narration and resource management

[Matt Wilson]

Been playing John Harper's "Poodle" pool variant a bit, and thinking about how the anti-pool in general is kind of a narration resource.

Resource management seems loaded with potential problems in games, and I don't know if they actually are problems.

In D&D, you choose which spells you need, and you have to decide whether to use fireball now or save it for what comes next. However, you can always decide to halt the party for the night and rest up and re-memorize that fireball.

In Anti-Pool, you have to decide whether to spend the dice and narrate now, and risk not having the opportunity later. But if your pool refreshes at the beginning of the next game, there might not be another conflict situation to worry about between now and end of tonight's game.

I imagine that the same goes for Trollbabe's reroll options. A group might wrap up a story long before any rerolls are checked off.

The apparent issue I see is an assumption in the game design that game play will last a certain length of time. There's a "sweet spot" that produces just the right number of conflicts to use up resources evenly. If play is too short, you won't have enough conflicts and have a resource surplus. If play is too long, you have too many conflicts and use up resources early.

Thoughts?

[John Harper]

The first thing that comes to mind is tying resource refreshment to some gameplay activity, whether in-game or not.

Dying Earth works this way. Your trait pools refresh when you do X activity in-game, like enjoy a relaxing evening. This alleviates some of the session-length quandries since players can manage when and how their pools refresh on the same time-scale that they use the pools (i.e. from scene to scene) rather than the arbitrary time scale of "next session."

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Matt,

Regarding Trollbabe, my experience is that the number of re-rolls isn't problematic, all the way down to none. In one instance, a player simply made all sorts of decisions, succeeded in every roll (including some low-probability ones), and waltzed off once various resolutions had occurred. As far as I was concerned, the essential questions of the game ("Who am I?") had been answered. So in that case, I think the game is designed so that managing the resource isn't the only source of enjoyment.

And an interesting module for AD&D (A4: Eyrie of the Slave Lords, or some title like that) stripped a bunch of high-level characters from their stuff, flensed the spell-casters' memories of all but a couple baby spells, and put'em in some rather arduous peril, mostly involving terrain and negotiation. In this case, I think that the module emphasized that enjoyment was to be found even when the resource-management was stripped down to the basics. Iimportant, yes, but not in the max-out sense that much AD&D high-level play becomes.

But if the resources, both in quantity and in management, become the primary source of enjoyment? H'm. I agree with you. I think that sounds like no fun at all for me (and may well be why high-level D&D of whatever edition held no attractions for me, at least in the groups I was dealing with). I might be missing a whole school of play that I do enjoy simply due to cognitive malfunction, though.

Why doesn't The Pool qualify? Because it seems to me as if it's fun to play regardless of one's current Pool dice; "successful husbanding" really isn't a win-strategy of any consequence unless you bring in a value system that makes it so.

Best,
Ron

[Harlequin]

My two cents says that in part, there's an implicit assumption of a length of play, on the part of the designer... but in part, it's also an acknowledgement of some very valid out-of-character factors.  

The LARP system Shades of Divinity, for instance, scales everything to N/day and the like, which is of dubious merit if one wishes to consider running a full weekend event in a game which normally runs ~3hr evening events.  However, I am with them one hundred percent, due to the way those powers are set up.  The vast majority of powers listed (many, many, there's essentially no other mechanic), have no fortune involvement, nor much way to stop them from taking effect, so it becomes "one per day, you can do the following...".  Many of which effects are really fascinating... one of the social ones targets a character but is handled via a narrator.  The narrator provides you with three nouns of strong significance to that character (consulting with them if need be), but zero context for any of them.  You have to guess.  That's fairly typical of the game, and it's a good system IMO, because although they're limited in uses, they're both interesting and rewarding and have almost zero whiff-factor.  All good.

However, the fact that most of these effects essentially have no chance of failure and minimal chance of being countered in any way, and are intricate in their manifestation, means that there's a very real resource drain in terms of player interest.  Done once, those three words are a fascinating tool.  Done on every other character in the game, and not only do you have an unimaginable drain on narrator time, but they would pale down to tokens only, even for the player using the power.  The cool-factor would degrade rapidly per number of uses that night.

But by the next event (for us, typically a player-month later), the very scarcity of the resource has recovered its coolness in the player's eyes.  You have a long list of people you'd like to use it on, and a whole month of OOC time to come up with intricate plans and ideas involving it.  As a player, your energy refreshes.  That's not trivial.

Do I think that's the reasoning behind most such resource systems?  Of course not.  But if the use of the resource is tied in any way to the availability of player energy/enthusiasm/plans, then linking both to their common root - the game session - isn't as unreasonable as it sounds.

- Eric