Resource Management, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying About Rations and Love Mana

[GobHag]

I think you point to another important aspect here: Versatility. There are usually a choice associated with how you use mana. Most games have only one use for an arrow or food, and in the latter there are not even a choice about if/when you are going to use it.

But this brings me to another thing: How would you feel like it if it was represented as a clock instead? 3 ticks and you are out of food, ticking every time you rest. That seem like a more popular way to represent things in the narrative culture, while still boiling down to essentially the same activity...

There are two problems with mundane/associated resource; How it's done and what it represents. Stuff like encumbrance or resource die or clocks are about the first, I'm gamist through and through so I recognize that all countdown/up are just clocks and that clocks are just HP for a variety of situations/events but I think the problem isn't about the squeeze, it's the juice itself. The very thing it's meant to represent is uninteresting to me.

Are you willing to use an emotion/mental health system where the character can get majorly depressed to the point of being suicidal? In your 'torches-and-10-foot-poles' dungeon crawling game?

 

[Enrahim]

There are two problems with mundane/associated resource; How it's done and what it represents. Stuff like encumbrance or resource die or clocks are about the first, I'm gamist through and through so I recognize that all countdown/up are just clocks and that clocks are just HP for a variety of situations/events but I think the problem isn't about the squeeze, it's the juice itself. The very thing it's meant to represent is uninteresting to me.

Are you willing to use an emotion/mental health system where the character can get majorly depressed to the point of being suicidal? In your 'torches-and-10-foot-poles' dungeon crawling game?

I think you might be hitting a nail on it's head when you use mundane/associated resource here. These concepts are not the same. Keeping track of the number of scrolls of wish you have in your back pack is from my understanding "associated", while I guess you would call it far from mundane.

So I suspect you might have misindentified the central division in your initial post. It isn't about abstract/dissociated power, but rather about that such "dissociated" resources tend to represent something less mundane in RPGs? I guess you wouldn't be as exited about tracking wakefulness, imunesystem capacity or "fatty energy reserves" as you would "power to alter reality as we know it"?

 

[GobHag]

I think you might be hitting a nail on it's head when you use mundane/associated resource here. These concepts are not the same. Keeping track of the number of scrolls of wish you have in your back pack is from my understanding "associated", while I guess you would call it far from mundane.

So I suspect you might have misindentified the central division in your initial post. It isn't about abstract/dissociated power, but rather about that such "dissociated" resources tend to represent something less mundane in RPGs? I guess you wouldn't be as exited about tracking wakefulness, imunesystem capacity or "fatty energy reserves" as you would "power to alter reality as we know it"?

That is true on the form of dis/associated resources, than you for maming me realize that, but I was mostly thinking about the baseline assumptions of what resources are tracked and that I see them more on the spectrum rather than a strict divide. And think I'm fine with wish scrolls because as you said, it's spectacular, but also really powerful so of course it should be limited.

However, the other reason I'm a-okay with wish scrolls is that the player isn't tracking it's up and down in a... consistent? repeated? manner. Like if you have a per-encounter recharging mana system but then give the players 3 mana potions to recharge it in the middle of a fight, I don't consider those 3 mana potions a negative/issue for the resource system.

Hmmmmm, this is making me realize that another issue I have with most mundane resources is the delayed feedback and future anxiety. Rations, arrows, oils and the like are more 'sensitive' to the GM's choices and prep since they're tied to the world/fiction more strongly than a barbarian's Rage so there's less guarantee when I can get a refill

Oh, very much true. Surprisingly, I really am fine with action economy stuff(I think they're fun strategic meta elements) and that literally is about how if you lose the 'resource' you can't do anything.

 

[haakon1]

Seems like everyone on the thread so far agrees logistics don’t matter.

I disagree with that.

Why?

I think D&D should still show its wargaming roots. And the maxim comes to mitt mind: amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics.

In a campaign where food, arrows, torches, tents, and encumbrance don’t matter, you rule out scenarios where those things matter. Such as wilderness exploration, long-range recon patrols, extended wars, a storm cutting you off in the mountains, trapped in a dungeon or desert island, and being under siege.

I suppose if you don’t want those scenarios as DM, it doesn’t matter.

I go by the rule from the game RECON that if it’s not on your character sheet, your character doesn’t have it.

I’ve said that before here, so it’s not the first time we’ve discussed this.

 

[zakael19]

Are you willing to use an emotion/mental health system where the character can get majorly depressed to the point of being suicidal? In your 'torches-and-10-foot-poles' dungeon crawling game?

Darkest Dungeon the TTRPG?

 

[Enrahim]

Rations, arrows, oils and the like are more 'sensitive' to the GM's choices and prep since they're tied to the world/fiction more strongly than a barbarian's Rage so there's less guarantee when I can get a refill.

I think this one also touches upon something essential. I typically skip food/torch/arrow tracking myself - but there is one particular kind of game experience where I would would at the very least track food and torches: That is in the kind of experience where I as a player have to make an educated guess on how much is needed - and there is a benefit to bringing little.

The classic example is : You are by the dragon hoard. There is no way you can manage to bring even a fraction of the gold out. How much food do you need for the trip home?

At this point the players should have a reasonable idea about what sort of dangers might lurk on the way back, including the odds of getting lost. As such they should be able to make a calculated risk. This gives the immediate excitement of a gamble, and the pay of time-frame is relatively modest.

However if you play in a game where there is even a hint of the GM "choosing" anything that might significantly affect the outcome of this scenario, the entire gamble experience falls trough. Noone would want to play the rulette if they know the house is cheating (unless they know the house for some reason is cheating in their favor, in which case it still removes the tension)

So I think this might be an important observation. The circumstances that might make tracking food exciting and meaningful is not present in many play-styles. In particular modern narrative games where players and GM has a large degree of autorship during play, likely are not compatible with this kind of gambling, as the participants has too much control of the longer term outcome.

Compare this with a style of play with pregenerated locales with no "blanks", fixed encounter tables for both adventure location and the path to and from, hard rules for movement speeds, and chances to get lost, and an ethos of GM as a referee that should not create content on the fly - and I think it should be recognisable that this is an environement where players actually might be able to make educated gambles relevant for the scope of an entire expedition within the framework of the game.