I'm not the only one with resource mobilization on her mind.
In his book Art Worlds, Howard Becker proposes that individual genius isn't what creates art, art is created by communities of artists - working together, trading ideas, improving on one another's techniques, discarding unnecessary elements, refining the elements they keep. In this view Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson didn't invent D&D, the Lake Geneva wargaming scene invented D&D. It's obvious that there would be no Tekumel without D&D, it's less obvious, but no less true, that there would be no D&D as we know it without the educational supply companies mass-producing unusual-sided dice as classroom aids. Individual artists get credit and blame for the final products that bear their names, but if those products are credit-worthy, it's because of the community who helped invent, test, prove, and refine the ideas and techniques that went into that product, because of the community's theorists who justified and explained the ideas, because of the community's trained audience members who had already learned to appreciate what the product offered. It might require painstaking historical research to uncover the individual contributions of the community members, it might be impossible if insufficient records were kept of ephemeral conversations. Individuals get credit. But it's the community that creates.
My point is, resource management is having a cultural moment within what I would call the Old School Renaissance roleplaying scene. (Other people might call this scene/community by a different name, the self-identity of any scene is one of the things its theorists and aestheticians argue over and refine.) I've written a couple posts about resource management, but I'm not the only one thinking about it right now. One of my goals is to take stock of other people's ideas, but I'm not even alone in my stock-taking. Another of my goals is to look for places to innovate, but any innovations I think of will not be my ideas alone, they will be ideas I only had, ideas I only could have had, because of what other people wrote and thought.
Other people working on the same idea as you doesn't mean that you (and the world more generally) is in danger of running out or using up all possible ideas on that topic. It means the opposite. It means that's where the action is, at least right now. It means that ideas will come thick and fast from all corners, good ideas getting replaced by better ideas, today's draft torn down to make way for tomorrow's revision. And if someone else has literally the same idea you just had and posts it first, all it means is that you both looked as the same inspiration, both experienced the same eureka. The same idea might be thought up by many people simultaneously, because it's not any individual's idea, it's the community's. Stay involved, keep trying, speak up faster next time. You may not get credit, out of the whole community, hardly anyone will get credit, but you can still be a part of the scene. That's what's going on with resource management in the OSR right now.
Necropraxis offers a great overview of good ideas that have come out of the OSR, almost all of them related to resource management, or at least ideas that make RM-play possible. Half of Brendan's post reminds me of my own rough outline for my post series, half is full of ideas and suggestions that don't necessarily seem to be part of RM-play, but are principles that are necessary to make resource management function at the table.
"Make chargen fast and easy. Support fully random character generation. Determine starting gear randomly rather than shopping."
If you want to free up the cognitive resources necessary to pay attention to resource management, one place to cut complexity and decision-making is in character generation. Making starting gear randomly rather than painstakingly-selected speeds things up a lot, but it also has another consequence I'll talk about in a second. Plus, as Out for Blood (who Brendan links to) explains, random character generation is quick, quick chargen makes frequent character death possible and more palatable, and character death makes random chargen more fair by preferentially culling weaker characters faster, giving players more time to develop strong characters through gameplay.
"Low level D&D is a sweet spot for dungeon exploration games."
A game where you're worrying about running out of food or water or light is inherently a low-power game. Keeping gameplay grounded and low-fantasy leaves room that makes resource management possible. Superheroes don't count matchsticks. Gods don't carry flint and steel.
"Minimize bookkeeping. Not all games demand complex resource management, but I think it is better to let the nature of the game determine rules requirements rather than neglecting the consequences of encumbrance due to the hassle of using cumbersome mechanics."
Figure out the simplest version of things, so that you can use that if you need to, so that you have a baseline to add complexity to if you want to. Use something because you want it, ignore it because you don't. Don't feel forced to include accounting you find unnecessary, don't feel forced to exclude things you want because you can't figure out an easy way to count them.
The Scones Alone also has a recent post about resource management, ostensibly for Into the Odd, but his ideas could be applied to pretty much any old-school D&D-type game. To me, there is one big idea here, and then lots of other smart observations. (Also, I haven't read Into the Odd's latest playtest document, so I'm not completely certain how much of what he's written is new, and how much of it is just new to me.) The big idea is expedition resources. For vital resources like food, water, torches, and rope, one character carries the party's entire supply as a single indivisible object. What impresses me about this idea is that it's simpler than what you might otherwise think is the simplest version of this idea (which would be that each character carries their own supply of torches, let's say, as a single indivisible bundle.)
"If even one character in the group is carrying a single quantity of the resource, there is a sufficient amount for the entire group to use. They have an expected use that does not ordinarily deplete the resource. Creative uses of the resource trigger a Luck Roll that may deplete the resource. Only three states for vital resources: sufficient, resource about to run out, resource gone. If nobody in the group has the resource, the party suffers some negative effect."
Every vital resource has an expected use that doesn't deplete the resource at all (so for food, for example, one ration in one character's gear feeds all party members). Making creative use of a resource triggers a luck roll (Brian's example for food is dropping scraps to distract a monster, you could also imagine leaving a trail of breadcrumbs, eating extra portions to heal damage, or feeding an NPC you just met). The possible outcomes of the luck roll are that the resource runs out, that the resource has only a single use left, or that you get lucky and the resource remains un-depleted.
I like very much that this idea removes the shopping question "how much is enough?" from resource management, and focuses all the attention on the dungeoneering question "how shall we use this during play?" The right amount of anything to buy is one. One is enough ... as long as you use it exclusively for its intended purpose. And this is true regardless of how many people are in your party, so there's no wondering if each person needs to buy extra torches because there are fewer of you this week than last. This approach takes the classic lamp-oil trade off "shall we use it for light or shall we use it as a weapon?" and finds a way to generalize it to all the classic resources. Use your resources as intended and you're done, they're managed. Or use them creatively, which uses them up. Perfect. That's just about the perfect resource management decision, and in The Scones Alone's approach, it's the only RM decision.
"Notice something though? The group has only one of each Expedition Resource. That's a 'sufficient' quantity for the group's expected needs. But if a Luck Roll happens to deplete one of those resources, or one of the characters falls into a lava pit, the group now lacks that resource. We've successfully eliminated the guesswork about exactly how many individual rations, how many flasks of water, how many oil flasks are needed, and instead replaced it with the question of: 'How much redundancy do you want?' Or, what is your risk tolerance? Which is a more interesting question to me. It also happens to be an easier question to manage resources for. Maybe the party hires a porter to carry an extra everything? Of course, porters sometimes get scared and run away with all of their stuff..."
Again, this is smart. If a character dies (or at least dies in certain ways) or if an NPC fails their morale and runs away, you're not just down a person, you're potentially down your entire supply of a vital resource. It's the kind of risk that would basically never occur if you're counting individual torches. I mean yes, you could still run the risk of running out of individual torches, but probably only if you under-shopped. Here the question is not "should we buy 20, 40, or 60?" it's "should we run the risk of carrying only one, or give up the space to bring a spare?"
"Players quickly have so much gold that buying more-than-sufficient quantities of vital resources is trivial."
Resource-management heavy games may inherently be poor and/or low-power games, but if your character is routinely bringing back so little gold from the dungeon that you can't afford flashlight batteries and bottled water, then your campaign world may be a little too crapsack. Remember you're risking death down there. If all you're getting in return is pocket-change that leaves you unsure about whether or not you can afford a microwave burrito and to refill your Zippo lighter, then the risk/reward structure of your world may be too cruel for anyone to survive. Brian's idea would also justify charging non-trivial prices to replenish your expedition resources. Remember, you're not just buying a torch, you're buying all the torches you'll need to get through the dungeon.
"It is difficult for players to know how many individual rations, flasks of water, torches, etc. will be sufficient for the current session. Players will usually have either so much of a vital resource that it ceases to matter or so little that it feels like they guessed incorrectly."
To this I would add that if you are using fully-random character generation, including randomly generated starting equipment, then it feels perverse to punish the players with their characters getting lost in the dark forever and then starving to death, just because you, the judge, made them roll on a random table and then wouldn't let them go shopping afterwards. This is the point I said I would come back to earlier. If random starting equipment is a best-practice that gets games going faster and lets people actually play, then you can't subsequently force them to wallow in misery because they had random starting equipment rather than a painstakingly selected bespoke panoply.
"The more differences items have in relation to encumbrance, the more difficult the system is for players to manage accurately and efficiently. Limit encumbered status to, at most, two states: normal and overburdened. All items are either normal or Bulky. Normal items take 1 slot. Bulky items take 2 slots. There is no 'X quantity of this item fits in 1 slot'. If you have 4 vials of poison, it takes 4 slots to carry them."
"A single treasure is treated as a single, indivisible item. Most treasures are Bulky. Some treasures are Unwieldy - they cannot be carried in your inventory. You must come up with a plan, equipment, personnel, etc. to transport them. An important idea is the indivisibility of treasures. Take this into consideration when making your treasures. A heavy, golden vase makes a better treasure than a pile of gold coins. The latter immediately re-raises the 'how many coins per slot' question. If you really want chests of coins, play the 'It's a game. The chest of coins is a single, indivisible Bulky item' card."
Brian gives his player 8 encumbrance slots per character. Note that the popular encumbrance equal to Strength means an average character in an OSR game will get to carry 10 items, after packing rations, torches, and rope, they're left with 7 discretionary spots. In a party of 3 using expedition resources, each character can pack a single expedition resource and be left with 7 discretionary encumbrance slots. Perfect.
Brian's advice here is also just one more reminder that if you're going to use encumbrance, you have to keep it simple. I'm of the opinion that encumbrance is often difficult to use because we often ask it to do too much, tracking significant items, insignificant items, bundles of items, armors that can take up between 0-6 encumbrance slots, incorporating adjustments for strength, multiple movement rates, etc. Brian keeps it dead simple. A specific number of items, period. No bundles, nothing is special. Just this much and no more, and that's it. Again, if you want to add more complications later, there's still some value in identifying the simplest possible version for now. The simplest simplest version is still just to ignore these things entirely, but the simplest version that actually uses some form of encumbrance is probably going to look something like this.
The treasure rules are dead simple too, and preserve original D&D's challenge of making treasure an encumbering item, not just something that disappears into hammer space the moment you pick it up. I think caches of coins are still do-able, but I would suggest making each cache be a unique currency or denomination. The "late Renaissance gold florins with a rare anti-pope obverse minting" are a separate cache from the "Iron Age iron coins dating from Vandal Savage's third empire right before he was overthrown by Kru'll the Eternal" - and both of them are going to a numismatist to get changed for cash before you can spend them. Brian also points out something that I've noticed recently, and that Luka Rejec is obviously thinking about with his rules for "hacking up treasure", which is that there's a distinction between items that take up 1 or 2 encumbrance slots, and items that are larger than an individual character can carry. While technically, this issue could come up with adventuring equipment too, more often, it's a problem that arises from treasure, and I don't think it's fair that you, the judge, should show the players some cool treasure and then force them to leave it behind because you couldn't figure out what rules would adjudicate how their characters could carry it.
Showing posts with label resource management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label resource management. Show all posts
Saturday, July 28, 2018
Monday, July 2, 2018
Mechanics for Resource Management - part 2, Defining our Terms
In my first post about resource management, I argued that the original rules for resource management in D&D are too difficult, that they're rarely used, that they nevertheless saddle us with a legacy of unnecessary bookkeeping, and that a better solution is to truly ignore resources that you don't plan to meaningfully track. A longer-term goal of this project is to think about solutions, about better ways to track resources so that they can be managed, easily, effectively, and at the table. There are a number of creative solutions that have emerged from the OSR that deserve to be looked at in detail.
In the shorter term, I want to take a step back and define what I mean by "resource management" generally, identify the major resources that there are to manage, and talk about what I think RM gaming looks like compared to non-RM gaming (and perhaps, compared to an emerging genre of new-RM gaming).
I don't think I have any original insights here. I'm just collecting my own thoughts in one place. I only have the same intellectual resources anyone reading this blog has available to them: access to the rulebooks, and the wealth of play reports and session reports that let me read what other players and other judges do in their games. I'm not even making a real systematic analysis of those reports, just using what I've seen to inform general impressions of common ways that people play.
(As an aside, because of my time in sociology, my automatic word-association for "resource" is "mobilization" rather than "management". I keep having to stop myself, erase the last word, and rewrite it. It will be interesting to see if this project changes my habit at all.)
By resource management, I mean the minigame of actively tracking the supply of multiple different kinds of resources, making decisions (both short-term tactical and long-term strategic) to manage the rate at which the supplies of these resources are depleted and replenished, making trade-offs to spend one resource in order preserve another, and suffering consequences or receiving rewards for making these decisions poorly or well.
The resource management within a play-style or campaign can vary in at least three ways. Campaigns can differ in the purpose that resource management serves within the game, in the overall importance of resource management to the campaign, and in the method used to track each resource. I think of these as being semi-independent axes; two different judges might both use the same method to track a given resource, but it might be much more important in one campaign than in the other, and the purpose that managing that resource serves might be quite different. On the other hand, I have the impression that people's answers to these questions tend to cluster to form either "resource-management games" (or "high-RM games", if you prefer) or "non-resource-management" games.
Purpose - Resource management can be a source of active danger in a campaign. In such a game, players are always at risk of running out of something mid-session, and if they do, there are mechanical consequences. There is an expectation that the players will run out of supplies sometimes, and so the consequences, while possibly harsh, are generally non-lethal. (For example, if players are exploring a pitch black cave using headlamps, they would need to continuously monitor the battery life of their headlamps. They might rotate leaving some on and some off, or turn them all out while camping to save power. If they run out of batteries entirely, they'll have to navigate the cave in the dark. This is much harder than navigating with lights, and increases their chances of becoming lost or trapped, but they also might still make it out alive, especially if they have a good mental map or a skilled navigator. The players could probably spend an entire session exploring the cave while blind, although this might be a frustrating experience for both them and the judge.) To serve this purpose, the resource in question has to be something that's important and consumable, but not entirely indispensable. A character with enough hp (or other resources) should be able to finish the adventure, or at least rush back to safety, without dying.
RM can also serve to set the context for an adventure. Here the assumption is that ensuring that resources don't run out is one of the players' primary goals for the session; there might be rules for the consequences of running out of supplies, but if so, they're typically so harsh that suffering them for more than a couple rounds is going to be fatal. Alternatively, the judge might rule the the players can't take any action that would cause them to run out of supplies, or that they die instantly if they do. (For example, if the players are exploring underwater, they need diving suits and oxygen tanks before ever going underwater. The judge might have rules for drowning, but if so, they'll only get used if someone gets a nick in their airhose during combat, or fumbles while switching their oxygen tanks. There's no way anyone could do the whole dive while drowning the whole time, no matter how many hit points they have. Alternatively, the judge might simply rule that the players have to surface rather than let themselves run out of oxygen, or that they die instantly if they run out.) To serve this purpose, the resource in question has to be something that's vital, and that with careful play is not likely to be used up. Any kind of survival gear for harsh conditions could serve this purpose. A horse or guide might also serve this purpose, with their hit points or morale being the resource that has to be conserved.
Resource management could be entirely a downtime activity. Here the assumption is that resources will not run out during play, and that the players don't particularly need to do anything special to avoid it. There are likely no rules about what happens if the character actually do run out of something, and no expectation that such rules would ever be enforced. Here, resource management is essentially reduced to the role of mandatory shopping. It becomes a kind of between-session tax that the judge enforces on the players. Each time they set out, they need to buy new rations, torches, arrows, and anything else that might get used - under the assumption that it likely got used up between adventures and now needs to be replenished. Depending on the prices characters have to pay relative to the treasure they're likely to find, this tax could force them to pick and choose which resources they're going to maintain from adventure to adventure, keep them hungry for their next score, or shade into ritualistic bookkeeping. Any resource that's routinely available in very large quantities could fall into this purpose.
RM could also take the form of pure ritualism. Players track their supplies with varying attentiveness; some monitoring every expenditure, others keeping track only when they remember, others ignoring it except when prodded. There are no in-game consequences either way. Details that have no relevance in play are listed in the rulebooks, where they can be dutifully recorded by players who feel obligated to write down such information. It feels weird, or wrong, or strange to consider not tracking some resources at all, across the board. Such is the power of tradition, such is the power of legacy. The actions, once performed for a reason, are now simply performed for the sake of the performance, for the sake of ritual. Any resource that serves primarily as a quantified version of "fluff" or characterization has become ritualized. There's space to write it on the character sheet, but this information is never consulted during play.
Finally, resource management could be absent from the game entirely. There isn't space to write it on the character sheet; isn't there in the rulebook to be copied down. Since everything that isn't there technically falls into this category, but the only resources that are likely to be considered notable in their absence are ones that are recorded in other games. The Sims computer game tracks every characters' bladder capacity and Fatal famously tracks a number of different genital measurements; D&D fortunately doesn't, and few players are likely to miss them in their absence - but to consider removing gp, hp, or XP might seem like something that would change the game so much it wouldn't be D&D anymore. And yet, there are those who say the same (loudly, angrily, and often) about resources like loyalty, morale, and strictly-observed movement rates.
Hit points, incidentally, can fall into any of the above categories, depending on how many hp characters have, how much damage hazards and monsters deal, how easily hit points can be recovered through mid-session healing, and how the rules around dying are handled. Numbered in the hundreds and backed by healing surges, death saves, and similar mechanics, hit points become something that are tracked more as a ritual or a legacy than because there is any chance of falling to 0 and actually dying.
Importance - Resource management can range from being so important that tracking various resources practically is the game being played (as in at least some of those early OD&D games, in Torchbearer, and in LotFP's The God that Crawls module) to basically having little or no role in a game that's mostly about combat, mystery-solving, social interaction, or exploration. In between those poles are play-styles where a smaller amount of resource management is used to set limits on how much combat, how much exploration, etc, can be accomplished, so that tracking resource use is done in service of facilitating some other player goal, rather than being a goal, unto itself.
In principle, the importance of each resource can vary independently, but it seems that in practice, these things cluster together, so that either resource management is considered very important and lots of different resources are tracked, or it's considered pretty unimportant and few if any resources are monitored.
One challenge in all this is that there's a kind of paradox to resource management. A situation where the players treat resources as important and plan ahead to have a sufficient supply is almost indistinguishable from a situation where the players and the judge all ignore resource management completely. In both situations, resources don't matter. In both situations, play proceeds without complications created by resource management. There's very little difference between play where the players track their resources but always have enough, play where the judge describes the characters using up un-tracked resources and they always have enough, and play where resource use isn't mentioned at all. I suppose the amount of work put into describing unimportant resources creates a kind of sliding scale of gritty realism, but if all you want is flavor, I think it's better to get it from the narrative you speak aloud to each other, rather than the math you scribble silently on the sheet in front of you.
Resources don't matter when you always have enough of them. The two situations where resources are truly important are when resources run out and players face the consequences or when resources could run out and players adjust their behavior to ensure the they don't. Spells and hit points make paradigmatic examples for thinking about both situations. Spells run out. Players might occasionally hold back from using a spell to save it for later, but in general, players cast spells when they need them, and then deal with the consequences of no longer having them later. The situation where you used to have a spell that could help you, but now you don't, and so now you have to think of a different solution is inherently an interesting situation. It demands improvisation and creative thinking. Hit points could run out. Nothing interesting happens if hit points do actually run out. You're just dead, just no longer in the game (temporarily). But the things players do to avoid running out of hit points, the way they change their behavior from what they want to do to what they have to do to survive, that is interesting. Negotiations, surrenders, chases, combat-avoidance strategies, all of them happen because hit points could run out and players want to ensure that they don't.
A challenge then, for a judge who wants resource management to be important, is to think of why players who care about resources wouldn't just bring enough of them that they don't need to be managed. If you want resources to be important, you can't allow them to be simply a downtime activity, a ritual, or something that's absent from play. Encumbrance is one answer. The characters don't bring enough resources because they can't, they can't carry that much bulk or weight, at least not without the added inconvenience of pack animals and hirelings. The other main answer I've seen is unpredictable resource loss. If resources are consumed at an unpredictable rate, then it may be impossible to have enough of them on hand when you need them. As I'll talk about next time, rations and torches get used at predictable rates, spells and hit points are used up unpredictably. I don't think it's a coincidence that the resources that survive even in most non-RM games are the ones like spells and hit points that almost always matter, that almost always demand to be managed. One final solution is to treat resources as optional benefits. Nothing bad happens if you don't have resources, but something good might happen if you do. Magic items are like this. So would be, for example, gourmet meals, in a game where you assume you always have enough food to avoid starvation, but gain some optional benefit if you manage to eat a really good meal.
Method - Resources can be tracked by counting them directly, by not tracking them at all, or by using an alternate mechanic to track them abstractly. The original D&D rules seem to me to encourage managing all resources by tracking them directly; not tracking, or allowing unlimited supply, seems to me the most direct alternative to that system.
Between these two poles, there are a variety of experimental mechanics that have been written to try to track resources at some level of abstraction, typically with the goal of making them more important by making them easier to track. A great deal of innovation in the OSR concerns resource management, and coming up with alternate mechanics for tracking resources while making tracking easier than direct counting.
Different resources within the same game can use different mechanics, some resources might be counted, others ignored, the remainder might draw on multiple different sub-systems to track each in their own way. Hit points, gold pieces, and experience points seem to be the most common resources to count directly, even in games that treat other resources differently. Encumbrance, ammunition, and time (especially as it relates to light and wandering monsters) seem to be prime contenders for the choice to either ignore the resource or find a new way to track it. One of my goals for starting this series in the first place was to look at the different systems OSR authors have designed for alternative resource tracking.
In the shorter term, I want to take a step back and define what I mean by "resource management" generally, identify the major resources that there are to manage, and talk about what I think RM gaming looks like compared to non-RM gaming (and perhaps, compared to an emerging genre of new-RM gaming).
I don't think I have any original insights here. I'm just collecting my own thoughts in one place. I only have the same intellectual resources anyone reading this blog has available to them: access to the rulebooks, and the wealth of play reports and session reports that let me read what other players and other judges do in their games. I'm not even making a real systematic analysis of those reports, just using what I've seen to inform general impressions of common ways that people play.
(As an aside, because of my time in sociology, my automatic word-association for "resource" is "mobilization" rather than "management". I keep having to stop myself, erase the last word, and rewrite it. It will be interesting to see if this project changes my habit at all.)
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| Treasure chest interiors from Slam Blogsma |
By resource management, I mean the minigame of actively tracking the supply of multiple different kinds of resources, making decisions (both short-term tactical and long-term strategic) to manage the rate at which the supplies of these resources are depleted and replenished, making trade-offs to spend one resource in order preserve another, and suffering consequences or receiving rewards for making these decisions poorly or well.
The resource management within a play-style or campaign can vary in at least three ways. Campaigns can differ in the purpose that resource management serves within the game, in the overall importance of resource management to the campaign, and in the method used to track each resource. I think of these as being semi-independent axes; two different judges might both use the same method to track a given resource, but it might be much more important in one campaign than in the other, and the purpose that managing that resource serves might be quite different. On the other hand, I have the impression that people's answers to these questions tend to cluster to form either "resource-management games" (or "high-RM games", if you prefer) or "non-resource-management" games.
Purpose - Resource management can be a source of active danger in a campaign. In such a game, players are always at risk of running out of something mid-session, and if they do, there are mechanical consequences. There is an expectation that the players will run out of supplies sometimes, and so the consequences, while possibly harsh, are generally non-lethal. (For example, if players are exploring a pitch black cave using headlamps, they would need to continuously monitor the battery life of their headlamps. They might rotate leaving some on and some off, or turn them all out while camping to save power. If they run out of batteries entirely, they'll have to navigate the cave in the dark. This is much harder than navigating with lights, and increases their chances of becoming lost or trapped, but they also might still make it out alive, especially if they have a good mental map or a skilled navigator. The players could probably spend an entire session exploring the cave while blind, although this might be a frustrating experience for both them and the judge.) To serve this purpose, the resource in question has to be something that's important and consumable, but not entirely indispensable. A character with enough hp (or other resources) should be able to finish the adventure, or at least rush back to safety, without dying.
RM can also serve to set the context for an adventure. Here the assumption is that ensuring that resources don't run out is one of the players' primary goals for the session; there might be rules for the consequences of running out of supplies, but if so, they're typically so harsh that suffering them for more than a couple rounds is going to be fatal. Alternatively, the judge might rule the the players can't take any action that would cause them to run out of supplies, or that they die instantly if they do. (For example, if the players are exploring underwater, they need diving suits and oxygen tanks before ever going underwater. The judge might have rules for drowning, but if so, they'll only get used if someone gets a nick in their airhose during combat, or fumbles while switching their oxygen tanks. There's no way anyone could do the whole dive while drowning the whole time, no matter how many hit points they have. Alternatively, the judge might simply rule that the players have to surface rather than let themselves run out of oxygen, or that they die instantly if they run out.) To serve this purpose, the resource in question has to be something that's vital, and that with careful play is not likely to be used up. Any kind of survival gear for harsh conditions could serve this purpose. A horse or guide might also serve this purpose, with their hit points or morale being the resource that has to be conserved.
Resource management could be entirely a downtime activity. Here the assumption is that resources will not run out during play, and that the players don't particularly need to do anything special to avoid it. There are likely no rules about what happens if the character actually do run out of something, and no expectation that such rules would ever be enforced. Here, resource management is essentially reduced to the role of mandatory shopping. It becomes a kind of between-session tax that the judge enforces on the players. Each time they set out, they need to buy new rations, torches, arrows, and anything else that might get used - under the assumption that it likely got used up between adventures and now needs to be replenished. Depending on the prices characters have to pay relative to the treasure they're likely to find, this tax could force them to pick and choose which resources they're going to maintain from adventure to adventure, keep them hungry for their next score, or shade into ritualistic bookkeeping. Any resource that's routinely available in very large quantities could fall into this purpose.
RM could also take the form of pure ritualism. Players track their supplies with varying attentiveness; some monitoring every expenditure, others keeping track only when they remember, others ignoring it except when prodded. There are no in-game consequences either way. Details that have no relevance in play are listed in the rulebooks, where they can be dutifully recorded by players who feel obligated to write down such information. It feels weird, or wrong, or strange to consider not tracking some resources at all, across the board. Such is the power of tradition, such is the power of legacy. The actions, once performed for a reason, are now simply performed for the sake of the performance, for the sake of ritual. Any resource that serves primarily as a quantified version of "fluff" or characterization has become ritualized. There's space to write it on the character sheet, but this information is never consulted during play.
Finally, resource management could be absent from the game entirely. There isn't space to write it on the character sheet; isn't there in the rulebook to be copied down. Since everything that isn't there technically falls into this category, but the only resources that are likely to be considered notable in their absence are ones that are recorded in other games. The Sims computer game tracks every characters' bladder capacity and Fatal famously tracks a number of different genital measurements; D&D fortunately doesn't, and few players are likely to miss them in their absence - but to consider removing gp, hp, or XP might seem like something that would change the game so much it wouldn't be D&D anymore. And yet, there are those who say the same (loudly, angrily, and often) about resources like loyalty, morale, and strictly-observed movement rates.
Hit points, incidentally, can fall into any of the above categories, depending on how many hp characters have, how much damage hazards and monsters deal, how easily hit points can be recovered through mid-session healing, and how the rules around dying are handled. Numbered in the hundreds and backed by healing surges, death saves, and similar mechanics, hit points become something that are tracked more as a ritual or a legacy than because there is any chance of falling to 0 and actually dying.
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| Treasure chest interiors from Slam Blogsma |
Importance - Resource management can range from being so important that tracking various resources practically is the game being played (as in at least some of those early OD&D games, in Torchbearer, and in LotFP's The God that Crawls module) to basically having little or no role in a game that's mostly about combat, mystery-solving, social interaction, or exploration. In between those poles are play-styles where a smaller amount of resource management is used to set limits on how much combat, how much exploration, etc, can be accomplished, so that tracking resource use is done in service of facilitating some other player goal, rather than being a goal, unto itself.
In principle, the importance of each resource can vary independently, but it seems that in practice, these things cluster together, so that either resource management is considered very important and lots of different resources are tracked, or it's considered pretty unimportant and few if any resources are monitored.
One challenge in all this is that there's a kind of paradox to resource management. A situation where the players treat resources as important and plan ahead to have a sufficient supply is almost indistinguishable from a situation where the players and the judge all ignore resource management completely. In both situations, resources don't matter. In both situations, play proceeds without complications created by resource management. There's very little difference between play where the players track their resources but always have enough, play where the judge describes the characters using up un-tracked resources and they always have enough, and play where resource use isn't mentioned at all. I suppose the amount of work put into describing unimportant resources creates a kind of sliding scale of gritty realism, but if all you want is flavor, I think it's better to get it from the narrative you speak aloud to each other, rather than the math you scribble silently on the sheet in front of you.
Resources don't matter when you always have enough of them. The two situations where resources are truly important are when resources run out and players face the consequences or when resources could run out and players adjust their behavior to ensure the they don't. Spells and hit points make paradigmatic examples for thinking about both situations. Spells run out. Players might occasionally hold back from using a spell to save it for later, but in general, players cast spells when they need them, and then deal with the consequences of no longer having them later. The situation where you used to have a spell that could help you, but now you don't, and so now you have to think of a different solution is inherently an interesting situation. It demands improvisation and creative thinking. Hit points could run out. Nothing interesting happens if hit points do actually run out. You're just dead, just no longer in the game (temporarily). But the things players do to avoid running out of hit points, the way they change their behavior from what they want to do to what they have to do to survive, that is interesting. Negotiations, surrenders, chases, combat-avoidance strategies, all of them happen because hit points could run out and players want to ensure that they don't.
A challenge then, for a judge who wants resource management to be important, is to think of why players who care about resources wouldn't just bring enough of them that they don't need to be managed. If you want resources to be important, you can't allow them to be simply a downtime activity, a ritual, or something that's absent from play. Encumbrance is one answer. The characters don't bring enough resources because they can't, they can't carry that much bulk or weight, at least not without the added inconvenience of pack animals and hirelings. The other main answer I've seen is unpredictable resource loss. If resources are consumed at an unpredictable rate, then it may be impossible to have enough of them on hand when you need them. As I'll talk about next time, rations and torches get used at predictable rates, spells and hit points are used up unpredictably. I don't think it's a coincidence that the resources that survive even in most non-RM games are the ones like spells and hit points that almost always matter, that almost always demand to be managed. One final solution is to treat resources as optional benefits. Nothing bad happens if you don't have resources, but something good might happen if you do. Magic items are like this. So would be, for example, gourmet meals, in a game where you assume you always have enough food to avoid starvation, but gain some optional benefit if you manage to eat a really good meal.
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| Treasure chest interiors from Slam Blogsma |
Method - Resources can be tracked by counting them directly, by not tracking them at all, or by using an alternate mechanic to track them abstractly. The original D&D rules seem to me to encourage managing all resources by tracking them directly; not tracking, or allowing unlimited supply, seems to me the most direct alternative to that system.
Between these two poles, there are a variety of experimental mechanics that have been written to try to track resources at some level of abstraction, typically with the goal of making them more important by making them easier to track. A great deal of innovation in the OSR concerns resource management, and coming up with alternate mechanics for tracking resources while making tracking easier than direct counting.
Different resources within the same game can use different mechanics, some resources might be counted, others ignored, the remainder might draw on multiple different sub-systems to track each in their own way. Hit points, gold pieces, and experience points seem to be the most common resources to count directly, even in games that treat other resources differently. Encumbrance, ammunition, and time (especially as it relates to light and wandering monsters) seem to be prime contenders for the choice to either ignore the resource or find a new way to track it. One of my goals for starting this series in the first place was to look at the different systems OSR authors have designed for alternative resource tracking.
Tuesday, June 12, 2018
Mechanics for Resource Management - part 1, The Easy Way
Recently I've found myself thinking (and commenting on G+) about resource management in D&D. The series of posts I'm starting here is mostly an attempt to gather my thoughts in one place so that I can consider my options and think about my own preferences.
In the earliest versions of D&D, it seems that players were expected to keep scrupulous accounting records of their adventuring gear and the weight of their treasure. Gear was recorded in pounds (or even in coin-weight-equivalents) and there were multiple levels of encumbrance with associated movement rates.
As I understand it, the goal of this approach is to make resource management central to the playing of the game. Your gear determines how many 10' dungeon grid-squares you move per exploration turn. Torches provide illumination out to a set distance, beyond which the dungeon is invisible in the darkness. Torches burn out and get used up; if you don't bring enough with you, you could run out entirely and be stuck in the dark. Every turn or every other turn, you check for wandering monsters. When you do find some treasure, you're limited in how much you can carry, and you have to decide how encumbered you're willing to become. The more treasure you take, the slower you'll move, the more torches you'll use up, and the more wandering monsters you'll check for and encounter. (And wandering monsters, of course, use up things like ammunition, spells, and the ultimate character resource, hit points.)
As I said, I think that's the goal. I think the message is intended be that resources matter, you have to make hard choices to manage them, and if you make the wrong choices, you won't get out alive. In practice, rules that require such strict record-keeping and so much memorizing and monitoring of multiple metrics simultaneously, in terms of pounds and coins of encumbrance, in terms of squares of movement, in terms of watching the time on your torches, in terms of remembering to keep checking for monsters ... in practice, a system like this sends a different message, to me at least.
If resource management is going to matter, then the rules for resources have to be simple enough to remember, monitor, and apply at the table.
In defense of the original rules, I think they were playing with miniatures on table-size grip-maps, and I think most of them were wargamers who were used to doing a lot of mental accounting during their games. Move off the miniature map and away from a direct physical representations of the pieces on the board taking their turns ... move away from that, I think it becomes practically unmanageable.
Later editions of D&D and Pathfinder seem to feel obliged to maintain rules for equipment weights in pounds, degrees of encumbrance and rates of movement. But they're like legacy components that are no longer supported by the rest of the system. There rules are there, but they don't matter. You get all the work, but it serves no purpose. In that sense, it becomes completely optional, because nothing in the game depends on tracking those things. There are no consequences if you don't track them, and no consequences if you do track them either.
If there are no wandering monster checks, then why does it matter how quickly you're moving? If it doesn't matter how quickly you're moving, then why does it matter how much weight you're carrying? And if it doesn't matter how much weight you're carrying, then why bother tracking the individual weights of every item in your inventory? (And in general, the high-fantasy settings these editions imagine, the linear-path games they support, and the medieval-superhero characters they generate all seem antithetical to imaginary scarcity and privation.)
For whatever reason though, the people writing these rules seem to be unable to admit that they're essentially set dressing, the weight of your boots mattering no more than the nutritional value of your bar-food or rations. Instead of removing the rules, or stating that they're cosmetic, or choosing to meaningfully support them, instead they have often chosen to fill their worlds with magic items to circumvent them. The worlds of 2e, 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder are all worlds filled with bags of holding, boots of walking, and flashlights of continual light. I don't know what message they hope this is sending to their judges and their players. Something about how it's important to track these things for their own sake, or the sake of realism, or the Protestant ethic, or something, but also about how good players and judges should find magical within-game ways to circumvent these rules as quickly as possible. I'm just guessing at that, though. I don't really understand what message they want to send. I do know what message they're sending to me though.
If resource management is going to matter, then there have to be consequences that result from how the players choose to manage their resources. (Consequences both for carrying too much, and consequences for trying to do without.)
5e introduces some rules simplifications in other areas, possibly aimed at lightening players' and judges' cognitive loads to the point where resource management could matter once again. Rather than picking characters' starting equipment item-by-item from across a multi-page inventory list, players get to pick between a few pairs of weapons that come with ammunition, and they receive a pack that contains bundles of items like torches and ropes.
My only critique here is something I've noticed in play. Every background has a special ability that guarantees you free room and board from someone. You start the game with a week or two of rations, enough arrows to slay a small army, and enough light to last at least through your first session without refueling. You can mark them off as you play, but you know (or you learn, the game teaches you) you'll never run out mid-session, and between sessions, you can fully restock on anything you used up. So why mark them off? Why keep track, if keeping track will never matter, if it will only ever be busywork?
And if you're not keeping track of your arrows, and the things the game offers for sale are things like arrows, things that cost the barest fraction of the treasure you hauled out your very first session, why keep track of those purchases? Your food is already free, your room every night is already free. What is there left to spend money on? And if you can't spend it fast enough to ever, even for a moment, be in danger of running out of it, why bother tracking it at all? (Yes, I realize I just asked "why track gold in D&D?" but if you aren't trading gold for XP, and you always have as much gold as you need for routine purchases, and routine purchases are the only kind of purchases you can make ... then why track gold in D&D?)
If resource management is going to matter, then resources have to be managed routinely (possibly every time they're used) so that running out mid-session is always a possibility, and having enough when you need them is the result of strategy, conservation, or luck, and not guaranteed.
If your supply of something is so great that you'll never run out when you need it, then your supply is practically unlimited. That is, in practice, if the number of supplies you have is so great that it can't run out, then that number does not set a limit on your use of that supply.
So the first option for resource management in D&D is, don't.
Don't manage your resources, ignore them.
Your characters can carry whatever equipment they've accumulated along the way. They are in the hallway, then a room, then back in the hallway again, then in another room, and it doesn't matter how much time passes while they do that, so it doesn't matter how fast they were moving. The lights are always on. Their guns never run out of bullets. They never need to eat or go to the bathroom. They always get a good night's sleep.
But if you're going to ignore resource management, ignore it. Don't force yourself to count things where the number doesn't matter. Don't continue going through the motions of a certain style of play without actually playing it. Be honest with yourself about what you're doing. Admit to yourself that you don't care about encumbrance, or movement rates, or light sources, or whatever. Don't pretend you're using them when you're not. Give yourself permission to play the game you're already playing. Don't punish yourself with unnecessary bookkeeping just because you don't want to acknowledge that account will never be overdrawn. Dan Savage claims, "Some people twist themselves into the oddest knots so they can have what they want without having to admit they want it." Don't do that. Admit what you're doing. Give yourself permission. Ignore it.
Admittedly, this style of play is far removed from the original wargamers counting dungeon tiles and coin-weight-equivalents, and double-checking their marching order, and playing "who's on torch" to decide how far they can move and what they can see each game-turn. But we've been far removed from that for awhile, though we feel obligated to pretend we're not. Ignoring resource management is easy. It frees up your cognitive resources to focus on other parts of the game.
Tracking all that shit is hard, and it's much harder to do in the theater of the mind than it is at a bespoke wargaming table. Sometimes you want to play a game without feeling like you're recreating The Things They Carried in fantasy while you play. Tracking all that shit takes time, real time, your time, an actual resource that is truly limited. For novice players, or players who are too busy, or players who can't make an 8-hour play session, ignoring resource management might be the only way they can play.
Are you missing out on something if your game doesn't include resource management? In the sense that you are missing out on participating in a very specific style of play, yes, you're missing out on something. But in the sense that that style is somehow the superior way to play? That everyone who doesn't play it only experiences something inferior? No, you're not missing out on a thing.
Gary Gygax claimed that "You cannot have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept," and you get the feeling that he felt that way about everything, down to accounting for the last copper penny. But meaning can come from lots of sources, and for me, those sources don't include determining my character's height in inches, or weight in pounds, or age in years, or birth order, or astrological sign, or how much loose change she keeps her pocketbook, or how many pencils are in the jar on her desk, or how many AA batteries she has in the door of her fridge.
Including any resource management in your game has to start with acknowledging which resources you want to manage, and which you can safely ignore. If there are resources you want to manage, then manage them, and for the rest, do what TSR and Paizo and WotC have been telling you to do with them all these years, (despite not being willing to admit what message they're sending you).
This is just the first option, the easiest. Everything else is more complicated.
In the earliest versions of D&D, it seems that players were expected to keep scrupulous accounting records of their adventuring gear and the weight of their treasure. Gear was recorded in pounds (or even in coin-weight-equivalents) and there were multiple levels of encumbrance with associated movement rates.
As I understand it, the goal of this approach is to make resource management central to the playing of the game. Your gear determines how many 10' dungeon grid-squares you move per exploration turn. Torches provide illumination out to a set distance, beyond which the dungeon is invisible in the darkness. Torches burn out and get used up; if you don't bring enough with you, you could run out entirely and be stuck in the dark. Every turn or every other turn, you check for wandering monsters. When you do find some treasure, you're limited in how much you can carry, and you have to decide how encumbered you're willing to become. The more treasure you take, the slower you'll move, the more torches you'll use up, and the more wandering monsters you'll check for and encounter. (And wandering monsters, of course, use up things like ammunition, spells, and the ultimate character resource, hit points.)
As I said, I think that's the goal. I think the message is intended be that resources matter, you have to make hard choices to manage them, and if you make the wrong choices, you won't get out alive. In practice, rules that require such strict record-keeping and so much memorizing and monitoring of multiple metrics simultaneously, in terms of pounds and coins of encumbrance, in terms of squares of movement, in terms of watching the time on your torches, in terms of remembering to keep checking for monsters ... in practice, a system like this sends a different message, to me at least.
If resource management is going to matter, then the rules for resources have to be simple enough to remember, monitor, and apply at the table.
In defense of the original rules, I think they were playing with miniatures on table-size grip-maps, and I think most of them were wargamers who were used to doing a lot of mental accounting during their games. Move off the miniature map and away from a direct physical representations of the pieces on the board taking their turns ... move away from that, I think it becomes practically unmanageable.
Later editions of D&D and Pathfinder seem to feel obliged to maintain rules for equipment weights in pounds, degrees of encumbrance and rates of movement. But they're like legacy components that are no longer supported by the rest of the system. There rules are there, but they don't matter. You get all the work, but it serves no purpose. In that sense, it becomes completely optional, because nothing in the game depends on tracking those things. There are no consequences if you don't track them, and no consequences if you do track them either.
If there are no wandering monster checks, then why does it matter how quickly you're moving? If it doesn't matter how quickly you're moving, then why does it matter how much weight you're carrying? And if it doesn't matter how much weight you're carrying, then why bother tracking the individual weights of every item in your inventory? (And in general, the high-fantasy settings these editions imagine, the linear-path games they support, and the medieval-superhero characters they generate all seem antithetical to imaginary scarcity and privation.)
For whatever reason though, the people writing these rules seem to be unable to admit that they're essentially set dressing, the weight of your boots mattering no more than the nutritional value of your bar-food or rations. Instead of removing the rules, or stating that they're cosmetic, or choosing to meaningfully support them, instead they have often chosen to fill their worlds with magic items to circumvent them. The worlds of 2e, 3.0, 3.5, and Pathfinder are all worlds filled with bags of holding, boots of walking, and flashlights of continual light. I don't know what message they hope this is sending to their judges and their players. Something about how it's important to track these things for their own sake, or the sake of realism, or the Protestant ethic, or something, but also about how good players and judges should find magical within-game ways to circumvent these rules as quickly as possible. I'm just guessing at that, though. I don't really understand what message they want to send. I do know what message they're sending to me though.
If resource management is going to matter, then there have to be consequences that result from how the players choose to manage their resources. (Consequences both for carrying too much, and consequences for trying to do without.)
5e introduces some rules simplifications in other areas, possibly aimed at lightening players' and judges' cognitive loads to the point where resource management could matter once again. Rather than picking characters' starting equipment item-by-item from across a multi-page inventory list, players get to pick between a few pairs of weapons that come with ammunition, and they receive a pack that contains bundles of items like torches and ropes.
My only critique here is something I've noticed in play. Every background has a special ability that guarantees you free room and board from someone. You start the game with a week or two of rations, enough arrows to slay a small army, and enough light to last at least through your first session without refueling. You can mark them off as you play, but you know (or you learn, the game teaches you) you'll never run out mid-session, and between sessions, you can fully restock on anything you used up. So why mark them off? Why keep track, if keeping track will never matter, if it will only ever be busywork?
And if you're not keeping track of your arrows, and the things the game offers for sale are things like arrows, things that cost the barest fraction of the treasure you hauled out your very first session, why keep track of those purchases? Your food is already free, your room every night is already free. What is there left to spend money on? And if you can't spend it fast enough to ever, even for a moment, be in danger of running out of it, why bother tracking it at all? (Yes, I realize I just asked "why track gold in D&D?" but if you aren't trading gold for XP, and you always have as much gold as you need for routine purchases, and routine purchases are the only kind of purchases you can make ... then why track gold in D&D?)
If resource management is going to matter, then resources have to be managed routinely (possibly every time they're used) so that running out mid-session is always a possibility, and having enough when you need them is the result of strategy, conservation, or luck, and not guaranteed.
If your supply of something is so great that you'll never run out when you need it, then your supply is practically unlimited. That is, in practice, if the number of supplies you have is so great that it can't run out, then that number does not set a limit on your use of that supply.
So the first option for resource management in D&D is, don't.
Don't manage your resources, ignore them.
Your characters can carry whatever equipment they've accumulated along the way. They are in the hallway, then a room, then back in the hallway again, then in another room, and it doesn't matter how much time passes while they do that, so it doesn't matter how fast they were moving. The lights are always on. Their guns never run out of bullets. They never need to eat or go to the bathroom. They always get a good night's sleep.
But if you're going to ignore resource management, ignore it. Don't force yourself to count things where the number doesn't matter. Don't continue going through the motions of a certain style of play without actually playing it. Be honest with yourself about what you're doing. Admit to yourself that you don't care about encumbrance, or movement rates, or light sources, or whatever. Don't pretend you're using them when you're not. Give yourself permission to play the game you're already playing. Don't punish yourself with unnecessary bookkeeping just because you don't want to acknowledge that account will never be overdrawn. Dan Savage claims, "Some people twist themselves into the oddest knots so they can have what they want without having to admit they want it." Don't do that. Admit what you're doing. Give yourself permission. Ignore it.
Admittedly, this style of play is far removed from the original wargamers counting dungeon tiles and coin-weight-equivalents, and double-checking their marching order, and playing "who's on torch" to decide how far they can move and what they can see each game-turn. But we've been far removed from that for awhile, though we feel obligated to pretend we're not. Ignoring resource management is easy. It frees up your cognitive resources to focus on other parts of the game.
Tracking all that shit is hard, and it's much harder to do in the theater of the mind than it is at a bespoke wargaming table. Sometimes you want to play a game without feeling like you're recreating The Things They Carried in fantasy while you play. Tracking all that shit takes time, real time, your time, an actual resource that is truly limited. For novice players, or players who are too busy, or players who can't make an 8-hour play session, ignoring resource management might be the only way they can play.
Are you missing out on something if your game doesn't include resource management? In the sense that you are missing out on participating in a very specific style of play, yes, you're missing out on something. But in the sense that that style is somehow the superior way to play? That everyone who doesn't play it only experiences something inferior? No, you're not missing out on a thing.
Gary Gygax claimed that "You cannot have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept," and you get the feeling that he felt that way about everything, down to accounting for the last copper penny. But meaning can come from lots of sources, and for me, those sources don't include determining my character's height in inches, or weight in pounds, or age in years, or birth order, or astrological sign, or how much loose change she keeps her pocketbook, or how many pencils are in the jar on her desk, or how many AA batteries she has in the door of her fridge.
Including any resource management in your game has to start with acknowledging which resources you want to manage, and which you can safely ignore. If there are resources you want to manage, then manage them, and for the rest, do what TSR and Paizo and WotC have been telling you to do with them all these years, (despite not being willing to admit what message they're sending you).
This is just the first option, the easiest. Everything else is more complicated.
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