IRL survivalism doesn't involve monsters that can breath fire and fly faster than you can run.
Yes, but this is also set in the beginner region where the weakest animals / monsters are.
Wouldn't the World of Tonia concept of "survivalism" also scale with the difficulty of the world? In a fantasy world, you would still have wilderness experts who taught survivalism classes and made recommendations on how to deal with the exact same situations... like if your boat sank and now you're stuck on an island.
The quest does not specifically mention exactly what kind of monsters are around, so there's enormous room for interpretation.
That's true, but I try to keep it realistic. If either of my characters find even so much as a bear while without equipment, they will die.
To be technically realistic, bears (and wolves) (on Earth) actually quite non-aggressive. Their danger is over-exaggerated in the media/fiction, and they generally attack when they feel surprised or threatened or provoked. Humans kill these animals more than these animals threaten humans.
Regardless — that IRL tangent aside — the average power level of AG's universe is evidently also slightly higher than Earth.
An average Level 4-5 character (i.e. city guard) is expected to have 1-2 skills, and they definitely aren't "normal Earth humans" anymore.
How those skills are employed will certainly vary and depends on your creativity as an author.
"Try to befriend", you mean. I'm pretty sure that anything strong enough to protect Okarin would also not care about them at all. I mean, like you said, you could just "make it happen", but I tend to avoid those sorts of things.
I think we just have a difference in perspective? For me — my interest is in writing a story — and less so simulating an outcome.
Consequently, I develop my stories in ways that I think will lead to growth for my characters and demonstrate some aspect of a theme.
One of Okarin's major character themes is finding allies and friends in people that you would ordinarily expect it — so I would definitely pull a plot like a giant ostrich mother getting her eggs stolen by a giant Kukuu bird — and then spending the rest of the quest with Okarin + Giant Ostrich.
Anyway, that was just a bunch of stuff I wanted to complain tell you about. The long and short of it is that you can only survive if you can use magic, or have some sort of inhuman ability.
Alright! I'll think about it for sure! ^^ Thank you for the feedback, it's really valuable!
I'm also a little curious — exactly how were you planning on growing your character later?
The quests and almost everything gets progressively harder, so at least to me, the matter of growing your character is primarily a question of
when you want them to demonstrate those major steps of growth?