| Another reason for the preference for "heroic"/"fantastic" resources over mundane resources might be that it's easier to create rules for made-up stuff than for things that exist.
How could you determine whether a travel adventure with mundane resource management is fair? How often do you need to place food sources and water sources, and how do you ensure the players have to be smart to find them, but not too smart? ANd how do you all that without it seeming "unrealistic"?
That a monster can use its Breath weapon in 1d4+1 rounds or that your daily attack power returns only after a 6 hour rest period doesn't hurt the believability of the situation much, since that daily attack power and the breath weapon don't map to something easily identifiable in our average lives - in fact, most oft the time not even in non-average lives (like that of soldiers or firefighters or survivalists).
__________________ Mustrum "Gummibärchen helfen auch" Ridcully Thoughts of the Arch Chancellor - My weblog on EN World - containing game related material, like: house rules, design theories, reviews, play reports, adventure ideas
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