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Message: <blockquote data-quote="IanArgent" data-source="post: 3795793" data-attributes="member: 21673">Tossed in as food for thought. I ran, from roughly 92-'93 through '99, a shadowrun game that varied from 2-12 PCs at various times. SR has no resource management as D&D would understand the term (there is some grand-strategy level resource management, I suppose) and I had an explicit policy of never killing PCs. And somehow I was able, on next to no prep time spent on mechanics (I would think up plot in the shower, throw it at PCs and see what happened) to challegne the players mentally and the PCs in every way possible. Now, I will admit to having players who were capable of not metagaming their PCs reactions to possible death - but I had neither limited resources nor threats of random death in my toolbox - and any session of that game has been much better from both a player point of view and a GM point of view (the players I have now in my D&D game that were in the SR game would rather I ran that).The key? Forcing the players to think. They had to deploy  their assets and resources cleverly to accomplish goals. I could always challenge the players at the level of adventure goals.I find I'm fighting the system when I run D&D these days - I have no margin of error. And one of the biggest problems I fight is the abitrariness of "availability" of caster abilities - the PCs don't always know when it is appropriate to use resources, so they get underused. I have this same problem when I'm playing in a friend's game - should I use my spells now or hold off? (Its not helping that my character is deep in the valley of multi-class suck on his way to arcane trickster after a change in career path at 4th level - but that's another rant). It is almost always a better choice for me to attack or use a charge off a wand, because I need to sav ethe good stuff for the "next encounter" (which may or may not happen - we're not in a dungeon right now and have a certain amount of freedom in pacing and encounter chaining.)</blockquote>

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