The Gaming Den

We have several times in the past been over how dumb this resource scheme is, but apparently we haven't been mocking it enough lately because certain people have been weakly trying to pimp this idea.

My opinion? It's dumb. It's both unbalanced and it's immersion-breaking.

Imbalances:
I am very against the idea of people, especially in heroic speculative fiction, being given metagame incentives to ignore adventures or act contrary to how characters behave in this genre. Per adventure and level does both. Yes, the 15-minute workday thing has its drawbacks. This is worse. Per day encourages players to sleep in dungeons and watch the clock. Per adventure encourages players to ditch entire adventures. Per level encourages players to ditch characters.

But even beyond that, I hate the idea because it requires players to budget their abilities based on shit they have no clue what is going to happen. I have players who blow through all of their abilities in the first encounter of the day and I also have players who don't spend action points and daily powers in the off-chance I might introduce a surprise encounter. Both people do this in an attempt to read my mind, but because a lot of people aren't good at long-term resource management it easily leads to unbalanced characters for no goddamn reason. It's very easy to do resource management if abilities are on a short timeframe like 'per encounter'. It's hard to do it for a finite number of encounters. And the more you stretch out the encounters the more likely it is for people to come up with a 'wrong' answer.

I prefer Winds of Fate and the Momentum Counter (where as you deplete some resources like powers and hit points you get benefits in another column) precisely because of that. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Per day is already a stupid enough scheme, but at least players can come up with a ballpark figure about when the adventure is going to end. Stretching this out to per adventure or per level leads to stupid shit like people budgetting their abilities based on sidequests that haven't even been foreshadowed yet. I mean, seriously, the hero has Ultimate Radiant Slice and then they fight the Dark Lord who killed their parents and torched their hometown. They underwent a training arc for this power... and then at the end of the battle they don't use it because the player knows that they're not going to get it back for four more battles and they might get surprise ambushed by a dragon. That is unsatisfying as all hell but under those systems of resource management that is what you do.

Metagaming:
Per adventure and per level are completely arbitrary units of time done for the benefit of the player. Per day at least has the advantage of being tied to something recognizable to the people in the gaming world. Per adventure and per level does not. It is not tied to any event in the fantasy world. Adventures can take as long as a few hours or as long as several months. There is no reason in the goddamn universe why some years Superman can use heat visions hundreds of time but then other years he only uses it about ten times. There is also no fucking reason why Master Roshi, once he learns the technique, can only use Kamehameha five times in his fucking life until he takes a weekend off and beats up on some mooks. And no, you can't use the 'he recharges his Kamehameha off of violence' because then he would just spar with his students or pay people to beat on him with objects. That is the entire point of the system, that no matter what a character in-universe does they will never be able to violate this resource management system.

There is no way of explaining this effect to an outside observer without resorting to the tired 'because the author/rules said so'. You can't use explanations in the gaming verse like solar flares or earth rotation because it's not tied to that. It depends solely on a factor that does not exist in the story. It's an extremely lazy explanation and begs an explanation why we use that.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:But even beyond that, I hate the idea because it requires players to budget their abilities based on shit they have no clue what is going to happen. I have players who blow through all of their abilities in the first encounter of the day and I also have players who don't spend action points and daily powers in the off-chance I might introduce a surprise encounter. Both people do this in an attempt to read my mind, but because a lot of people aren't good at long-term resource management it easily leads to unbalanced characters for no goddamn reason.

This is a good point. Mechanics should encourage and incentivize balanced play, not just balanced potential.

See, this is the very problem I had with fate points when dealing with a homebrew system I have been working on. Fate Points are amazingly useful, but you're only supposed to get two per adventure (by default, at least). The problem is, an adventure to me is one decent segment of a campaign(A few scenes). While you can get one back every session until the adventure is over, having no fate points can hurt. They're probably the best when used to avoid death or force another chance to complete a skill test.

Now, resources that are locked until level up when expended, those suck balls even worse because most systems that have levels, they don't come easy nor necessarily fast.

Per adventure is bad because the PCs have no real idea of when any given adventure may end, and it also works terrible for any kind of freeform play, since it may be hard to qualify what counts as an adventure, or how long any adventure is going to be.

Per level gets around that and makes recharge fixed but somewhat predictable. You may not know exactly what your next encounters will entail, but you've got a decent idea how far you are away from your next level, and that's something that people can plan around.

Now as far as the immersion factor, this shit happens with all manner of limited use abilities. I've seen people ask the same thing about ToB maneuvers or 4E encounter/daily powers, WoF systems and so on. Some people are always going to be complaining that they can't use their ultimate sword strike for every single turn of the game.

And yeah, it is metagamey, but you know what? Being able to spam the same thing over and over again is boring as shit. I've played 2nd edition where you can go ahead and take that same attack action forever, and it's all you ever do. It blew chunks.

Ultimately this is a game, and being a game it has to offer its players choices. One of those choices is invariably going to be managing resources.

And besides, in a lot of fantasy stories, characters have powerful attacks that are inevitably not used every battle. Fantasy stories generally don't have great reasons why this happens. There's no special reason that superman doesn't spam superspeed all the damn time other than the fact that it'd make for terrible stories. I really can't figure out why Gourry wouldn't use the sword of light in every single battle instead of that shitty sword blade he has over it. But the truth is that there's no real reason he doesn't do that other than the fact that it's a dramatic device for the hero to be able to bust out a higher power attack in mid combat.

Now, obviously if we hand those abilities to a PC, they're going to use them every single battle unless there's some kind of metagame limit to encourage them to play it closer to how the original characters play it. So you take superman's super speed and make it only usable 3 times per level. Now superman's player uses the ability more like superman does in the comics. It's only busted out in times of dire emergency. And if I'm playing an RPG where I want to include superman, making superman play like superman is an important design goal.

Now you'll always get some people complaining about how this shit isn't realistic or some bullshit, and in that case I can just point them towards 2nd edition and say "You're the reason we can't have nice things."

While you are accurate on several of the effects, I dispute the idea that you can't justify those kinds of resource schemes in character. You can justify anything in character. In Space Marine they land you on a planet with a limited number of plasma shells and if you run out before the mission is completed you have to figure out how to complete with shitty looted native weaponry. In Corporate Shark your project has a limited amount of funding, and if you run through your whole budget before completing the task (and gaining a promotion "level"), you get fired and the player seriously makes a new character.

Any resource system you can imagine can be justified in character in the right kind of game and is actually a good fit for the right kind of game. The question really is whether you want to play that kind of game. Rationing your plasma shells has a nicely survival horror feel to it, but it's kind of nitpicky and it isn't fun if you're playing with people who aren't good at it.

-Username17

I hate per adventure and per level because when you use the ability...

...You hope it ends the level or adventure. And if doesn't, you're screwed.

-Crissa

I don't even understand why you would even care to justify the resource management scheme in character if you're trying to a) make the game balanced or b) encourage the kind of story progression you want. No, really. Why does it even fucking matter? As RC2 mentioned, characters in stories do all sorts of shit that makes no god damned sense, leading to the inevitable fan outcry of, "That makes no god damned sense!"

But you know ... So the fuck what? If it makes for a more dramatic and exciting story for Kirk, Spock, AND McCoy to be part of the away team to a totally lethal mission, then that's what we want to happen. Endo storyo.

RandomCasualty2 wrote:Now superman's player uses the ability more like superman does in the comics. It's only busted out in times of dire emergency.

For this to really work you need to flag dire emergency pretty well. The players have to know how tough what they're facing is and how that relates to the range of toughnesses they're expected to encounter. D&D does a shit job of that with CR and EL being borked as.

The longer term you expect players to plan their expenditures in the more they need to know and understand to make intelligent choices. This makes the game harder to play and design as you move from at will to per encounter to per character or whatever.

I don't even understand why you would even care to justify the resource management scheme in character if you're trying to a) make the game balanced or b) encourage the kind of story progression you want. No, really. Why does it even fucking matter? As RC2 mentioned, characters in stories do all sorts of shit that makes no god damned sense, leading to the inevitable fan outcry of, "That makes no god damned sense!"

But you know ... So the fuck what? If it makes for a more dramatic and exciting story for Kirk, Spock, AND McCoy to be part of the away team to a totally lethal mission, then that's what we want to happen. Endo storyo.

I guess we play games for different reasons then. If I wanted to perfectly emulate a novel or movie, I'd read/watch the entertainment in question. Or maybe join a collaborate fiction-writing group. When I'm playing an RPG, a big part of the fun is being able to say "What would happen if I did this?". And "this" often means things like not being an idiot and opening the door that obviously has a zombie/Jason/alien behind it.

So who cares whether it's justified? I do. And given the complaints I've heard when the justification is lame, I'm not the only one.

You can justify anything in character.

Sure, but not for every setting. For space marines, an absolute limit on how many bullets you have works. For wuxia masters, an absolute limit on how many times you can swing your fist does not.

Sure, but not for every setting. For space marines, an absolute limit on how many bullets you have works. For wuxia masters, an absolute limit on how many times you can swing your fist does not.

Unless it's Sasuke's Chidori, Pain's Gravity Blast Ultra, or Ten's Kikoho.

-Username17

Well sure, but those aren't really the equivalent of normal bullets. Even then, if someone knew both Chidori and Kikoho, I would expect, for instance, two uses of either before they got tired, not specifically one use of each. Whereas, if it was a plasma grenade and a nano-infused sniper round, then one use of each works.

And then there's the issue that if you're too tired to use Chidori again, you'd expect there to be some loss of effectiveness in even basic moves by that point, and certainly in the mid-range stuff, but a lot of games do handwave that.

Ice9 wrote:Well sure, but those aren't really the equivalent of normal bullets. Even then, if someone knew both Chidori and Kikoho, I would expect, for instance, two uses of either before they got tired, not specifically one use of each. Whereas, if it was a plasma grenade and a nano-infused sniper round, then one use of each works.

Per level management doesn't have to be one of each. I mean you can totally do something like wizard spell slots and just say they refresh per level instead of per day.

That was more a response to "anything can be justified in character". While it is possible to justify some types of resource management on per-level basis, it's going to be a bit of a stretch, given that levels take an unpredictable amount of time to acquire. In a setting where levelling up was a notable event in-character, I could see it.

There's still the problem of hoarding vs splurging. Some players will end up blowing through their resource points too fast and spend the rest of the level spamming basic stuff, others will keep holding onto it "in case it's needed", and then end up having to massively overkill some random goblins because they're the last encounter of the level and points don't carry over. If they do carry over, then some people will probably be saving their first-level resources well into the double digits. Potentially balanced, but would it be any fun?

Ice9 wrote:When I'm playing an RPG, a big part of the fun is being able to say "What would happen if I did this?". And "this" often means things like not being an idiot and opening the door that obviously has a zombie/Jason/alien behind it.

Hm, how is this relevant to a resource management scheme? The "not opening door of evil zombie/Jason/alien Jack-in-the-box" thing is completely unaffected by the resource model. The thing it controls is whether you use Hyaku-Retsu-Ken every round. And the question of what would happen if you did is moot because you probably can't.

It's relevant in that it means "because that's how the narrative works" is not a satisfying reason to be able or unable to use an ability. I like creating things in RPGs - things like plans. And to plan, you need a world that operates under some rules more consistent than "things work when it's convenient to the plot".

Well, if a resource management scheme is defined, then there are consistent rules under which the world operates, so you can totally plan away.