The Gaming Den

Resource management is one of those things that gets included in a lot of games, and then promptly ignored by most of the players. The only resources that get paid attention to are the "big" ones. Spell slots, resting etc. Stuff like food, arrows, spell components and so on go largely ignored.

This is generally because the book keeping is annoying but also pointless. A bag of holding invalidates any concern for space or encumbrance. Stuff that sucker with beef jerky, hard tack, and a couple barrels of water and you're set. And the cost of basic goods is low enough to be negligible.

But even if you're playing a system without bags of holding, and item costs that would actually matter to the players, what makes resource management actually engaging? Just about the only thing needing to manage spell slots does is dictate when the players need to take a nap. Of course there are situations where you can't just take a nap, plenty of them, but then you just have the cranky spell caster whining about how they really need to take the nap.

To make it fun, you first need to keep it from being burdensome. In general if you have to check three tables and find the prices of 5 items, your mini-game is terrible and will be ignored. That's why bags of holding exist: to ignore a shitty encumbrance mini-game.

If you're needing to buy x day's worth of supplies before going in the desert, at 5 gp per person day, that's do-able. If it takes you x-1 days to get to the dungeon, or rescue someone on the way, you're going to have a fun trip back.

After that, have a good reason why things are set up the way they are, and have the fluff and crunch match. And give the players a reason to care (usually rewards, because it's a game and punishing people in a game is for assholes). Maybe they found literally more wealth than they can carry away from the dragon's nest before they get caught. Do they grab gold, or things that might be magical (but they don't have time to identify)? They win either way, but they do better if they played the packing min-game and have more capacity to carry treasure.

Like you said, often the bookkeeping is annoying and pointless. If you can't fix both, just skip it. That'll make people more receptive the 3 times you do make use of the rules.

I'd say, figure out what type of game you want to run, and track what makes sense. There are games out there that focus on the minutia of every bit of encumbrance/backpack space/etc, because that's a good chunk of what the game is. In games where you're meant to be the Big Damn Heroes who do Cool Things with their class features, you probably don't care about individual arrows or trail rations. Track the things that matter for your game, and make those interesting.

So, you could have a game where berserkers track Fury that starts at zero and counts up as they deal/take damage, and wizards track mana that depletes as they concentrate on spells, and assassins that gain precision. You could set that up in a way that's interesting and fun to track, gives certain mechanical incentives, and just not worry about arrows and copper pieces and backpack slots. Or, you could have a game where you're effectively a dude with a brain and two thumbs, who's very worried about the number of torches in his backpack. I doubt you're going to make a game that's both.

That second game could be made fun and interesting because it'd be a core part of the game. Balancing how much treasure you can carry with how many torches and rations you have would be a big part of the core system. It's not my cup of tea, but it's a thing some games already do.

In ACKS and LotFP, everything comes down to carrying capacity.

1. Encumbrance is measured in units of stones. The number of stones a person can carry is small enough that you can do the required math in your head.
2. Ammunition is abstracted into a unit called the "quiver". The number of shots in a quiver is modeled stochastically, so bookkeeping is much less tedious. [This isn't core, but it's a common house rule.]
3. Everything weighs something: The more supplies, ammunition, and equipment you take into a dungeon, the less treasure you can carry out. The less treasure you carry out, the slower you level up.
4. Beasts of burden add a point of vulnerability to an expedition and increase its costs.
5. Dungeons are dynamic and dangerous: they're not something you clear out room by room, they're something you sneak into, loot, and sneak out of.

What this means is that the mundane resource management is super important, not a hassle, and a source of excitement. When you get to be high enough level to hire companies of mercenaries to protect your pack mules and to make bags of holding, then this level of resource management gets abstracted away. But this is a feature, not a bug.

There are so many dirt-common magic items and spells that have been written specifically to get around food requirements - rings of sustenance, goodberry, create food and water, wall of iron, permanency - that it's pretty clear that many writers and players over the history of D&D have actively eschewed management of mundane resources. It's not hard to understand why. Resource management like food consumption requires that you have systems for things like "how long travel takes" which means that you need to know exactly how far your characters went in a day, and all that kind of crap. When you're 12 years old and playing D&D you aren't in it to simulate Oregon Trail.

It should be self-evident that if you want to make food consumption rates an important part of your game, they will have to have an effect on combat (e.g. +1 to hit for being well-fed, -1- to hit for starving), which means you can't just wing it. Sample argument:

MC: For this fight you're starving.
Players: Nuh-uh, we ate breakfast before we went into the kobold lair.
MC: You couldn't have, you're out of food.
Players: We only went ten miles from town, how could we have eaten all the food?
MC: It was ten miles of treacherous terrain, which increased the time taken.
Players: Well our Ranger should be able to forage!

etc.

If you're going to include resource management of mundane stuff as a subsystem of your game, it has to be a major focus of your game. This in turn limits how crazy your magic powers can be as well as what kinds of stories you can tell. For instance, if you have Greater Teleport, you wasted your time on all your food management systems. If you have Create Food And Water, you wasted all your time on food management rules. So, either high-level adventuring is right out, or you have to meaningfully change the assumptions of what we understand "high-level" to mean in a D&D context.

Furthermore, food management systems are only useful in certain stories. For instance, an intrigue campaign does not have any need for food management. A campaign set in a settled area could conceivably make use of it, but when your characters are resting in an inn every night they are not going to care how much hardtack they have on hand.

It seems to me like hexcrawls are the best-suited for food management shenanigans.

Mord wrote:There are so many dirt-common magic items and spells that have been written specifically to get around food requirements - rings of sustenance, goodberry, create food and water, wall of iron, permanency - that it's pretty clear that many writers and players over the history of D&D have actively eschewed management of mundane resources. It's not hard to understand why.

Counterpoint, by me:

me wrote: When you get to be high enough level to hire companies of mercenaries to protect your pack mules and to make bags of holding, then this level of resource management gets abstracted away. But this is a feature, not a bug.

The point isn't that mundane resource management is actively eschewed, it's that it is eventually eschewed.

RobbyPants wrote:There are games out there that focus on the minutia of every bit of encumbrance/backpack space/etc, because that's a good chunk of what the game is.

Indeed... I'm sure it's a big hit in Torchbearer, but in d&d it becomes a chore after lvl 3.

Dogbert wrote:

RobbyPants wrote:There are games out there that focus on the minutia of every bit of encumbrance/backpack space/etc, because that's a good chunk of what the game is.

Indeed... I'm sure it's a big hit in Torchbearer, but in d&d it becomes a chore after lvl 3.

Agreed. It's important to figure out what you want the game to be. D&D seems to want to be Torchbearer at low levels, come up with ways to circumvent that as levels increase, with the potential of DMs pitching a fit when the 9th level PCs aren't playing Torchbearer anymore.

I'm totally down with low-level PCs being the lowest of the low all ratcatcher style, but by the time you're a Knight of Whatever, nevermind the Queen of Wherever, you are too important to buckle on your own armor and are at the beginning of ceasing to care about resource management.

Almaz wrote:I'm totally down with low-level PCs being the lowest of the low all ratcatcher style, but by the time you're a Knight of Whatever, nevermind the Queen of Wherever, you are too important to buckle on your own armor and are at the beginning of ceasing to care about resource management.

Or you need to worry about higher scale resource management, like Queen Daenerys one day no longer needs to worry about feeding herself or her army, but needs to worry about feeding a whole city and three growing hungry dragons and wonders "if I struggle with a city, what hopes do I have of managing a bunch of kingdoms?"

Would an ammo roll like Necromunda count as resource management? Lasguns reload on a 2+, boltguns though need a 6+. Lasguns are way more reliable but weaker, this makes the weapons distinct in a turn based skirmish game that usually ends on round 6.

*craft has gold, which lets you buy more units to field, and houses, which raises your maximum units you can field at once, some units may use more house space, I forget.

Things having a startup cost and a limit on growth is a pretty solid model that raises a fuck tonne of questions within even a fairly simple game like a Dune2 clone.

Some games have lots of types of gold, but that's usually a bad thing, unless you have a computer tracking it all, there's a lot of thinking time allowed and encouraged, and it's super easy to see what is used for what, and there's good cause for them not to be fungible or tied to each other.

Some games limit the total gold spend ever, to supposedly force an end game moment, but that often fails and the end game generally works better without it because the winning side can just keeping winning harder.

So, uh, yeah. Resources. One is good. Two is probably better if you need to limit the load on the processor (which is like, the humans on a tabletop game). Three is maybe interesting if you find another interesting axis to game, and you don't break the first one by doing so.

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When XP awards are stupid enough, people sometimes track "level" instead of XP, but for clarity it's all XP here.

So in D&D you mostly have XP and ... essentially gp has always tracked along with XP by some function or another so it's basically the same thing.

The early game also had in-game time as a strict resource, mostly lost over the later editions other than as a fig leaf that is kinda stupid. The relevant components thereof like food and searching and thus traps and how long things take to happen outside combat, and spell durations of over 1 minute but under 1 day have all become very stupid indeed.

Arguably there was also carrying capacity (but almost never mattered) and leadership (but DM says No because fuck you, and so Charisma becomes the worst stat instead of the best). But yeah, mostly not used and so no one cares.

Arrows? Did anyone ever run out of arrows? No? No, they did not. That's not a resource, you have plentiful arrows and you can't actually use them up. Like, if it annoys you conceptually that archers carry tonnes of arrows, just have them shoot less for more damage each. End of conceptual problem.

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So, like, generally, D&D should probably have a 2nd resource that isn't XP|gp, as a thing that limits stacking of things that would harm the processors. But given that tracking time was broadly unpopular and most of the formerly attached stuff is broken and thus consistently ignored, and leadership doesn't really work in 3.x because of the fast scaling, um, yeah. I don't know what it should be.

Maybe like Leadership|Morale though. Probably for 5e, that would be a useful resource to track somewhat more specifically, as the expanded skirmish side of it pushing toward small-scale wargame seems like a natural end-game state.

Maybe like a limit on the number of decent-size magic items a PC can carry, though probably you'd just tie that to XP again and it'd be better. Though by class to let Fighters and Monks and other un-classes carry more. Like Shadowrun's humanity counter?

Potentially a kingdom-scale thing, orthoginal to XP so you can have 1st level girl-queens who hold a lot of land and loyalty but aren't a super-princess, or linked to XP so they totally are Amidala, and Fighters can rule places. Loyalty? Lordship? Whatever.

I suspect the more things you can spend XP on, and the more interesting stuff that spending opens up for you, the less you need any other resource at all, and the less it makes sense for other resources to be dissociated from XP.

I don't think resource management in game is so complicated, that you need to devote any extra time on it. how ever I am not a pro player. it is just my humble opinion. ,

Sumiron wrote:I don't think resource management in game is so complicated, that you need to devote any extra time on it. how ever I am not a pro player. it is just my humble opinion. ,

This was less a 'how much time to devote' question and more a 'what would enforcing it actually do for the players' question.

Resource management serves as a leash. You can only get so far before you run out of X and need to return to civilization to refuel. This is generally coupled with some kind of time limit, if you can't stop the big bad in 9 days the world ends, you can stop to refuel every time you need it and potentially miss your deadline, or you can try pushing through on empty which is riskier but better for your time management.

The problem I have with this model is that pushing through on empty sucks. There's not a lot an archer can do when they're out of arrows. There's not a lot a wizard can do without spells. If you've got penalties from lack of food combat is a chore. This isn't dark souls 'woo I made it through by the skin of my teeth and feel awesome.' This is 'oh god I just spent two hours of my life plinking away at a group of goblins with a 1d3 cantrip and I'm never going to get that back.'

I don't think there's a one size fits all solution to this question. I enjoy when resource management has depth to it on higher levels, and yet it remains simple for the more casual approach.

Pushing through on empty should speed combat up, not slow it down. Penalties should be to defenses, not to attacks. If being hungry provides penalties to saves and AC, then fighting hungry is dangerous without being tedious.

The fact that some of the most popular video games in the world are all about resource management should clue you in to the fact that it's possible. But obviously what one can do with a video game that handles a lot of cumbersome details behind the scenes, and in a P&P game, are different. But it's clearly possible at all.

Well video games also have the distinction of being able to save and reload relatively easily. If I bungle an encounter in a video game I can go back to my last save state and redo it in a matter of minutes. D&D and most of its contemporaries doesn't have this.

Penalties to defenses vs attacks is a good point, but the examples I used (arrows, spells) were more about your damage being tied to a consumable resource rather than the fighter failing to hit the goblin because he's hangry.

Sure, and if you want resource depletion to be a mechanic, it should not have those results. Like, do you need to have a dedicated archer class or build? Haven't we all pretty much come to the conclusion that feats or class features that say "you are level appropriate only with this one weapon or this small category of closely related weapons" is bad? An archer who runs out of arrows should not be completely crippled as a character, nor should a wizard who's out of spells be reduced to a level 1 Rogue without sneak attack, firing his crossbow for 1d8 damage against CR7 enemies. For the wizard in particular, the paradigm where there is an amount of resource drain past which you may as well not exist is bad for any situation where you aren't relying on the five minute workday.

Almaz wrote:I'm totally down with low-level PCs being the lowest of the low all ratcatcher style, but by the time you're a Knight of Whatever, nevermind the Queen of Wherever, you are too important to buckle on your own armor and are at the beginning of ceasing to care about resource management.

At that point you are probably qualifying for the old "Amateurs talk tactics but Professionals study logistics"

And that actually is, to me at least, an interesting concept in a high fantasy world where food and item creation, gates, and all kinds of stuff like that are possible.

Logistics stops being about supply lines and more about magic and protecting the magic while it provides supply. I could imagine level 1 mages with wands of dispel magic flying over the Cleric camp and disrupting their create food cycle & antimagic fields cutting off gates, summoning packs of rust monsters and setting them loose in the armory, all kinds of crazy crap.

There are entire genres of board games dedicated to fiddly supply chain and resource management stuff, it's clearly possible. Hell, instead of making your RPG be a frame tale around a bunch of tactical wargaming, make it a frame tale around a bunch of Power Grid and you're done.

The problem with standard RPG resource tracking is that it's either so granular (list every arrow and foot of rope) that the rules can't possibly support interesting tradeoffs for every unit of resources, or that they're completely handwaved away.

A good resource minigame would abstract resources to units that the rules can actually fully cover. For example, a climbing gear resource could be a unit that contains up to 25 feet of rope and 5 pitons, but everything in the rules will spend a whole "climbing gear" at a time, and the conversion to individual bits is just for if you're trying to do something clever.

Once you have resources, you can start using tricks to make them interesting:
- Some resources may partially overlap in use. Clear this thicket of dead brambles with tools or torches, but you can't pry open the sealed tomb with torches or light the catacombs below with tools. How you clear the thicket matters now.
- Problems may have dangerous or poor options that are more resource efficient. Cross the chasm with climbing gear, or take a chance and leap it?
- Characters can have abilities that allow new options or substitutions. The ranger can set camp for the night using climbing gear instead of camping gear. The wizard can solve any standard problem with two packs of candles. The paladin can feed two people with one day's rations.