Aldarc
Legend
I would say that "different game systems don't use hit points..." That is more factually true.
Is Resource Management “Fun?”
- Thread starter JohnSnow
- Start date
Jd Smith1
Hero
Your first mistake is playing Pathfinder.
But I believe the opposite: misers make excellent PCs, because that makes for very easy manipulation. There's nothing like debt and expenses to make them quick to take a good-paying job without looking too hard at the details.
Compound interest is a powerful force.
Jd Smith1
Hero
Exactly. The first rule of enhancing a campaign via resource management is doing away with the Wal Mart approach: villages don't have weaponry, armor, etc, for sale.
Then keep scenarios from being 'go to Ye Olde Ruins and return'. Make them find the ruins. Which leads to Location B. Which presents an opportunity at location C. By the time they get home again, its six months and two seasons later, half their equipment has been replaced, they've got a dozen topics to research, and their entire investment situation needs an overhaul.
Most of all, don't let scenarios be neat little packages. Loose ends should build up and lead to complications. Helping Group A pisses off Group B. Killing Villain 1 inconveniences Coven 2.
Keep the PCs hopping. They should be concerned with who is plotting what, who is angry about that, what sort of planning is needed. Problems large and small.
Committed Hero
Adventurer
Dwindling resources can be a way to heighten tension in a survival horror game.
Composer99
Hero
I'm inclined to say that if you're only having fun for half an hour of a three-hour TTRPG session, something has gone very wrong? Not for nothing, I think, are TTRPGs part of the "hobby game" niche. Hobbies generally can include model assembly, gardening, cross-stitch, and so on, none of which are "fun" in the sense that we usually mean the term, but are clearly very engaging and rewarding for them as like it.
Or put another way, maybe when we talk about "fun" in RPGs, we mean something different from, say, the thrill of a roller coaster ride or a game of friend-or-foe tag.
(All that said, TTRPG play still ought to be fun, even with a more "hobby"-like sense of the term!)
Apropos of resource management and fun in TTRPGs, I'm confident to assert as fact that one can and will have engaging and rewarding gameplay with any given amount of resource management, from the most detail-oriented "how many fractions of a pint of oil did I just use in my lantern?" tracking to the most abstract die roll mechanic to almost none at all (*). I think two big factors are player tolerances/preferences and gameplay focus.
Apropos of player tolerances/preferences, different players are going to prefer different levels of management, either in and of itself or as befits the gameplay focus of the game. Well and good. We only run into problems when someone starts assuming their preference is "objectively" superior.
Apropos of gameplay focus, as others have noted upthread, plenty of players seem to enjoy managing resources such as hit points or spell slots while playing D&D, even as they chafe against managing torches or rations. The game's focus has been on heroic deeds and rich tactical combat - thematically since about the mid-1980s and mechanically since 3e came out - so managing the resources that facilitate that gameplay is intrinsically rewarding; managing resources that are orthogonal to such gameplay - torches, rations, and carrying capacity - is down to player preference.
Contrast that to pemerton's gameplay examples from Torchbearer, where players are quite clearly engaged by such minutiae as whether they even have shoes! The focus of more survival-oriented games drives engagement with such matters in a way that the focus of heroism-oriented games do not.
Of course, one thing about D&D in particular is that it inhabits a weird space where people want it to enable both heroic fantasy and survival-style play at once!
One thing I think also matters is how "solvable" a resource management problem is. Hit points are rarely a "solved" problem of resource management, for instance. Even if you play a 5-minute adventuring day, you can run out of hit points in that one encounter. Going hungry in Minecraft matters - up until you have set up your pen with animals and/or your fields of wheat and can always have stacks of food in your inventory, whereupon it ceases to be an interesting problem.
(*) I'm not referring to some sort of "god-mode" approach; say rather that there are TTRPGs where managing resources as such just isn't part of gameplay. I have yet to play, say, Monsterhearts (and probably won't), but I feel fairly confident saying that resource management, at least as it's being conceived of in this thread, just isn't part of the game at all, with the possible exception of managing your relationships with other player characters and NPCs and leveraging them to achieve your goals in gameplay. (I could, of course, be mistaken and would be happy to be corrected.) Superhero genre games are another example.
Or put another way, maybe when we talk about "fun" in RPGs, we mean something different from, say, the thrill of a roller coaster ride or a game of friend-or-foe tag.
(All that said, TTRPG play still ought to be fun, even with a more "hobby"-like sense of the term!)
Apropos of resource management and fun in TTRPGs, I'm confident to assert as fact that one can and will have engaging and rewarding gameplay with any given amount of resource management, from the most detail-oriented "how many fractions of a pint of oil did I just use in my lantern?" tracking to the most abstract die roll mechanic to almost none at all (*). I think two big factors are player tolerances/preferences and gameplay focus.
Apropos of player tolerances/preferences, different players are going to prefer different levels of management, either in and of itself or as befits the gameplay focus of the game. Well and good. We only run into problems when someone starts assuming their preference is "objectively" superior.
Apropos of gameplay focus, as others have noted upthread, plenty of players seem to enjoy managing resources such as hit points or spell slots while playing D&D, even as they chafe against managing torches or rations. The game's focus has been on heroic deeds and rich tactical combat - thematically since about the mid-1980s and mechanically since 3e came out - so managing the resources that facilitate that gameplay is intrinsically rewarding; managing resources that are orthogonal to such gameplay - torches, rations, and carrying capacity - is down to player preference.
Contrast that to pemerton's gameplay examples from Torchbearer, where players are quite clearly engaged by such minutiae as whether they even have shoes! The focus of more survival-oriented games drives engagement with such matters in a way that the focus of heroism-oriented games do not.
Of course, one thing about D&D in particular is that it inhabits a weird space where people want it to enable both heroic fantasy and survival-style play at once!
One thing I think also matters is how "solvable" a resource management problem is. Hit points are rarely a "solved" problem of resource management, for instance. Even if you play a 5-minute adventuring day, you can run out of hit points in that one encounter. Going hungry in Minecraft matters - up until you have set up your pen with animals and/or your fields of wheat and can always have stacks of food in your inventory, whereupon it ceases to be an interesting problem.
(*) I'm not referring to some sort of "god-mode" approach; say rather that there are TTRPGs where managing resources as such just isn't part of gameplay. I have yet to play, say, Monsterhearts (and probably won't), but I feel fairly confident saying that resource management, at least as it's being conceived of in this thread, just isn't part of the game at all, with the possible exception of managing your relationships with other player characters and NPCs and leveraging them to achieve your goals in gameplay. (I could, of course, be mistaken and would be happy to be corrected.) Superhero genre games are another example.
The Shadow
Hero
I'm well aware, thanks. I was appealing to an abstraction I knew he'd be used to. I personally find abstracting Supply much more natural than abstracting wounds.
Your suggestions are not in the middle though: they are on the don't keep track of things side. The character can shoot 30, 50, or 100 arrows before it's said "oh you shout a couple arrows".
Though if you can keep track of HP, you can keep track of arrows too....
The Shadow
Hero
Of course I can. It is well within my capabilities. I just don't see any value-added that justifies the effort in my game.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
You put that in the game, right in the equipment section. That way, you can read it and then you do know what your characters are eating.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
Hit points are an old, familiar abstraction; a necessary evil, if you will. Adding supply points is increasing the amount of abstraction in the game. Its simply not a matter of "some abstraction that's been with us forever is acceptable, so adding more is no big deal".
Aldarc
Legend
This argument basically amounts to special pleading by arguing that hit points are an accetable exception due to some sort of imaginary or abstract, if you will, grandfather clause.
I would nevertheless encourage you and others to try some of these games that have more abstract supply. Your experiences may vary, but I have personally found that the abstracted supply in a number of these games (e.g., Ironsworn, Stonetop, Black Hack, etc.) have somehow made supply feel more real and visceral for play than in games where supplies aren't abstracted.
Though to be clear, I don't think that there is one true way here. I don't think that abstracted supply inherently produces this outcome. I also believe that this is true for the reverse. Concrete supplies or resource management isn't some surefire way to increase realism or somehow makes this aspect of the game important or meaningful.
I understand that some strands of D&D, for example, take great pride in resource management and meticulously hand-tracking inventory of supplies. There is obviously a legitimate place for this sort of survival-based dungeon-delving game in D&D and other TTRPGs. Some claim that this represents old school D&D. However, I also get the impression that there is also an equally long tradition for a lot of inventory management and supplies to get handwaved in D&D (and its ilk) by the GM and players. This is despite D&D have unabstracted supplies. For the latter approaches to the game, unabstracted supplies seem to get in the way of the fun. In fact, this seems to be the prevailing approach to D&D at present. Matt Colville even had a fairly recent video about how a lot of the items in the equipment section in 5e D&D was mostly vestigial to make the game feel like D&D rather than being a vital aspect of its present play.
Again, this is nothing new in D&D's tradition. As @hawkeyefan says, there are a lot of magic items and spells that amount to circumventing or bypassing the resource-management mini-game and/or turning it into a trivial part of the overall game.
delericho
Legend
IMO, resource management isn't fun in and of itself, but it can lead to fun down the line - if the archer is laboriously tracking his 200 arrows then that's just work, but once he's down to his last two or three that's much more interesting.
So I'd strongly advocate for keeping resource management in the game, but with advice to use it sparingly - it should only be used when it matters, and in those cases it should really matter. (Of course, how do you know when moving from the one case to the other?)
The other thing I'm inclined to note is that even in old school play, a lot of resource management went away fairly quickly - spells like continual light removed the need for torches, Tenser's floating disk and then bags of holding negated encumbrance, and so on. I suspect that even back in the day the tolerance for these things was pretty limited.
So I'd strongly advocate for keeping resource management in the game, but with advice to use it sparingly - it should only be used when it matters, and in those cases it should really matter. (Of course, how do you know when moving from the one case to the other?)
The other thing I'm inclined to note is that even in old school play, a lot of resource management went away fairly quickly - spells like continual light removed the need for torches, Tenser's floating disk and then bags of holding negated encumbrance, and so on. I suspect that even back in the day the tolerance for these things was pretty limited.
TaranTheWanderer
Legend
This is why I like World Without Numbers: you can’t physically carry 200 arrows. And, unless you have a pack animal, the things you can carry are fairly limited (depending on your strength). In my experience at least, getting down to your last 5 arrows is a much more common issue. It also makes tracking equipment much easier.
Of course, we don’t have a bag of holding and I imagine that their use in a game is a way of hand waiving a lot of tedious supply counting and encumbrance calculations. (Which WWN makes way easier)
Jd Smith1
Hero
Not in my experience. The spell bloat in D&D came long after I quit that system in the early 80s.
But there are many other games, including modern ones, that stick with the tried-and-true business of resource tracking.
I also find that players who come from video games are more inclined to respond well to resource management.
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
The games you are suggesting are largely narrative, a style I have little to no interest in (though I appreciate others do like it). And I strongly dislike magic as a tool to bypass resource management, despite its prevalence in modern D&D. My version of 5e tones down a lot of that stuff, which is a big reason why I love it.
Aldarc
Legend
Black Hack is not though. Its Usage Die mechanic has already been described in this thread.
That said, I would recommend trying some of these games out at least once, even if they are outside your usual preferences. There are a lot of great mechanics in these games, and I personally find that it's worth experiencing how other games handle things like resource management in different ways.
Warpiglet-7
Cry havoc! And let slip the pigs of war!
I do not like “free” light, food or water at the lowest levels. (I wish light was a spell and not a cantrip at least).
I realize though some prefer to get to the action and don’t want to have complications like that.
Though come to think of it….I don’t think we track water in any way!
Micah Sweet
Level Up & OSR Enthusiast
I have plans to run Star Trek Adventures, a game that makes strong use of metacurrency, aspects, and abstract resource management. I chose that game specifically because it's not too much out on a narrative limb, and because I love Star Trek. For most genres, that's not what I want.
The Shadow
Hero
They aren't a necessary evil. Plenty of games don't use hit points at all - some of them much grittier and more "realistic" than D&D. Using hit points is a choice at this point.
So I agree with @Aldarc - this is special pleading in favor of familiarity.
