RPGs Should Not Forget Resource Management as a Cornerstone to Strategy

One thing many current computer and console RPGs miss, which was prevalent in old-school D&D, was the idea of resource management as a key component of your strategy. Basically, you didn’t want to blow that fireball spell on the first group of goblins you met because you might need it later.

While there were certainly mega-dungeons in D&D that often required multiple days to clear out, even these had a certain amount of resource management. Hit points, for example, weren’t completely restored by resting for the night. In fact, you’d find yourself mostly in the same shape the next day and probably in need of some healing spells, which begins to drain the resources of the cleric.

When I first designed my Endless Adventures roguelike with an emphasis on bringing a 4-character party to roguelike games, it was with this idea in mind. Many roguelikes use resources like mana to help the player reset, but the design of a game meant for a single character is very different from the design for multiple characters. In order to achieve this resource management, I did two things:

1. Give characters much higher hit points than the creatures they would oppose at their level. This allowed the character to be heroic, but it also created a dynamic where their hit points would wear down as the adventure progressed.
2. In order to augment #1, ensure that healing was regulated to very small heals with moderate-to-greater heals available only a few times in an adventuring day.

This created a system wherein the characters could easily defeat the first few encounters they met on an adventure, but even then, taking too much damage would put them at a disadvantage as the adventure wore on.

The same applied to spells. While some minor spells could be repeated every 2, 3, or 5 rounds, the major spells could only be cast a few times a day. So that Greater Heal spell might be cast twice, and that Heal Group spell might only be cast once per day. The same applied to fireball, lightning storm, confusion cloud, etc.

This design continued in my Rogue Party app. Rogue Party concentrated on building on the design by creating a more open-ended character development system without classes, where the player could mix and match skills to create the type of character they wanted. And because it allowed up to four characters in the party, they could build certain strategies into the mix.

Rogue Party was built on top of an idea of a simplified TTRPG system that utilized fewer attributes and guidelines for building abilities/spells to allow for more open play.

In Rogue Party, medium-to-high-end spells weren’t limited by a certain number of uses per day. Instead, they charged throughout the day and could gain multiple charges. This allowed their usefulness to be maintained as the character progressed through levels and became involved in longer combats and more encounters per adventuring day.

However, I do think that one mistake with both of these roguelikes was having minor abilities based on being used every other round, every three rounds, or once a combat. This turned them into a whack-a-mole system. You might as well use that once-a-combat skill every combat because, why not? And as soon as that once-every-three-turns skill is available, use it!

There are a few ways to fix this. An easy way would be to implement a stamina system wherein skills were balanced by how much stamina they used. Was the once-a-combat skill worth it if it drained your stamina completely? As an addition to traditional stamina systems, we could put in a system where if stamina drops below a certain point (say 25%), your max stamina goes down slightly for the rest of the day. And if your stamina goes into the negative, the character might suffer other penalties.

Or, another way that I find interesting is the idea of powering up those minor abilities if they aren’t used. So, if you don’t use that once-a-combat skill in the fight against the goblins, it becomes a little more powerful when next used. If you skip multiple combats, it could become as powerful as a medium-level ability. There would no doubt be a cap on how powerful it could get, but this could create the same “is it worth it?” question that is asked when pondering the higher-end abilities.

The Rise of the Single-Character RPG

If you looked at most CRPGs in the 80s and early 90s, you would see titles like Ultima, The Bard’s Tale, Might and Magic, Wizardry, and similar games where the cornerstone of the game was creating a full party of characters to take on the baddies.

And then came Diablo.

While Diablo is no doubt one of the greatest RPGs ever created, it did usher in the age of ARPGs where fast action trumped turn-based strategy. When we think of RPGs these days, we often think of games like Diablo, Path of Exile, and Dark Souls. Even the games that allow you to have a full party (Baldur’s Gate 3, Avowed, etc.) often make it feel like you are only playing a single character amongst some NPCs that have joined your party.

As I mentioned earlier, single-player RPGs tend to need their own distinct design elements and often do better with a fully-regenerating system like mana and hit point regeneration as opposed to resources being limited until a “full rest” resets them.

Does Modern-Day D&D Suffer From the Same Problem?

It does seem that D&D has gone from having resources being a key component of the strategy back in the AD&D 1e days to an “action economy” and 5-room dungeons that promote more of a “blast them with all you’ve got” strategy.

The 5-room dungeon, in particular, can be problematic. The encounter design guidelines are centered around the idea of 6–8 encounters in a day. Fewer encounters mean the party can throw more resources at each encounter.

The inclusion of two short rests per day added with a 5-room dungeon means a class like the Warlock can be mostly reset after every other encounter.

This can create less emphasis on guarding resources and more emphasis on dishing out spikes of damage.

One rule of thumb I’ve always kept in mind when designing a system is that offense doesn’t make for good strategy in a game. Defense does.

Of course, there can also be too much defense, especially if the defense is simplified. Does anyone really like ‘Counterspell’ being spammed throughout combat? But that’s a rant for another day…

About the writer: I developed the Endless RPG: Random Maps for Solo D&D app, which is available on the iPhone, Android and the Steam store for PC.