Food and Supplies in GURPS and ACKS

Food and Supplies in GURPS and ACKS

Before a party of adventurers sets out to clear out a wilderness area or dungeon, they have to buy enough supplies for the trip. The same thing is required when an army marches to war, but on a larger scale. How much do supplies cost in GURPS? This is actually a surprisingly difficult question despite resource management being such an important part of the game. I’m doing this topic for two reasons. First, I ran into this when calculating ACKS Battle Ratings for GURPS creatures, so it needs to be settled. Second, in my current game, one of the player characters is a food mage, and the question of supplies has arisen multiple times.

On page 426, GURPS Basic Set says that a human needs three meals per day and at least 2 quarts of water a day (that’s around 4 lbs. of water for those who are completely unused to non-metric measures of volume). That means that a full wineskin (p. B288) is enough for two days. How much does a “meal” weigh? On page 288, GURPS Basic Set has traveler’s rations that weight 0.5 lb. and cost $2 a piece. Water is considered free. Thus, weekly supply of food weighs 0.5 x 3 x 7 = 10.5 lbs. and costs $2 x 3 x 7 = $42. A person also will need 2 x 7 = 14 quarts of water (28 lbs.). This means that total weekly supply net weight is 10.5 + 28 = 38.5 lbs. If we assume that water is transported in wineskins that hold 8 lbs. each, weigh 0.25 lbs., and cost $10, this means that we need 4 wineskins. Actually, that’s 3.5 wineskins, but we have to round it up. The difference is negligible. The four wineskins add 1 lb. of weight and $40. This means that gross weight of supplies is 39.5 lbs. and full cost is $82, if we are buying new wineskins.

On page 265, GURPS Basic Set has the Cost of Living Table, and under it you can see how much food costs. The page says that travel rations cost 5% of cost of living for one week and weigh 14 lbs. For Status 0, this is $600 * 0.05 = $30. For Status -1, this is $300 * 0.05 = $15. When divided by 14, this gives us roughly $2.14/lb. for Status 0 or $1.07/lb. for Status -1. As you can see, both weights and costs of traveler’s rations are inconsistent in the same book. Isn’t that strange?

But let’s go back to the matter of food weight. We know that traveler’s rations weigh 0.5 lb. per meal, or 0.67 lbs. per meal if using the Cost of Living rules. If we read GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3, we will find the following values: “A meal’s worth of gathered food weighs 0.5-1 lb. for most animal foods, 1-2 lbs. for seeds and nuts, 3-4 lbs. for many fruits and roots, and up to 6 lbs. for leaves and fungi.” A page later, it says that when you butcher an animal, one pound of meat equals one meal. GURPS Template Toolkit 2: Races talks about food on page 25, where it describes the effects of realistic and cinematic scale on food consumption. However, it doesn’t say how much a meal weighs.

A more definitive answer to this question can be found in GURPS Bio-Tech on pages 63-64, where the book talks about genetically engineered smaller or larger creatures. Here, we can find out that a meal for a SM+0 creature weighs 1 lb. This weight scales with SM, but the number of meals per day has an inverse relationship with scale. If you do not want to bother with realism, you can simply calculate the total food weight per day and divide it by three to find out how much a meal would weigh. I have a spreadsheet that does all that, taking into account SM, Reduced Consumption, Increased Consumption, Cast-Iron Stomach, and Cold-Blooded. In any case, you can see that the meal weight doesn’t exactly correspond to the traveler’s ration weight, but that’s probably because rations are mostly dried.

However, GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16: Wilderness Adventures states in the foraging section that one meal weighs 0.5 lb., just like rations, and disregards their “best before” duration. Water also is baked into the meal weight. This is done to make bookkeeping simpler. I’d use GURPS Bio-Tech values to emphasize the difference between normal food and rations.

As you can see, the rules are all over the place, and I haven’t even covered them all yet. Since I have an acute interest in ACKS, let’s take a look at how food, water, and rations work there. Perhaps, something can be borrowed or adapted. On page 145 of ACKS II RR, we see the descriptions for standard rations and iron rations. Either ones count as 1/6 stone for encumbrance purposes for a day’s worth of rations, or 1 stone for a week’s worth of rations. I have to remind you that encumbrance is semi-abstract in ACKS – stones represent a combination of mass and bulk, but generally speaking, one stone is around 10 pounds. The cost varies depending on the quality (just like in GURPS, when using Cost of Living). A week’s worth of standard rations costs from 35 cp to 3 gp (that’s around $14-$120), while a week’s worth of iron rations costs from 1 gp to 6 gp (that’s around $40-$240). And would you look at that, the costs and weights are almost the same as in GURPS! In addition, we have a clear distinction between standard rations and iron rations in that iron rations cost more, but remain edible for much longer.

On a side note, ACKS has humans consume twice the amount of water per day than GURPS. Waterskins also are much smaller. However, the food consumption is slightly lower. As per page 276 of ACKS II RR, a human must consume 2 lbs. of food per day and 1 gallon of water. This dovetails nicely to 1 stone of encumbrance per day. For animals, the amount of daily food and water is a function of normal load, with daily food requirement being (normal load)/10 and daily water being (normal load)/5. In large expeditions, this is abstracted to make bookkeeping simpler.

Speaking of that, supplying armies was one of the reason why I decided to explore this subject. In ACKS, each unit has a weekly supply cost. For a unit of 120 infantrymen, this is 60 gp ($2,400). Thus, a single soldier requires 5 sp ($20) in weekly supplies. However, this is not just food, but also water, pack animals, handlers, and supplies for said pack animals and handlers. Since iron rations start at 1 gp per week, this means that army supplies are the cheapest fresh food. If we look back at GURPS Basic Set, we will see that if we were to use traveler’s rations bought as gear, we would have to pay $42 x 120 = $5,040, which is a lot despite neglecting animal feed, water, and pack animals themselves. However, if we use Status -1 rations as the base, we get $15 x 120 = $1,800, which is much closer. The difference between $2,400 from ACKS and $1,800 from GURPS may account for all the non-food supplies. It also should be noted that carnivorous troops are four times more expensive to supply.

But wait a second, doesn’t GURPS have rules for supplying armies? GURPS Mass Combat has a logistics system, where monthly maintenance cost of an element is one fifth of its cost to raise. This seems to imply that supplies are not only food, but ammunition, gear, and all other stuff as well, because otherwise it would mean that pikemen eat twice as much as regular infantry. In ACKS, this additional non-food maintenance cost is covered by the cost of specialists, such as quartermasters and armorers, and is static - 50 gp ($2,000) per month per unit. This means that comparing ACKS supply costs to GURPS Mass Combat maintenance cost is like comparing apples to oranges – don’t do that.

Now I understand the following:

1.       Food rules in GURPS are messed up, and I have to clearly define how much food costs in my games.

2.       Fresh food and iron rations have to be separated, because GURPS has no rules for food spoilage that I could find.

3.       Abstracted supply costs from ACKS work well with GURPS, but may require additional granularity. After all, the Size Modifiers in GURPS are more granular, and things such as Reduced Consumption with or without Cast-Iron Stomach, Restricted Diet, etc. can affect supply cost. For these purposes, I suggest simply proportionally increasing or decreasing this abstract troop supply cost using the same ratio as for daily food.