Depends on what you mean by fun.One of the things I find myself frequently going back to these days is the oft-quoted that “A session of D&D is 30 minutes of fun stretched out to fill 3 hours.”
It's more about lessening the mechanical burden to make things flow faster. Instead of 40-pages of combat rules, you have one page. Instead of 40-page of treasure and magic item rules, you have a random chart. Rules light games don't fix things by relying on improv, they simply have fewer rules, hence the handling time for the rules is less...so the game moves faster.And while I don’t entirely agree with the ratio, the simple fact is that both D&D and all other tabletop RPGs definitely have slow moments where the game can start to feel like a slog. I know that there are rules-light RPGs that “fix” that by relying entirely on improv and storytelling, and while I know that works great for some groups, I don’t want a character’s effectiveness to hinge on their player’s ability to improv or justify their actions. That doesn’t work at every table.
For some resource management helps with immersion in the world and builds verisimilitude. That's important for some people and doesn't matter at all for others. It takes all kinds.In the early days, Dungeon Delves relied a lot on resource management as the key to the game. And while that kind of accounting may be “fun” to some players, to some of us, it’s a bit too close to what we do for a living. And I wonder if resource management and “attrition-based play” is what plays into that.
That is who the game was originally designed by and for. A lot of that has carried over if for no other reason than to appeal to nostalgia and tradition. There's a lot of more story- and narrative-focused games out there. If that's what you're looking for you're kind of in a golden age of RPGs. The market is littered with wonderful games to suit all kinds of preferences.When you’re starting with people who got into the hobby from a tactical wargame, that approach makes sense. These are the people for whom strategy, tactics, and logistics are fun, and something they want to do in their spare time.
The five-minute workday is a function of bad design coupled with gamers optimizing the fun out of games. If you give gamers the option of burning through a whole day's worth of resources in one fight, they will. So they do. Hence the five-minute workday. Design the game around one fight...design the PCs resources around one fight...and problem solved. The "30 minutes of fun in three hours" is a function of the mechanics being such a slog to use compared to what they represent in the fiction. A player's turn takes three minutes to handle yet it's supposed to represent six seconds in the game world. Streamline the rules so that a player's turn takes ten seconds or less, and you'll see that complaint die.I can’t help but wonder if leaning on that last piece is the source of the “15-minute day” problem and the “30 minutes of fun in 3 hours” comments. All games benefit from strategy, and that’s a big part of why people play them, but not everyone who likes strategy and tactics also enjoys logistics.
One of the things I find myself frequently going back to these days is the oft-quoted that “A session of D&D is 30 minutes of fun stretched out to fill 3 hours.”
I prefer to have a mix of short-term and long-term ability resource management. PF2 sort of gets there via focus spells, but they have the issues of (a) being actual spells, so not suited for purely martial classes, and (b) being 1/encounter until rather high levels (usually 10 or 12, and at that point costing a class feat to get the ability to recover 2 focus points).I very much enjoy the adventuring day and resource attrition. That is, abilities, spells, etc.. planned and used strategically to make it through the day. I enjoy my fantasy RPGs to be built this way.
That's pretty much where I sit too. "It's not a problem until it is".I do not enjoy tracking food, water, ammo, etc... I dont mind moments in the campaign where these items are an issue temporarily to be navigated, but I dont want to track them in detail in perpetuity.
I think you're on to something, but I don't think it ties directly to counts of torches, rations, or arrows. Along with "do I have enough of those," seems to follow: " do I have my sword? " "Did I don enough armor?" I'm saying there's a good question there, but I hope the question doesn't sound too much like "should characters have inventory?"It seems that some of the presumption is that there’s fun to be gained from tracking torches, rations, pints of oil, or what have you.
This led me to have a bit of an epiphany about the whole concept of attrition-based games, and whether resource management should be a requisite part of a tabletop roleplaying game. That decision has vast implications for game design generally, but most directly for damage tracking, narrative control, and spell-casting. And I’m not even sure we’ve ever questioned whether or not it should be a part of the system. It’s so embedded in the DNA of RPGs, I feel like it hasn’t really been looked at critically.
If you mean spells and magic items, like potions and scrolls, yes. If you mean torches and rations, maybe, maybe not........
In the early days, Dungeon Delves relied a lot on resource management as the key to the game. .....