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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7407332" data-attributes="member: 42582">I might call your last category "gritty" or "logistical", depending on the details. Interestingly, HeroQuest revised (building on the earlier HeroWars rules) is "handwavy" vis-a-vis treasure for PCs, but has detailed rules for tracking community resources, which many other RPGs (including D&D) tend to handwave (eg D&D has no rules for tracking a village's fluctuating propserity).As [MENTION=82106]AbdulAlhazred[/MENTION] has said, there is no correlation between this sort of resource management and whether or not a game is hard or demanding.The issue of typicality vs specialness of the PCs seems to have no bearing on anything else discussed in this thread. By definition, MHRP and Cortex+ Heroic PCs are heroes, not typical. 4e is similar, especially once the game moves out of Heroic tier.Burning Wheel characters and Traveller characters, on the other hand, may be quite typical, or not, depending on how the lifepaths turn out (in BW this includes elements of decision; in Traveller it's about luck of the dice).As far as survival and death being stakes, there is no particular correlation here to mechanical approach. BW is very gritty, but PC death is quite unlikely. (PC maiming is more likely.) It woudl be easy enough to play Cortex+ Heroic with all Stress treated as Trauma, resulting in fairly frequent PC maiming and death, but that wouldn't turn it into a logistical game - it would just make it a game with high PC turnover.Classic D&D could be fairly easily tweaked so that 0 hp means unconscious, or otherwise out of the action for the moment, but everything else left unchanged. Now we'd have a game in which instead of hauling bodies out of dungeons to get them resurrected, we'd have the hauling of unconscious companions out of dungeons so they can regain consciousness. And instead of TPKs there would be TPC - total party captures, being held for ransom by kobolds and having either to arrange payment, or escape.The game would have a lower PC death rate (more comprable to 4e) but would still involve tracking ammunition and treasure.Gygax already moves the game in this direction in AD&D (with the "unconscious if not dropped below -3 in a single blow" option; plus the option granted to the GM to declare a well-played PC unconscious rather than killed) and 2nd ed AD&D took things further in this direction.</blockquote>

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