Dungeon crawlers and resource attrition

Zarion · 2009-05-04T18:52:50

[I realized, only after writing this, how atrociously long it had become. For the sake of those who'd rather not read through such a long post, I've posted a summary of the core points in the second post of this thread.] Lately I've been trying to dust off some of my notes, and start working on a game design project again, and one of the things that I've thinking a fair bit about lately is resource attrition. The game idea that I'm working on is essentially an old-school dungeon crawler with tactical turn-based combat. It's not really a roguelike, as there's a seperation between combat and non-combat screens. In that sense, it's probably more like Ultima 3 or 4 (from what little I played of them, many years ago, so it's possible I might have that mixed up) Ideally, the combat should have enough tactical depth enough to be interesting in and of itself, and I want resource management to be meaningful within the scope of a single battle. (I mean resources here in the sense of mana, energy, items, or anything else that can fund actions taken by characters in combat) It should be possible to run low on resources within a battle, or be temporarily tapped out at a bad time (say when a crucial healing spell is needed), and choosing where and when to spend these resources should be tactically meaningful, without encouraging excessive conservation. In many older or more traditional RPGs, resources are strictly finite in the scope of a single dungeon. You have so much mana when you set out (possibly restorable with a similarly finite number of items), and you don't get it back until you return to town or some other place to rest. On the plus side, it gives strategic relevance to encounters that are individually too weak to have a credible chance of defeating a rested party. Even if they can't outright kill you, they can force you to consume resources in order to defeat them. These battles become a form of longer-term resource management and attrition. Moreover, the fact that meaningful resources are steadily eroded as you delve deeper into a dungeon provides a sense of dramatic tension. I think that it can contribute significantly to a sense of danger, and of being far away from a safe haven. However, they also tend to encourage gameplay that is (in my opinion) less interesting. Resource management is often irrelevant within any single (non-boss) battle, since in order to have enough to last for many battles, you have much more than you could possibly use in just a couple. So if you're in an area sufficiently close to town (or another place to rest), you have pretty much free reign to cast your most expensive stuff with impunity. And if battles are generally balanced around the assumption that you CAN'T do that, they also tend to be trivialized. On the flip side, if you're in an area that does NOT have easy access to rest (such as exploring a dungeon), it often encourages a boring degree of conservatism. Since the player does not usually know the depth of a dungeon or the exact dangers they can be expected to face deeper within it, it's sensible to avoiding wasting something which might be essential to have later, even if using it now would speed things up. Frequently (if resources are finite enough in the game) this can result in magic-users avoiding using any magic at all unless absolutely necessary. I know this has been my own experience in some games, and I personally think it's rather boring if you're effectively encouraged to avoid using most of the interesting abilities of entire archetypes. Quite a few newer games (especially MMOs, anyway), have effectively switched this around, making resources finite in the short-term, but infinite in the long-term. This is often done through making the maximum pool of a resource only large enough to use a couple abilities before being emptied, but regenerate very quickly. I think this has very positive ramifications for tactical depth within a single combat. You're encouraged to actively use abilities, and short-term resource decisions can be meaningful (eg: if I cast X now, I won't have enough mana to cast Y for a couple more turns. Will I need it in that length of time?). Unfortunately, it also means that unless a given encounter has a non-trivial chance of wiping the group out, it becomes rather meaningless. You'll just recover whatever resources you used during the fight shortly after it concludes. Battles which are not a credible threat, and have no long-term consequences are tantamount to time-wasters, really. You could, of course, make sure that EVERY battle was designed to be difficult enough to pose a challenge individually, but I believe that, a game's difficulty curve should be punctuated with challenging encounters, rather than consist of entirely of challenging encounters. In fact, I think it could be rather exhausting of the player. I believe that systems without long-term resource management also lack most of that sense of dramatic tension you'd get from being deep in dangerous territory. After all, even after slogging through hordes of monsters to reach the deepest parts of a dungeon, you're not appreciably more exhausted or weakened than you were when you started. I'm not sure you could even replicate quite the same sense of being tired and vulnerable and far from home that older-school games tended to provide. Maybe not everyone felt that way, but personally, this is something I'd like to be able to capture in my own game. In essence, I want to make both short-term and long-term resource management meaningful in my game, despite these often seeming contradictory in many existing games that I've looked at. How can you make mana finite enough to be exhaustible (and regenerable) within a single battle, and yet slowly exhaustible over many battles? I've brainstormed a number of ways that my game's resource system could be constructed to attempt to facilitate some of these aims, but they all suffer from various different problems. I'm not going to go over all of them here (although I suppose I could, later, if anyone was interested), but here's one of the more simple and 'obvious' ones: A caster would have enough mana that it would be possible to exhaust themselves in a taxing battle, or if their mana was poorly managed, but more than enough to use a range of spells in an average combat. After each battle, a certain amount of mana would be instantly recovered (perhaps proportional to the difficulty of the battle, and affected by equipment or abilities that provided regeneration bonuses) The goal of this is that you would be free to use a reasonable number of spells without worrying about wasting mana (since you'd get it back after the battle was over), but that it would still be possible to win a battle with a net loss of resources, and that this drain could be cumulative. (ie: each battle you'd end up with a little less mana than the battle before it). Also, it would technically be possible to end battles with a net gain of resources, so this isn't just a death spiral. Unfortunately, if mana was to be used as the limiting resource in this way, it would also seem necessary to disallow mana regeneration in-battle, through any reusable source, be it through passive natural regeneration, abilities which could convert health into mana or generate mana in some other way. Because, if you could regenerate mana while in-battle, but not out of it, it should be quite possible to 'stall' for time in-battle to regenerate an arbitrary amount of it. For example, by leaving a single weakened enemy alive, who doesn't pose much threat individually. This actually sort of reminds me of the situation in Final Fantasy: Tactics (which I consider a great game, actually) where one of the most effective ways to gain experience points and JP (used to purchase abilities) was to leave a single enemy alive, and then have your characters either hit each other with wimpy attacks, or spam free support abilities. I think 'generating mana through abilities' is a rather large design space to restrict oneself from entirely, and I'd really rather not do that. But I decidedly do not want to create any obvious ways to gain tangible advantage through tedium. So.... I was basically just wondering what some of your opinions are on the subject of resource management and attrition in RPGs (or even more generally). It doesn't even have to concern my own problem, specifically. If you play these sorts of games, how do you feel about systems with/without significant attrition? Are there any games that you think have done it unusually well?

Game Design and Theory Game Design

Started by Zarion April 29, 2009 11:58 PM

19 comments, last by Telastyn 15 years, 9 months ago

Telastyn

3,778

May 04, 2009 06:52 PM

Quote:
Original post by Zarion
A number of the games you mention, though, have a significant number of non-regenerating resources, at least within the scope of a single area.

Right. Having a smallish area that some resources are limited makes for tactical nuance. But those resources are largely irrelevant once you leave the area/win the fight/go back to town. I got the impression that you wanted those resources to matter over a longer period of time.

-- Tangent Developer Journal - Delegates - Part 2

Dungeon crawlers and resource attrition

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Dungeon crawlers and resource attrition

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Reticulating splines