you were looking for.
Only an encyclopedia could provide you with what you were looking for back then, and while it might tell you what a dog was, or a tent. It certainly didn't tell you how fast you could walk across ice, how long someone could hold their breath underwater, or how much weight a horse could pull.
😏👍
When that book came out, there was no internet and no way for the majority of the populace to truly understand the Wilderness that they were supposed to be describing to their players.
I agree that it's not the best designed system(s), but they're an excellent foundation for making good judgment calls by the DM.
Back then, the only source for anything close to this information was an encyclopedia, and most of those entries didn't touch what can be found within the Wilderness Survival Guide.
Personally, I used the book as a guideline, but rarely, if ever, actually used it mid-session (even though it was used daily as a part of my pre-game preparation).
🤷
The overview of what each environmental is actually good but only in the sense that it is from a time before the internet was common and to people that don't leave the cities of only live a area that is just one climate & environment .
Good point!
Exactly. These books were written during a time prior to the internet and when an encyclopedia was the only easy way to learn most of the basic information. Nothing covers what these books detail, even today, in my opinion. Their rules and systems are just outdated due to improved knowledge and core rules changes over the years.
I started with 1E and have since returned to it. All these years later I can still get by with just the PH, DMG, MM 90% of the time. Occasionally I reference Fiend Folio or Deities and Demigods but very, very rarely.
That pretty much mirrors our games.
The new equipment tables are nice. My old DM would break this book out every time our tent got destroyed or otherwise lost.
Need a frank episode. Frank in chainmail treading water.
Next up: Knights on ice.
“City State Campaign of the Invincible DM Overlord”. 🤡
It seems like a missed opportunity for wilderness play. Today I'm looking for supplemements on hexcrawling, exploring, getting lost and all cool potential tools for DMs for populating such regions, domain play, etc. etc.
Come on guys, it’s a resource. I like the book
I love the way you guys make your videos. They're fun to watch : )
Thanks, Lightmane. Compliments are always welcome. Let's us know we're not wasting your time or ours.
I seem to remember it was mainly a consolidation of Dragon Magazine articles. If you don't like it, it is good bookcase ballast to fill out the collection.
The Wilderness Survival Guide is the /most/ important 1e release for me as an OSR referee playing within LotFP's semi-realistic tone.
- I don't care about the player's handbook because I'm using something that looks like BX plus a load of house rules from blogs
- I mostly don't care about the DMG past internalizing the discussion on time and open table play because the hireling and downtime information is nice but already covered by something like ACKS or similar
- Since I'm only playing with humans, and only four classes (with race as class), the front half of UA isn't relevant, and I'd much rather use LotFP's Eldritch Cock and Vagina's Are Magic along with the three spellbook releases from Lost Pages than the UA spells.
- Veins of the Earth covers /some/ of the same space as the DSG, albeit with far less depth and a different flavor.
- In a world where Clerics are atheist vampire hunters and a "cursed amulet" is equally likely to be radioactive as to be touched by black magic, Deities and Demigods and Manual of the Planes aren't much help
But hexcrawling rules? In the OSR mainstream, these trend towards simple abstracted resource usage simulation (Errant is one example). That lack of diegesis within a hex is a problem if we're aspiring towards the play cycle variously called Context > Choices > Consequences [Daniel J. Bishop] or Information > Choice > Impact [Chris McDowall]. But since you talk about changing things in the middle of resolving them to fit the DM's story (the cardinal sin of OSR play, e.g. "No Paper after Seeing Rock" [Blorb Principles]) I suspect you have different priorities.
Not every subsystem is a winner here, but if you're already tracking encumbrance, keeping track of a static number representing how warm your clothes are is hardly onerous. You can absolutely rule this on the fly, but the issue is when you have to rule something similar again, will your rulings be well calibrated? When the physics of the world is effectively player facing instead of passing through the DM's head as part of the resolution step, the players can make intelligent choices in advance, because coherence will be maintained.
Your favorite section, flying mounts, is something I'd find easy to rule at the table - you're violently thrown off and die within the first ten seconds almost invariably.
Eh... idk I kinda like the sorta item save they give buildings to handle tornados. Sometimes I feel making things random even though you might not normally think about that adds a certain organic quality to it. But I do think HP might do it better. The thing about dice rolls is it's swingy, so this big huge building even though it's made of weaker material is solid, it would be weird if it went anywhere.
I would probably suggest a middle ground between the book and your HP idea. Where it's still sort this pseudo item save, but everything has a DC, and you need not necessarily roll for any one building. It gives you more freedom with material of the building, and the structure of the building maybe playing into the DC you set. And the best part is it would all be up to you and you can do it on the fly instead of being bogged down by rules and tables. You could do this in a somewhat later edition style, where depending on how badly the check is failed tells you how much damage is sustained, just in a sorta vague way.
You do make a good point with there being sucha thing as too much dice rolling.
I guess i just like what I think they were going for with that.
Nice to see you again, Warlock! You inaugurated overlayed pictures and it's definitely cool! It might take you more time to edit, but it gives the video a lot of accessibility more. Great! As to the book...I've always wondered what it might have been about, while finding its title so weird. From what I see I basically agree with you! But this makes me think to mr. Kask...in one of the latest videos from "his cellar" he mentions classes by provocatively asking: how many of them do you need?!?!? And then he starts listing: sorcerer...it's a magic-user, witch...magic-user, warlock...again, magic-user!!! And so on... The point is D&D is like hide and seek: once you master its root concept, if you don't critically lack imagination, you don't need any rule book (this sounds familiar, btw ;)). The rest is marketing, unless you base your books on lore. That is an entirely different type of content which people might find useful to have in good amount. Aaaand now that you opened it up you should carefully close this Pandora's box regarding the history and success of D&D based almost entirely on hundreds of books we never needed! ;) :D KYSAF
Really good point, Marco! Once you understand the basic concept - the rule books really aren't needed. Mr Gygax's famous quote always springs to mind, "The secret we should never let the game masters know is that they don't need any rules."
Supreme Overlord here. Lol 🤓😆 Thnx for this! I literally use it only for the NWP's and their associated descriptions. Nostalgia at the table for me too...Lol
The extended encumbrance rules for animals and vehicles are very useful, as are the many new proficiencies if you use those (I do, particularly for NPCs.) The rest is as needed depending upon a particular survival situation you want to use.
Wilderness and Dungeoneers guide were the only 2 books I bought off the shelf as a teen (rest were used). Honestly, only bought them because of the covers and they were the latest releases. Still have them for the warm nostalgic fuzzies.
Is there a reason they're treading water instead of doing a dead man's float. Holding breath is actually one I would want to know. There's a range depending on physical health and training.
I think I still have that book. I can not remember if I used it before. I do like the art work though.
It's nice to have a collection of the books too.
I tend to agree with you guys. In some cases, in some books, the hand holding and explaining gets a bit out there. But then we also live in a world where we NEED to put on plastic bags warnings that it might suffocate your baby. Wargames have rules, role games have guides. There isn't a single design, not one turn of phrase in any role game book that is absolute. But eventually they need to put something on the page. Since 1st edition AD&D, they have pumped out book after book where it has been more about selling us a book than enhancing the game. Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneers Survival Guide are likely best printed from a modified pdf file. Some of it is indeed unneeded fluff. The much hated (I don't hate it) 4th edition made only one mistake, it was too much of a battle game. If the battle took all session, so what. But D&D hasn't been a wargame since Chainmail. Anyway, in the end, there are as many gamers that want to game out the wilderness in specific detail. and there are plenty who think the wilderness is an annoying intrusion to getting to the next monster hackfest. Lost in a desert, can be deadier than the deepest dungeon. A freezing blizzard can be more unforgiving that a 20th level monster. The jungle hides many dangers, and most of them are just the terrain trying to kill you.
I think the only DM I've known who made much use of this book was one who spent most of their life living in the middle of a dense city.
As someone who's spent a lot of time hiking, walking outside in various weather conditions, use to swim a lot, and just having lived in a more hilly and mountainous forested temperate biome and in a barren sandy desert, and spent a while in an open plains area, the vast majority of stuff in the guide that comes up falls into the realm of "Common sense" rulings for me.
But I can definitely see it having utility to someone who is running a game set in an environment they've never experienced, or who doesn't have the sort of life experiences to be able to say off-the-cuff "If you try to move that fast across the ice you're going to fall." or "If you go out into a blizzzard dressed like that you'll be dead before you can set up a camp."
That's pretty much the way we see the book.
the info on climate and terrain types wasn't so out of place in the years before the web and wikipedia. Plus little-ish kids were buying and using these books (bought the 1E PHB when I was 10) and geographical education isn't a particularly strong feature of the American education system. But yeah, looking at it as an adult, feels like a cash grab!
Knowing the history and financial position of TSR by 1985, Unearthed Arcana and every book afterwards was pretty much a cash grab. Thanks Lorraine Williams and the Blume brothers!
How bad is it in your opinion? Better to use as toilet paper if the stores run out again?
Not THAT bad. It's got some great late AD&D first edition artwork. And there are some sections that make you think. But if I had to use my D&D books for TP after the apocalypse, it would go first.
@@theoldwarlock 😄
@@theoldwarlock I'll never use any of my AD&D books for that. I'll go grab a stinging nettle leaf from the field first!
🤣👍
@@theoldwarlockWhen you look at the amount of useful info in the PHB or MM, it’s hard to understand how TSR could make this the same length book. That being said, Kim Mohan was a fine contributor to and editor of Dragon magazine for years. He also left TSR with Gary when the split happened. For those reasons, I always feel a little bad when people trash this book. I think the same applies to Niles and Grubb with those other two weak books.
I think this book would have been great back in the early days.
They were, and I haven't seen an updated or improved version of them since!
🤔
Was this sort of the start of non-weapon proficiencies for the ADnD game to 2e? I'm way more of a B/X kind of guy and I think I would prefer the general percentile table of trade skills in the 1e DMG and simply rolling under, applying a bonus/penalty if the situation called for it. I have the wilderness survival guide and reading it was more useful to consider useful distinctions like personal/actual temperature, how easily different pack animals spooked, etc.
That being said I have NEVER cared for the idea of giving inanimate objects hit points, it tricks people into thinking they are meat points rather than an abstraction that covers fighting prowess, damage reduction, dexterity, etc. Besides, a simple item saving throw list like the one in the 2e DMG has served me really well for any edition I run.
If you were going to run a wilderness exploration game, what book(s) would you use? They can be from any edition.
Weirdly, this video kind of convinced me that maybe I should look at the Wilderness Survival Guide. The stuff like wind chill and tornado damage actually sounds pretty cool to me. What makes this even weirder is that I saw my older brother's Wilderness Survival Guide decades ago and was never interested in it.
I wish I had a good suggestion, but I really don't. I've used some things from the 3rd edition DMs Guide. It's much more limited than the WSG and very hex based, but it's got some good things on storms, other weather, acclimation and such. You might see if you can find a PDF of that guide. Possibly on DriveThruRPG.
My advice would be to use their book to develop your own (faster) rules and tables. That's what I did to a certain extent. The parts that I use daily in-game, I photocopied for easy usage (i.e. quick access), just in case I needed them, but my goal was always to open 0 books during sessions (it ruins the flow and fun).
@@tyree9055 That was my original plan. I'm considering using cards so that people don't get the same weather back-to-back two days in a row. I was planning to have some sort of event deck, and I'm not sure if I want the weather deck to be incorporated into it.
The "cards" might be a simple computer program rather than actual physical cards.
My main problem at this point is that I'm working on too many projects while still needing real life necessities. Even though I had asked about this forever ago, I'm still not up to this point yet.
@Steven Fletcher There is an entire weather system in the WSG. But, it's difficult to use, as is, so I used it to predetermine the weather for my players 30 days ahead and sort of winged it from there.
Bought this book 30+ years ago. Never used it. Same with the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide.
I think this book is valuable at giving you ideas if you have no clue how to handle some of these very specific things. Not necessarily running them how the book says, but taking them as suggestions for a new DM who might struggle with these areas of a campaign.
I think you're right, it definitely does give some inspirations for ideas of how to play and what to do! Thanks for the comment! Keep your sword arm free!
Although I generally share your opinions, some things are worth pointing out here. The elementary nature of the material was conducive to laying a framework for suburban teen boys who may have not had real life context. Systems were always understood to be optional. This book encouraged players to add a wilderness dimension to their game. Also ad&d was meant to introduce consistency to the game for purposes tournaments and for inter campaign character transferability. This material allows for common ground regarding resolution of outdoor adventures.😊
I think that's a great way to look at it! Thanks for the comment, Robert!
Definitely my least favorite of the 1e era. I remember this book and the dungeoneering one hung around in shops long after the rest of the other books were impossible to find.
I have the same memory. It always seemed they were always covered in dust on the topmost shelf.
It's a first draft with food for thought.
That kind of sums it up for us as well.
the WSG tricked me with the sweet cover.
TBH the dungeoneering survival guide wasn't particularly useful to me either.
I actually use many ideas from this book. I like this book a lot.
Agree, agree, agree.
First time I hear of this, wow ,really bad.
You guys are completionists.
Hey-o!
Hey-o SH!