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

[Thomas Shey]

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.

Some people find that the worst of both worlds because it makes the resource exhaustion random (albeit weighted).

 

[Piperken]

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?

Yes, if it's well thought out (ie something besides sanity, let's say) and provides cues for players to seize on in the moment.

 

[Joerg Baumgartner]

Some people find that the worst of both worlds because it makes the resource exhaustion random (albeit weighted).

As a simulationist, one might blame the randomness on ecological or market fluctuations beyond the control of the character/organisation. Sometimes the nth drink is the one too many, even if usually not. Sometimes your rare item comes to the market as the third of its kind. Sometimes some hiccough in the supply chain has induced an unforeseen scarcity.
Giving such effects a weighted chance to apply seems realistic to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

As a simulationist, one might blame the randomness on ecological or market fluctuations beyond the control of the character/organisation. Sometimes the nth drink is the one too many, even if usually not. Sometimes your rare item comes to the market as the third of its kind. Sometimes some hiccough in the supply chain has induced an unforeseen scarcity.
Giving such effects a weighted chance to apply seems realistic to me.

Yes, but if you're more on the gamist end it just adds one more ruddy random check with potentially broad impact in a realm where you probably aren't that thrilled about engaging in the first place.

I'm not speaking hypothetically; this was something Alternity 2e did with ammunition consumption at one point during its playtest, and two of my players indicated their displeasure about it. At length.