Survival

Survival

(Wisdom)

Use this skill to follow tracks, hunt wild game, harvest useful components from dead creatures, guide a party safely through frozen wastelands, identify signs that owlbears live nearby, predict the Weather, or avoid quicksand and other natural hazards.
The Survival skill is not only important in the wilderness, but can be the difference between life and death on the mean streets of the city. In huge cities, the poor and destitute must scrounge for food, find places to sleep, and avoid dangerous animals that call the streets home.

Survive in the Wilderness

You can keep yourself and others safe and fed in the wild, as well as avoid getting lost and avoid natural hazards. See the Survival Checks table below for the DCs for various tasks that require checks.

Action: None. Survival checks for the activities listed on the Survival Checks table are made as part of the act of traveling or getting by.
Try Again: Retries to survive in a hostile environment are not allowed. Most checks are remade daily, regardless of previous results.
Special: If you are trained in Survival, you can automatically determine where true north lies in relation to yourself.

Avoid Getting Lost

There are many ways to get lost in the wilderness. Following an obvious road, trail, or feature such as a stream or shoreline prevents most from becoming lost, but travelers striking off cross-country might become disoriented—especially in conditions of poor visibility or in difficult terrain.
Any character in forest, moor, hill, or mountain terrain might become lost if they move away from a trail, road, stream, or other obvious path or track. Forests are especially dangerous because they obscure far-off landmarks and make it hard to see the sun or stars.
If conditions exist that make getting lost a possibility, the character leading the way must succeed on a Survival check or become lost. The difficulty of this check varies based on the terrain, the visibility conditions, and whether or not the character has a map of the area being traveled through.

Terrain	Survival DC
Desert or plains	14
Forest	16
Moor or hill	10
Mountain	12
Open sea	18
Urban, ruins, or dungeon	8
Modifier	Check Modifier
Proper tools (map, sextant)	+4
Poor visibility	–4

A character with at least 5 ranks in Knowledge (geography) or Knowledge (local) pertaining to the area being traveled through gains a +2 bonus on this check.
Check once per hour (or portion of an hour) spent in local or overland movement to see you have become lost. In the case of a party moving together, only the character leading the way makes the check. This check is made in secret, and characters are not immediately aware if they become lost.
If a party becomes lost, it is no longer certain of moving in the direction it intended to travel. Randomly determine the direction in which the party actually travels during each hour of local or overland movement. The characters’ movement continues to be random until they blunder into a landmark they can’t miss, or until they recognize that they are lost and make an effort to regain their bearings.

• Recognizing You’re Lost: Once per hour of random travel, each character in the party may attempt a Survival check (DC 20, –1 per hour of random travel) to recognize that he is no longer certain of his direction of travel. Some circumstances might make it obvious that the characters are lost.
  
• Setting a New Course: Determining the correct direction of travel once a party has become lost requires a Survival check (DC 15, +2 per hour of random travel). If a character fails this check, he chooses a random direction as the “correct” direction for resuming travel. Once the characters are traveling along their new course, correct or incorrect, they might get lost again. If the conditions still make it possible for travelers to become lost, check once per hour of travel as described above to see if the party maintains its new course or begins to move at random again.
  
• Conflicting Directions: It’s possible that several characters may attempt to determine the right direction to proceed after becoming lost. Make a Survival check for each character in secret, then tell the players whose characters succeeded the correct direction in which to travel, and tell the players whose characters failed a random direction they think is right, with no indication who is correct.
  
• Regaining Your Bearings: There are several ways for characters to find their way after becoming lost.
  • If the characters successfully set a new course and follow it to the destination they’re trying to reach, they’re not lost anymore.
  • The characters, through random movement, might run into an unmistakable landmark.
  • If conditions suddenly improve—the fog lifts or the sun comes up—lost characters may attempt to set a new course, as described above, with a +4 bonus on the Survival check.

Tracking

To find tracks or to follow them for 1 mile requires a successful Survival check. You must make another Survival check every time the tracks become difficult to follow. If you are not trained in this skill, or it is not a class skill, you can make checks to find tracks, but you can follow them only if the DC for the task is 10 or lower. Alternatively, you can use the Perception skill to find a footprint or similar sign of a creature’s passage using the same DCs, but you can’t use Perception to follow tracks, even if someone else has already found them.
You move at half your normal speed while following tracks (or at your normal speed with a –5 penalty on the check, or at up to twice your normal speed with a –20 penalty on the check). The DC depends on the surface and the prevailing conditions, as given on table.
Action: A Survival check made to find tracks is at least a Full-Round Action, and it may take even longer.
Try Again: For finding tracks, you can retry a failed check after 1 hour (outdoors) or 10 minutes (indoors) of searching.
Restrictions: While anyone can use Survival to find tracks (regardless of the DC), or to follow tracks when the DC for the task is 10 or lower, a character must have survival as a class skill in order to follow tracks with a DC higher than 10.
Special: A Ranger gains a bonus on Survival checks when using this skill to find or follow the tracks of a favored enemy.

Trailblazing

When traveling in poor conditions or difficult terrain, you can attempt a Survival check to hasten your group's progress.
On a check result of 15 or better, you increase the movement modifier for overland movement by 1/4, to a maximum of ×1. For example, you could increase your movement rate through trackless jungle from ×1/4 to ×1/2 your normal overland movement rate. With a result of 25 or higher, you can increase the movement modifier by 1/2 (and thus could travel through trackless jungle at ×3/4 your normal rate). In either case the ×1 maximum still applies - that is, you can improve up to but not exceed your normal movement rate by this means. See the Movement article for more information on movement rates.
Action: None. Survival checks for trailblazing are made as part of the act of traveling.
Try Again: No. Trailblazing checks are made daily unless the environment or conditions in which you are traveling changes sufficiently to warrant another check.
Restrictions: This ability applies only to long-distance overland movement - it has no effect on tactical movement.
Special: You can guide a group of up to four individuals (including yourself) at no penalty. However, for each three additional people (rounded up) in the group being guided, apply a -2 penalty to the trailblazing attempt. Thus, a group of five to seven (yourself and four to six others) would incur a -2 penalty, a group of eight to ten a -4 penalty, and so forth.

Trail Signs

You can create, find, and read trail signs with a successful survival check.
Create Trail Signs: You can leave brief messages for anyone following you or using your route after you pass by. To create a message, you make marks in the ground, pile up rocks or twigs, bend plants into unusual shapes, or perform some other fairly subtle alteration of the landscape. Halflings make use of simple drawings, which they scratch into the ground or on some object with a sharp implement or draw with a piece of chalk or charcoal.
Very simple messages, such as "Go this way" or "Don't go this way," are fairly easy to convey (DC 10). More complex messages, such as "Walk west three days, then turn left at the bluff," have a DC of 15. In general, a message that could be written in four words or less has a DC of 10, and messages of five to ten words have a DC of 15. Failure by 4 or less means the signs you leave don't get the message across. Failure by 5 or more means that the signs convey some false information (see below).

Finding Trail Signs: Once trail signs are in place, anyone passing through the area where you left them can find them with a DC 10 Survival or Perception check. You can make them easier or more difficult to find. Making the signs big or putting them in an obvious place sets the DC lower (DC 5 or DC 0). Similarly, you can make the signs difficult to find by hiding them. In this case, make a Survival check to set the DC for finding the signs, but the minimum DC remains 10. Older signs are harder to find, and poor visibility can make trail signs more difficult to locate, as indicated in the find trail signs modifiers table.
Reading Trail Signs: If the character who placed trail signs created them correctly, the Survival check DC to read them is the same as that it took to create them. If the check fails by 4 or less, the reader cannot make any sense of the signs. If the check fails by 5 or more, the reader perceives an incorrect message.
If the character who placed trail signs failed his or her check and created meaningless signs, you can still try to read them. The DC is the same as the DC to create the signs; if you succeed, you know the signs are meaningless. If you fail by 4 or less, you cannot make sense of the signs. If you fail by 5 or more, you perceive an incorrect message.
Action: Creating trail signs requires a Full-Round Action that provokes Attacks of Opportunity. Locating trail signs usually is reactive; when you have a chance to notice trail signs, you can make a Survival or Perception check without using an action. However, if you know or suspect someone has left trail signs in a certain area, you can use a Full-Round Action to search a 5-foot-by-5-foot area; this requires you to use the Perception skill, with the same DC as the Survival DC to locate the signs. Reading trail signs requires a Standard Action that does not provoke Attacks of Opportunity.
Try Again: If you fail to create or read trail signs, you cannot try again. If you fail a reactive check to find trail signs someone else has left, you cannot try again (you simply pass by the signs). When using the Perception skill to locate signs that you know or suspect are present, you can try again.

Monster Harvesting

If you wish to harvest the useful components of a dead monster, you can use survival to attempt to do so. Harvesting a monster requires knowledge of what parts of it may be of use, and the proper techniques to remove them. This is accomplished with a Knowledge check appropriate to the monster in question, as detailed in the Knowledge skill article. If the Knowledge check is made by a different character, a -2 penalty is applied to any harvesting check you make using that result.
Each component of value has a harvest DC, maximum quantity, and component modifier, all revealed by a successful Knowledge check. A survival check is rolled for each component, with a successful check indicating the maximum quantity of that component has been harvested, and a failure reducing the quantity harvested by 1 for each multiple of the component modifier the check failed by.
Action: Harvesting a component from a monster takes a minimum of 1 minute, and can often be longer depending on the complexity of the process (as determined by the DM).
Try Again: An attempt to harvest monster components can only be made once for each component in question. Any components not harvested by a failed check are ruined in the attempt.
Restrictions: Many components degrade quickly once harvested, and require a Craft (alchemy) check to preserve beyond a limited time span.
Special: If you use a Harvesting Kit or Surgeon's Tools in conjunction with this skill, you get a +2 bonus to your survival checks.

Skill Unlock

A character who selects this skill for the Signature Skill feat or a Rogue who selects it for their Rogue's Edge class ability gains the following abilities when they reach the designated number of ranks in this skill:

• 5 Ranks: You reduce all nonlethal damage you take from heat, cold, Starvation, or Thirst by 1 point for every 5 ranks you possess in Survival.
• 10 Ranks: You can track creatures that leave no tracks, including flying and swimming creatures and creatures using trackless step or pass without trace, taking a –20 penalty on your Survival check.
• 15 Ranks: Once per day, you can spend 1 hour and attempt a DC 30 Survival check. Success grants you Cold Resistance or Fire Resistance 5 for 24 hours. You can share this with one ally for every 5 by which you exceeded the check.
• 20 Ranks: You take only a –10 penalty when tracking creatures that leave no tracks.

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