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

[Bill Zebub]

I like resource management of physical items if it does not require a lot of bookkeeping.

I hate resource management of character abilities. E.g. mana, spell slots, x/day abilities, etc.

It’s not a verisimilitude issue, I just don’t enjoy “should I use it in this fight or save it for an unknown more desperate situation later?”

 

[kigmatzomat]

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.

My players use food for a lot of different things. To distract beasts, to barter/bribe "differently civilized" peoples, as bait, and as "alms" for the poor.

Even arrows, or at least steel arrow heads, can be bribes to stone-tool types.

Seems like everyone on the thread so far agrees logistics don’t matter.
I disagree with that.

I'm on team "logistics matter", but for food, water, arrows, torches, I think it depends where you are. Meaning traveling through the heartland where villages with inns are located every 5-6 miles, it doesn't matter. Mark off a couple of silver per travel-encounter when you reach the next village. Now if you don't have a pocket of gold coins, those silvers matter.

But you leave the roads to chase child-stealing slavers into the Vast Trackless Bog and all of a sudden logistics becomes important and your pocket of gold coins might be dead weight.

Story centric GMs should take the opportunity to use this as a way to drive tension. Do you try to bring your horses to the bog? If you don't, what supplies do you leave behind? And if you do, what will thr mounts forage? And if you manage to rescue the kids, what will you leave behind so the kids can ride?

 

[kigmatzomat]

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

How gracious and magnificient it is then, that D&D is now filled with proud amateurs such as myself

The "amateurs" quote is properly attributed to USMC General Robert Barrow, who in 1979 said "Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability in warfare” but it is sometimes attributed to General Omar Bradley.

However that is a modern retelling of a common aphorism that appears repeatedly in history:

• Sun Tzu “The line between disorder and order lies in logistics…”
• Alexander the Great “My logisticians are a humorless lot … they know if my campaign fails, they are the first ones I will slay.”
• Napoleon Bonaparte “an army marches on its stomach”

There is even a nursery rhyme version:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost.
For want of a horse, the messenger was lost.
For want of the message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
For want of a nail.

 

[billd91]

Keeping track of supplies/gear has (and probably still does) had implications for game balance - for the inter-PC balance sticklers. Back in 3e, one of the notable reasons wizards got a perceived increase in power was the simplification of rules that limited them in prior editions - including keeping track of material components.
But it also was an issue in a few other circumstances:
Strength dumping - this can be done with relative impunity in a game that doesn't track encumbrance, meaning a character can be loaded down any amount of gear or treasure and not have to make choices about what to loot from the dungeon
Archers - they can do a lot of damage from a relatively safe location compared to their melee counterparts. But if you track their ammunition, they can do so only for a limited time before they run out.

There's nothing particularly glamorous about tracking any of this stuff, and I understand why people hand wave it away. But you may notice effects downstream.

 

[GobHag]

I like resource management of physical items if it does not require a lot of bookkeeping.

I hate resource management of character abilities. E.g. mana, spell slots, x/day abilities, etc.

It’s not a verisimilitude issue, I just don’t enjoy “should I use it in this fight or save it for an unknown more desperate situation later?”

I can see the other benefit in that most physical items have flat but specific uses while 'mana' is useful in one, relatively wide, scenario such as 'combat'


Though spell slots are much much better at those niche and general situations of course

 

[Joerg Baumgartner]

Resource management can be abstracted as resistance rolls, with the starting difficulty depending on successes during preparation, and increasing difficulty with each resource roll failure not balanced by some act of foraging, trading or similar.

 

[Willie the Duck]

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

How gracious and magnificient it is then, that D&D is now filled with proud amateurs such as myself

The "amateurs" quote is properly attributed to USMC General Robert Barrow, who in 1979 said "Amateurs talk about strategy and tactics. Professionals talk about logistics and sustainability in warfare” but it is sometimes attributed to General Omar Bradley. However that is a modern retelling of a common aphorism that appears repeatedly in history: <examples>

My takeaway from the Barrow statement and the related references is that the notion is correct -- in the real world. In an elfgame, game systems focused on logistics are just another option of mechanical dials and levers one can focus on (and be skilled or unskilled at doing). They (preferring them, or excelling at them) do not make you the 'professional' among 'amateurs' among gamers. Everyone is best at the mechanics with which they have the most practice, and will falter (with some benefit from overall experience) using less familiar systems.

Except, what village has 10 days of salt-pork and sun-dried veggies, per adventurer, for sale? You could go find a standing army's quartermaster or even the marshal, and bribe her for supplies. Armies like gold, but they're not very easy to trade with.

My players use food for a lot of different things. To distract beasts, to barter/bribe "differently civilized" peoples, as bait, and as "alms" for the poor.

{or any other of the many examples people have brought up}
Stuff like this are good ways of making the logistics part of the game more interesting. If the game historically had done more of this (ex. rules for how many rations were available at a given hamlet), I think more people* would have glommed onto the mechanics to begin with.
*It still would not address those with the "I sat down to play 'Dungeons and Dragons,' not 'Ledgers and Logistics'" issue, but that seems to be a much more base-principle preferred-playstyle difference.

Keeping track of supplies/gear has (and probably still does) had implications for game balance - for the inter-PC balance sticklers. Back in 3e, one of the notable reasons wizards got a perceived increase in power was the simplification of rules that limited them in prior editions - including keeping track of material components.
But it also was an issue in a few other circumstances:
Strength dumping - this can be done with relative impunity in a game that doesn't track encumbrance, meaning a character can be loaded down any amount of gear or treasure and not have to make choices about what to loot from the dungeon
Archers - they can do a lot of damage from a relatively safe location compared to their melee counterparts. But if you track their ammunition, they can do so only for a limited time before they run out.

There's nothing particularly glamorous about tracking any of this stuff, and I understand why people hand wave it away. But you may notice effects downstream.

There are absolutely benefits to the game in terms of interesting things you can do or play patterns you can support (oftentimes in terms of giving cost to alternatives). The (in-)glamorous part of it is genuinely the design challenge -- how do you make people want to do these things that then open up all this extra design space. A logistic puzzle in facilitating logistic puzzles, as it were.

 

[kigmatzomat]

My takeaway from the Barrow statement and the related references is that the notion is correct -- in the real world. In an elfgame, game systems focused on logistics are just another option of mechanical dials and levers one can focus on (and be skilled or unskilled at doing). They (preferring them, or excelling at them) do not make you the 'professional' among 'amateurs' among gamers. Everyone is best at the mechanics with which they have the most practice, and will falter (with some benefit from overall experience) using less familiar systems.

Note that the OP was also in the context of wargame-style rpgs. The term "campaign" is a vestigial sign of most fantasy rpg's wargame heritage. Note this is aligned with the oft-neglected "exploration" pillar of game play. The difference between a trek to the north pole and a military campaign into hostile territory is hardly perceptible on the first day, or even week, after it actually launches.

There's other gamer aphorisms like "anything can become an interesting game to someone", "there are people who yuck your yum and vice versa" and "if you think X is boring, make it exciting."

1E/Earthdawn/4e style "points of light" games, where there are small clusters of civilization surrounded by weeks of unpopulated terrain, are very much logistics based.

An RP variant of this is the "populated but refuses to deal with your kind" game, where you can't walk into the plentiful stores but have to find a shady black market dealer willing to handle your tainted, defiled coin (at a markup).

Logistics/inventory is also key in plenty of other scenarios. Do your PCs get to carry their rucksack and have weapons and shield strapped to every limb while meeting royalty? What about having dinner at the inn? Going to visit a priest in their church? Walking around in town?

My players usually wind up with a "couth social call" and "don't scare the civilians" inventory in addition to their standard "loaded for bear" adventurer-style inventories. Some campaigns (wargame call-back!) also involve the "royal/hoity-toity" inventory where anything bigger than a belt knife is verboten and visible armor is right out (mithral chain/breastplates are in high demand along with ring, cloaks, and bracers of defense).

Heck, one of the RP reasons for my players to make nice with the nobility and get knighted is because only knights can wear armor to "couth social calls" in some lands and only a very particular subset of titles can be armed in "royal/hoity-toity" settings. (IMC the Feywild respect knighthood and "royal champions" of all lands but scorn ruffians and pretenders)

 

[Willie the Duck]

Note that the OP was also in the context of wargame-style rpgs. The term "campaign" is a vestigial sign of most fantasy rpg's wargame heritage. Note this is aligned with the oft-neglected "exploration" pillar of game play. The difference between a trek to the north pole and a military campaign into hostile territory is hardly perceptible on the first day, or even week, after it actually launches.

The OP was asking why people liked certain playstyles. I don't see that it was exclusively in the context of any specific game style. My understanding of the OP premise was to dissect the reason why people like/dislike the playstyle.

Re: wargaming--haakon1 also mentioned D&D's wargaming roots, and they are undeniable. D&D started as an add-on to a wargame (+braunstein). I'm not 100% sure if the logistics aspect of the game was more contingent on that*, or EGG's notion about what players of this new proto-game liked to do ("fight things and collect treasure") and creating a play dynamic around the important decisions that come up in that context (press-on/press-your-luck or retreat with what you've collected so far). Either way, the focus on encumbrance and reward for how much loot you could cart out of the dungeon (often in heavy piles of copper coins) make very clear the initial focus on logistics that the game had.
*one of the corollary points of the game being based on a wargame is that it must be something more than a wargame, else it wouldn't exist -- they already had one of those-Chainmail.

That's why it's so interesting to me that many people whom I know started in the (pre-2E) TSR era didn't or don't now want to deal with that kind of logistics. Also the places in the game rules indicate that the devs also didn't (always) want to deal with it (ex: bags of holding showing up in LBB oD&D, the entire basic/classic line devoting a fixed encumbrance to rations/survival gear and not updating that when the game supposedly shifts to wilderness hexcrawling).

There's other gamer aphorisms like "anything can become an interesting game to someone", "there are people who yuck your yum and vice versa" and "if you think X is boring, make it exciting."

I think that's what you, GMMichael, and others have been giving examples of. It's certainly worked for some of my groups. I think what happened historically is that, instead of making it exciting, many groups simply ignored it/glossed over it/made or found fixes to not have to worry about it. That's where I think some added support in the rules text might have done something to sway some minds.

Logistics/inventory is also key in plenty of other scenarios. Do your PCs get to carry their rucksack and have weapons and shield strapped to every limb while meeting royalty? What about having dinner at the inn? Going to visit a priest in their church? Walking around in town?

My players usually wind up with a "couth social call" and "don't scare the civilians" inventory in addition to their standard "loaded for bear" adventurer-style inventories. Some campaigns (wargame call-back!) also involve the "royal/hoity-toity" inventory where anything bigger than a belt knife is verboten and visible armor is right out (mithral chain/breastplates are in high demand along with ring, cloaks, and bracers of defense).

Heck, one of the RP reasons for my players to make nice with the nobility and get knighted is because only knights can wear armor to "couth social calls" in some lands and only a very particular subset of titles can be armed in "royal/hoity-toity" settings. (IMC the Feywild respect knighthood and "royal champions" of all lands but scorn ruffians and pretenders)

In a BRP-based game my group kitbashed together, we made an entire social rules system which included clothing. There was a rock-paper-scissors chart of what various outfits were strong and weak against, as well as overall levels of effect. This was effectively the 'goals/collectables' for the party Face characters (whereas fighting types might be looking for high-quality weapons and armor, etc.; and casters new spells, etc.). It allowed a lot of variety, planning, coordination, and trade-offs (so logistics, briefly). It's a great example of how you can make logistics fun, and I think a reason it had so much buy-in was because it wasn't a commodity-level thing you just selected off an equipment list when going to town to re-stock. Instead, you had to find out that the courtier color to wear was crimson, that wearing 1000 gp earings would be seen as putting yourself above the lord you were attempting to influence, and that the local fashion requires rolled cuffs.