For reasons that now escape me, I found myself looking back at the pregenerated characters for the D&D Starter Set, specifically to look at how much food and water they carry. What I found was odd - different characters may carry 10, 5, or 2 days' worth of rations. One character carries no rations at all! Likewise, four of the five characters have a waterskin.
(Actually, there is a good reason for this - depending on the chosen background, each character will have a different 'pack', and those packs contain varying amounts of food and water.)
Incidentally, it's worth noting that D&D (at least in 5e) says that characters need a gallon of water per day, while the waterskin contains half a gallon of liquid. So by RAW four of the five characters have enough water for only half a day. However, I'm inclined to adjust this - apparently the recommended intake for an adult is about half a gallon a day, so a waterskin should be enough for one day.
Anyway, the reason (I suspect) that the characters have food and water, but have it assigned with no particular rhyme or reason, is that that's one of those things that D&D has as a "nod to realism" - characters have food and water because of course they need to eat and drink, but who really cares? Just write them down and forget about them!
But this is one of the areas where I think the game could (and probably should) be doing better - and especially in a Starter Set adventure like "Lost Mine of Phandelver", where there is a perfect opportunity to do better. Here, the game starts with a fairly simple dungeon (which is good), then has a largely 'urban' section (which is also good), and then has a section of exploring a wider wilderness area. So by the time the group are on to that exploration, they're already used to much of the core of the game, and ready for some of the resource tracking that could come with that process.
(Then again, D&D's rules for wilderness travel have traditionally sucked, and although 5e is slightly better than previous editions they're still not good.)
The reason that I'm pondering all this is that "Storm King's Thunder", the adventure I'm running at the moment, features a lot of overland travel. And while at the moment that travel is all on roads and is easily handwaved, before too long the party will want to be going off-road, at which point it would be really good to have something better to offer.
Plus, at some point I'm keen to move over to my "ten things" approach to encumbrance. At which point I'm inclined to consider rations for 5 days to be one "thing" and a waterskin likewise to be one "thing". (Then again, right now they have a wagon, so don't need to worry about 'things'. But once they go off-road...)
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