Resource Management

It may sound a little strange, but one major aspect of D&D is resource management. When you engage in battle you use spells and other powers and lose hit points. During the battle you have to decide what abilities you want to use. Many of these abilities when used can not be used again, like a spell slot. After the battle you have to decide what you want to do based on what abilities you still have access to. This whole resource management aspect is a major part of D&D. So it is important to examine how this resource managment affects the game. What does it add to play? What does it take away?

Typically adventures are broken down into periods between long rests. A long rest is basically a full night's sleep. Each period between long rests is typically broken down into encounters. So there are basically 3 types of resources: resources you regain after resting for the night, resources you regain after an encounter, and resources that when used are gone permanently. One of the great limitations in the design of 3.5 that was carried on to 3.75 was ignoring resources you regain after an encounter. This one a major design improvement added in 4.0 and using that aspect in previous editions could be a great improvement. Technically there are also resources that are handled over multiple days like hit points, ability scores that have been damaged, disease effects, rare class/item abilities that are used on a per week/fortnight/month/et cetera basis rather than a daily basis. But for the most part the three categories I mentioned are good for examining resource use.

So why do we have daily resources? Wouldn't it be nice to start every encounter with full resources. You would never have to leave a dungeon right before confronting the horrible cult leader about to sacrifice the innocent girl because you used up resources on the minions. Hard encounters at the end wouldn't be harder because you had a hard time dealing with previous encounters. But what do we give up? If every encounter is met by the players with the smae resources they will all have to be closer in difficulty. The minions and the cult leader will have to be roughly equal in difficulty since the players will hit them with the same resources. You would lose the ability to whip out some super special ability for hard fights, or even some moderately special ability. For some out of combat abilities it would get silly. For example, knock and teleport. If you had those without any daily limit locks and travel would instantly become a non-issue. So it is clear that having daily limits on abilities is a good thing.

So I mentioned above that I thought resources that recover after an encounter were a good idea. What are the advantages and disadvantages? The advantage is having resources you can use in an encounter without having to worry about saving them. For example, you have a wizard who either blows his abilities on an easy encounter because otherwise he would not be doing anything or he simply does nothing. If you have many encounters lined up for whatever reason, most likely plot reasons, resource users like casters tend to have trouble. It would be useful for all classes to have meaningful things they can do in an encounter without having to worry about gimping themselves later on.

One of the disadvantages of encounter based resources that I touched on earlier is that they don't work well for non-combat powers. Fourth edition solved this by completely separating out combat and non-combat powers. And non-combat powers all use permanent resources instead of daily resources. Non-combat powers can't be used in combat and encounter powers can only be used onve every 5 minutes. This, in my mind, is horrible. It limits things significantly. The use of a non-combat power could easily be a part of combat like casting Knock on a locked door or setting or some sort of defensive ward as warriors hold off a orde of goblins. And the use of encounter powers outside of combat is also limited. What if I want to use an ice spell to cool a red hot floor so I can pass. Well, unless your at-will power is cold, you can't do this either.

So recognizing that encounter based resource work well for some things but not for everything, how would I try and make 3.5 better. I would try to include limited encounter based powers. For example, you could split a wizards spells into a class that recovers after every encounter and a class that is used up. Or maybe you could have some percentage of a wizards spell be recovered after every encounter. You could recover 50% of all the combat slots you used. One concern is that this tends to make spell casters much better by removing some of the limitations, but this change wouldn't make them more powerful within a combat, just more useful across multiple combats.

Another issue is healing. Healing is kind of both combat and non-combat so how do you handle it. Well, realistically most 3.5 D&D parties will stock up on cure light wounds and even lesser restoration wands and will solve between combat healing. Only low level parties are limited by healing, and in this case they are massively over-limited. A kobold gets a lucky shot in and your group has to retreat and abandon those kidnapped townsfolk. In my mind it would be fine to say that a cleric can fully heal you between combats. In medium to high level games characters can do that with wands anyway. In low level games it makes continuing past more than one or two encounters possible.

In fourth edition, they introduced the concept of 'milestones'. You get a milestone for every two encounters you complete. In my mind this is potentially a very useful mechanism that was only minorly used in 4.0. What if you introduced this mechanism into 3.5 and said that characters could spend milestones to regain certain abilities. Maybe a caster could recover their level in spell levels for each milestone. A Barbarian could get back a rage at the cost of a milestone. I think a mechanism like this would be a good way to even out the parties power level between encounters and allow them to go longer without being forced to engage in a plot disrupting break while still having the basic limitations that are in place.

Since resource management is such a big topic in D&D I will probably write more on this subject later and may flesh out a 'Milestone Reward' system that would award spell casters with more durability and would reward non-spell casters with something like special stunts they could perform.