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.