Tired of the only being able to tire out your characters by yanking HPs and healing surges? What you need, friend, are extra resources.
What do I mean by a resource? There are many ways to define it, but to put it simply in an RPG context, a resource is anything that a PC cares about that can be quantified. This will vary from campaign to campaign, but if you can quantify it some way, and players want/need it, it’s a resource. The basic resources in 4e are your powers, your hit points, and your healing surges. I feel that when people decry the lack of “roleplay” or non-combat stuff, it’s for lack of other resources that can drive the game in other ways.
If your PCs lose a skill challenge, for example, typically what happens is they fall into a fight, taxing the aforementioned resources. But what if losing a skill challenge does something else…like causes you to lose influence with the king? Or bring you closer to starvation out in the wilderness? Essential to the art of good roleplaying is this set of things that your characters want or don’t want. RPGs are still games after all, and any good game compels its players to take action.
It’s easy to add resources to your campaign with little overhead. You pick something appropriate to the campaign, something that your campaign and therefore your players, care about. In a political campaign, Influence is an appropriate resource. In a post-apocalyptic game about survival, Rations are an appropriate resource. A game where the PCs are working with and for gods uses Favor.
Now, if the players fail a skill challenge to impress someone at court, they lose Influence. If they fail a navigation check in the survival game, they lose Rations as they spend their time wandering aimlessly through the wilderness. Piss off a god and you lose Favor. As long as you use resources that are important and relevant to your specific campaign, losing or gaining these resources matters. Exhaustion of these resources challenges players, and gaining the resource rewards players.
If you still aren’t sure what I’m talking about, here is an example:
Rations
Appropriate for: any game where survival and foraging are required of the players.
What it represents: Basic necessities need to live –food, water, and basic means of getting or storing these items.
Usage: Rations are used to abstract and collect what the players need to survive into on easily trackable resource. Instead of spending more time than is necessary with everyone doing book-keeping, you lump all that book-keeping into one resource. Each ration point lets the party live comfortably for one day.
Each day the party loses 1 Ration point.
To acquire Ration points:
- Forage (at the DC in th book for 5 people) per ration point
- Buy them (1 Ration point is equal to 1 gp per party member)
- Any other way the characters are determined to be clever…
The party is OK until they are out of ration points. The first day the party spends without ration points, and every day thereafter, they lose two healing surges. These healing surges cannot be regained until they the party has spent consecutive days with Ration points equal to the number of days without. So if the party went three days without ration points, they’d need three days with ration points to regain the healing surges lost.
An alternate consequence of going without rations is to have the party weakened until they recover.
Still need more examples? They’ll be coming up. Also: I’ll take requests.
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About gamefiend
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e. By day he is a technologist.
Nice. I used to use something along the lines of influence with a mechanic I called Reputation (which I actually stole from the old school GTA II before there was WoW).
Reputation had varied effects on price of goods in a region, which taverns you could sleep in, and what odd jobs (read adventures) you could be hired for.
Looking forward to more.
Yoink!
@madbrewlabs that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. I’m ironing out my reputation system right now, actually. It’s actually got different sorts of reputation –so you could get rep points for being a scoundrel or being virtuous for example.
@The last rogue –double yoink?
What about gold as a resource? The party needs to purchase some valuable item/artifact or maybe some expensive components in order to cast a plot-centric ritual.
The downside to gold as a resource is in leading your PC’s to grind – something I’d like to keep as far away from the table as possible.
Brilliant timing – I have been pondering how to make a sea journey more interesting, and making the trip be all about managing the rations seems like a great idea. Perhaps an extended skill-challenge (or set of challenges), starting when they leave port… or starting even earlier, with a skill-challenge to get as many rations as possible to start with, e.g. while they might have enough money to buy all the rations they need, they might need to ferret out all the places that can actually supply enough rations at short notice. Then between each port, you’ve got another skill-challenge to navigate successfully – potentially even a nautical fight or two thrown in there to mix it up, and potentially invaders (pirates, sahuaghan etc) try to steal / spoil some of the rations! The only part I’m struggling with is how (in 4e) to represent the “navigate” part – in 3.x, you’d use profession (sailor), with some knowledge (geography) etc, but in 4e their doesn’t seem to be enough skills to put to good use – or perhaps I’m just not thinking creatively enough? Anyone able to help me with a good mini-skill challenge for navigating a ship from port to port? Preferably complexity 1, and assuming the PC’s are not actually captaining the ship, or even part of the crew, but I’d like to engage them in helping decide the fate of the ship as it tries to get from port to port, across open seas as well as through islands and suchlike, before running out of rations (there are about 22 people on board, i.e. crew, passengers, and PC’s).
@kingworks Wealth as a resource would be totally awesome. My basic treatment of it would be a wealth system similar in function to d20 modern, where the players could make skill checks against their wealth to procure items. You could then abstract treasure into bonuses on the wealth, and take out a loooot of recordkeeping, allowing you to focus on the nature of the loot in general. I think you can avoid grind if you allow a bit of leeway with the resource –certain items won’t actually deplete wealth, for example. It wouldn’t have the same day to day drain as rations, obviously.
@hastur Oh man, I love a challenge (especially when it’s a skill challenge!) Give me a bit, Hastur and I’ll have something for you. If you want, start a thread on the forums and let’s talk this over. I already have a few ideas I’d like to bounce off of you.
RATIONS! How very old schooly school of you friend! Here’s a list of additional resources:
- encumbrance
- arrows (no really, lots of people don’t bother)
- weapon / armor wear and tear (on a crit, it makes a save or looses effectiveness somehow)
- spell components
- morality points (yes… you can loose these too in times of _great_ need). =D
RATION POINTS!!!! shit, I’ve been trying to figure out a simple way to implement rations into my games again without having to count three meals a day. Awesome!
As for resources as treasure, how about renewable spell components? Say a rare patch of green-blue 5 foot mushrooms used for a specific ritual that can be harvested once a month? I’m going to try using more spell components as resources when my campaign starts back up next month to encourage more ritual casting and alchemy.
Another resource I thought about implementing is the temporary buff quest reward. Say you rescue the witch hag from the evil fairy princess so the witch hag bestows a temporary buff of +2 to attack and damage against fey creatures while wielding the plucked out eye of the evil fairy princess. The eye of course will deteriorate after a few days and become useless…
@jonathan I do like to get old school sometimes!
Encumbrance…how to smoothly integrate? I’d have to think about that one. The others are all good candidates though…you’ve got my wheels turning.
@kaeosdad the ration points have worked awesome thus far…in the slaughtervale game they were designed for, it was awesome to have the players get lost in a navigation quest, and then just deduct the extra points that leave them just a few days from starvation. Oops!
Spell components could be cool…use them a bit like reagents from AV, with an extra touch to them. Maybe set it up so they give bonuses to certain rituals?
Quest buffs are also cool, and also get me thinking…
As the last rogue said – yoink!
You might want to combine the component thing with the 3E concept of power components which gives a modifier for exotic doodads. The only thing you’d then have to watch is players trying to flange a bonus for any old monster part.
@Hastur – Nature for navigation (unless you have big underground lakes full of aboleth in which case Dungeoneering comes into play.
Rowboats (Strength check) and punts (Dexterity check) are elementary (a Strength check) to steer once you’ve got the hang of it.
If you’re sailing, then Athletics and Use Rope for all that sail-setting stuff while navigation uses Nature and Perception. Maps, sextants and spyglasses provide modifiers to these rolls.
Haggling with crew needs Bluff, Diplomacy, Insight and Intimidate. Pirates of the Carribean fans can come up with modifiers based on one-liners, magic items and corsetry gags.
Very nice, this will fit perfectly in my upcoming campaign…
sweet. Glad you like! Got more coming this week….