Well, one aspect of the game is and always has been resource management; and I think it does the whole thing a disservice to ignore this aspect completely even while handwaving a few of the more tedious bits.
I love
well-made resource management. That's actually something I've been championing in my main MMO of choice, Final Fantasy XIV. They've stripped out too much resource management from the game's jobs, though the new Pictomancer is a huge breath of fresh air on that front and gives me hope that things will get better.
My problem is that a lot of the systems people propose for resource-management are...well, frankly,
bad. Most rules for "carrying capacity" are boring, fiddly, and exclusively there to punish (often
minor) failure, with no possibility of rewarding success. Monitoring rations can be fun in the limited context of something like Dark Sun or a specifically survival-focused game, but outside that context it quickly becomes a boring chore.
In real life, failing to do stuff like this (in game terms) would mean you "suffer a debuff/condition." Eat too much or too little, or at the wrong times, or the same thing too often, or the wrong kinds of things, and you'll suffer various conditions. Fail to wash, or use the bathroom, or sleep, etc., etc. Yet I see no effort to add bathroom-use or varied-diet rules,
because they wouldn't be interesting. Carrying capacity is only a concern because Gygax had such a love affair with heisting as a core design principle. Even the inventory-tetris of several RPGs is not particularly interesting or engaging. I've seen small efforts at trying to make carrying/logistics/etc. stuff interesting, but most folks just keep putting out the exact same basic and badly-made rules over and over again because they're trivial to implement, even though they suck to actually USE.
If we're going to have resource-management as a mechanic, it needs to be
fun to manage resources. Which, almost certainly, means there need to be rewards, player-tangible or at least clearly player-visible rewards, for clever resource management--not just punishments for inept (or merely not-perfect!) management.
Or, far more fun, doing the wrong thing for the right reasons or the right thing for the wrong reasons....
No. That is not fun for me, except in small doses. Genuinely doing morally wrong things in gaming makes me feel gross. Doesn't matter whether it's TTRPGs or CRPGs or even freeform roleplay. I literally
do not have fun being a bad person in gaming. It just sours the entire experience.
Agreed; and that tangentially points to somethng that has been a hole in the D&D rules since 1974: there's no game mechanic for someone dying slowly or clinging to life for several days.
While that is potentially somewhat interesting, as a gameplay element, those are going to be...pretty not-great experiences. "You are definitely dead, there is no saving you" just casts a pall over the experience.
Some people might find such a rule useful, so I could see value in implementing it (4e actually would do a really good job with that via its Condition Track--you'd just modify it slightly so there's no "getting better," only delaying getting
worse). That said, in general these rules would not be particularly useful to most tables because they just...wouldn't be particularly fun to play around with.
I very much agree about the problem of rules designed for geometric prettiness (or geometric convenience!) but don't agree about the realism piece, as I feel that's what the rules should first and foremost be there to emulate: the in-game reality.
But that's precisely the problem: the map is not the territory, as I am fond of saying, and trying for total emulation is both a fool's errand and
extremely deleterious to the game experience. That doesn't mean that providing a
grounded experience is bad; far from it, groundedness is very important. The problem is...well, what you've just said: "
first and foremost." You have put groundedness on a pedestal. Nothing whatsoever--not a more enjoyable gameplay experience, not rules which do their job better, NOTHING can EVER trump an improvement in "realism."
That is bad game design. Period. The game should be designed to do the stuff its designers want it to do in an engaging, enjoyable way. Groundedness will almost surely be a significant component thereof. Inflating that component until it becomes THE end-all, be-all of game design results in fiddly, overcomplicated systems that punish reasonable decision-making and reward nattering pixel-b!%@#ing and rules-lawyering. It creates systems encumbered by constant tiny adjustments because you haven't
perfectly modelled the in-game reality yet.
Every game MUST be abstracted to some extent. Period. Even LARPing, which gets far more realistic than D&D ever could be, what with, y'know, actually containing physical effort in addition to rules engagement. Now, that doesn't mean we should put abstraction on a pedestal any more than we should put "realism" or groundedness. But it does mean that, if we know for absolute fact that every game
must contain abstraction, we should
use that abstraction. Make it work for us. Leverage it--not treat it like an enemy to be eliminated on sight.
)
