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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 7421101" data-attributes="member: 996">I'm not seeing the strong coupling between daily-resource management games and 'strategic' play vs encounter-focus and 'narrative' play.  A game could use a longer-term player resource to license narrative changes, for instance, you have a limited number of plot-points to make, and you can use them strategically to develop the story.  A game with no regenerating resource (static or consumable, for instance) could still involve strategies to make best use of them. I mean, I do see /a/ correlation, having started with D&D and gone for the depth of Vancian casting, I certainly see it in that context, there was a strategy aspect to managing a caster back in the day, beyond just managing daily 'slots,' for that matter.  It's less pronounced in 5e, where casting has far fewer limitations, less strategic, more 'gonzo' I suppose.  ::shrug::Or FATE, a poster boy for narrativism, no?   FATE progresses in scenes, but you have resources and complications that are persistent and need to be managed over the course of multiple scenes.  IDK... the distinction, while a real difference in mechanical design, seems almost a red herring to balance or world-building or putative 'styles' or whatever.  I don't think 'unit of balance' sums it up, at all.  'Balance target' might do it better.  Games should try to be balanced, it's a desireable quality - but imbalance can be used to narrow the functional range of play intentionally as well as unintentionally.  Pem made the point that a game which 'needed' so many encounters per day or whatever restricted the GM's options in running the campaign, and that's true.  I don't think it's often the point, but the same can be said of player options, and that can be part of the point, to put a lot of options on the table, but with the intent players learn to gravitate towards the most functional ones, which just happen to be the ones that support the game's intended theme/feel/genre/whatever... Whether you balance an RPG just around The Encounter, or just around an assumed day length, or just around acquiring imaginary wealth, or whatever, you're choosing to balance only a fraction of the ways it might reasonably be played.  A game aimed to balance at 6-8 encounters/day is imbalanced at 1-3, if it also needs 2-3 short rests, it can be imbalanced at 7, too if there were 6 short rests or only 1.   A game balanced over a 'whole campaign' (as classic D&D arguably was meant to be) is imbalanced at every session in that campaign, but when you look back at having completed the whole campaign with all the same players & characters, maybe you see "oh yeah, it kinda all evened out, didn't it?"  Or not.I think that's part of the point.  Balance to a restrictive formula of workable play isn't really balance, it's just tip-toeing past imbalance.  For instance, a game in which everyone's resource re-charge anew for each encounter (Like 7th ed Gamma World) might be balanced within the structure of an encounter, but it's either ignoring things that happen outside the encounter, or risking not being balanced in other contexts (like 'exploration,' traditionally a big part of GW, actually).Either way, there's a lot of potential play that can't be realized without coping with balance issues in some other way. Or 'unrealized' can refer to potential not yet developed.</blockquote>

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