Out of curiosity, have you played and enjoyed survival games in other media/settings? Sort of, is it the style of game you're not into, or the particular implementation of early D&D?
I haven't. It's a long time since I've played any Traveller, and never as much of it as I've played D&D and other fantasy games, but to the extent that Traveller can take on a survival vibe I tend to find that tedious too. And I've never had players who are into it.
I don't think this is necessarily incompatible with a survivalist approach, myself, but I can see how a constant pressure would necessarily force some compromises.
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"Dungeon Survival" focuses on the adventure as the main unit of play rather than the encounter.
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"Dungeon Survival" gives an element of challenge and strategy to the adventure as a whole, where it matters what in-character actions you perform, rather than simply what attacks and defenses you make. It enables failure without TPK, and success without total success. It emphasizes at-table play instead of pre-table character creation.
I like the encounter as the main focus of the "accounting" elements of RPG play - it makes record keeping simpler (though keeping track of dailies, action points etc for my group still causes issues sometimes, especially because there is a tendency for my players to print out a new character sheet to bring along to a session rather than to keep track of the old one that had all that resource stuff marked up on it in pencil).
I like the adventure to unfold primarily through changes in fictional position than changes in mechanical position (though sometimes these overlap - eg recovering an artefact from a ruined temple is both a fictional and a mechanical change). I find that once the players are invested in that fictional position, it matters a great deal what actins are performed, and it enables failure and success along the lines you describe, without long term resource management being all that important. (Unless you want to talk metaphorically about reputations, relationships, geographic location, metaphysical location, etc as "resources". I personally don't find that metaphor very helpful or illuminating.)
One thing I like about 4e combat is that it makes choices matter (ie tactics as well as build seem important, at least for me and my players) and that it creates scope for those choices to feed nicely into the fictional positioning. This is in part because I find 4e combat relatively forgiving over a wide range of choices - I don't feel any pressure towards narrow optimal paths - and in part because I find 4e characters to very naturally propel themselves into the fictional situation once they start doing things in combat (with the possible excpetion of the archer ranger, who can very much just stand at the side and pling arrows - I have a small and steady group, so haven't seen a particularly wide range of builds in play, but this one seems to me to be noticeably weaker in this aspect of its design than the others that I have seen).
If I wan't GMing 4e I'd probably be GMing HARP or Burning Wheel. Both of those do have longer term resource management - HARP has spell points and lengthy natural healing, and BW has the latter. For the same reasons that get discussed in relation to 3E wizards, nova-ing and the 15 minute day, I'm not the biggest fan of RM/HARP-style spell points. But long term healing doesn't both me per se, but - especially in BW, which doesn't have magical healing alternatives - would require a change in pacing from that which 4e favours. I wouldn't envisage long term healing changing the overall dynamics of choice and consequence, however. It would just be another element in the mix.
the use of resources over a longer time frame than a single encounter provides for a satisfying pattern of active time and down time that is a rewarding psychological state to achieve. A game that is BAM BAM BAM all the time becomes tedius, especially over the longer time-frames a D&D game usually occupies.
This is interesting, and perhaps gets closer to the issue of "filler" encounters. These days I play fortnightly for sessions of 4 hours or so. But even when I used to play weekly for sessions of 5 hours or so, I never felt the tedium you describe. I find that the spacing between sessions, plus the natural spacing that is introduced by food breaks, toilet breaks, resolving mechanical questions, dividing loot, remembering who said what to whom last session in the key political negotiation, etc, etc - all work to introduce the necessary downtime for the participants in the game,
without any need to replicate that downtime in the gameworld.
This produces situations of fictional absurdity, or at least fridge-logicality - for example, the gametime that has passed in my current 4e campaign is about two months, in which the PCs have risen from level 1 to 13 over 3 years of play. But the
players don't have the feeling of emotional drain or jadedness that such an experience would produce in real life, precisely because for them all this stuff has happened over 3 years.
I see this as analogous to Marvel comics, which at least in the 70s and 80s would have a Chrismtas episode every year despite the fact that nothing like 12 months of action had taken place in the comics. It's a compromise between fictional time and real time, which (in my view at least) is harmless as long as no one at the table actually makes a point of it. And 4e in particular is fairly forgiving for this, because the looseness of fit between mechanics and fiction means that there is no need, in the fiction, to suppose that in 2 months of adventuring the PCs have quintupled (or whatever) their physical and magical prowess. The only change in the fiction that the mechanics
mandate being recognised is the gaining of their paragon paths.
Out of curiosity, have you played and enjoyed survival games in other media/settings? Sort of, is it the style of game you're not into, or the particular implementation of early D&D?
