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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 5716222" data-attributes="member: 2067">IMO, the resource management wasn't done the most elegantly before, and could certainly stand to be improved, but to dismiss it entirely is to miss the forest for the trees -- or the adventure for the encounter, in this case."Survival Horror" is a genre of game arranged around hoarding scarce resources. Every bullet. Every medpack. Every bit of food. It provokes a very visceral form of tension. You need everything you have in order to make it out alive. It is a game designed around scarcity, with strategy shown in how one makes use of those scarce resources.Early D&D arguably had, in some instances, a "dungeon survival" element of challenge, with scarce resources that needed to be used intelligently for victory. Fights took place in a broader game of managing the scarce hit points and healing spells the party had. Sending the wizard to kill the goblins wasn't just a bad idea, it was potentially the last idea you'd have. Fighters showed their worth by being the biggest, toughest, hardest-hitting bucket of resources around. This mirrors a narrative arc: as resources diminish, tension rises, and threats escalate, until the biggest threat you meet is met with your resources nearly gone and takes all of your luck and strategy to endure. Rising action-to-climax right there in the mechanics. Now, dungeon survival isn't necessarily for everyone, or for every mode of play. But part of the reason we have the bandit scenario is that it fit very comfortably in that mode of play. Whatever else it did narratively or to simulate the world, in gameplay, it was an element that raised the stakes by consuming limited resources. In fact, Bandits could raise the stakes in interesting ways, since they were theoretically after wealth, and not lives. If you could spare the scarce resources, you could escape without a fight. It was a choice between spending some HP or spending some GP (or even some unique treasures). Bandits are a great encounter in a game that puts encounters in a greater context. They do loose quite a bit of their oomph when removed from that context, however, as do many classic D&D tropes.</blockquote>

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