#Resource Management

[theresattrpgforthat]

I'm a TTRPG designer, and also a big fan of the video game Terraria. I'm stuck on fun ways to handle material gathering and crafting. Send me some inspiration! Thanks!

THEME: Gathering and Crafting

Hello friend! Putting this one together was very fun. I hope you enjoy it!

Stoneburner, by Fari RPGs.

Stoneburner is a sci-fantasy solo-friendly demon-hunting community-building tabletop role-playing game.Inspired by the new school revolution movement, players take on the role of a group of dwarves who must assume control of a demon haunted mine, along with its accompanying settlement, which they inherited after the death of their distant relative.The game focuses on the dwarves' journey as they navigate the challenges of their new responsibilities, rebuild a new thriving community, and clear the mine of its fire spitting monsters.

A techno-fantasy game of exploration and survival. You’ll be delving into a mine to extract resources and attempting to maintain and protect your community not just from magical beasts, but also greedy and plotting rivals. The system is built on Breathless, which is pretty rules-lite on the face but has a lot of possibility to expand, borrowing quite a bit from the NSR but giving the GM specific cues where they have a license to complicate the story. You’ll find a lot of familiar pieces here, with character classes, special abilities, and loot tables. Stoneburner isn’t fully ready to be published quite yet, but in the meantime you can check out the free preview!

Hostile (Rules and Setting), by Zozer Games.

Welcome to the gritty, retro-future universe of HOSTILE. Based on the Cepheus Engine, these rules add in realistic combat rules as well as setting-specific rules from some of the eighteen HOSTILE supplements. When combined with its companion book, the HOSTILE Setting, you will have a complete, stand-alone, retro-future sci-fi game. HOSTILE is a gritty, near future roleplaying setting that is inspired by movies like Outland, Bladerunner and Alien. It is a universe of mining installations, harsh moons, industrial facilities, hostile planets and brutal, utilitarian spacecraft.

When I looked up info about this game, HOSTILE was described as not an ALIEN RPG, but rather an RPG that you could plug Alien into. It’s a space horror setting, but what kind of space horror is up to you. The Rulebook has rules on trade, salvaging, and other pieces of resource management, while the setting book contains construction rules for your own mega-ton spaceship. There’s also plenty of colonies, survival rules, campaign advice and encounter tables. If this is interesting to you, I’d recommend checking out the Double Shift Bundle, which offers both the Rulebook and the Setting Book for 20% off.

Forbidden Lands, by Free League Publishing.

Forbidden Lands is a new take on classic fantasy roleplaying. In this open-world survival roleplaying game, you’re not heroes sent on missions dictated by others - instead, you are raiders and rogues bent on making your own mark on a cursed world. You will discover lost tombs, fight terrible monsters, wander the wild lands and, if you live long enough, build your own stronghold to defend.

As raiders and rogues, in Forbidden Lands you will need to scavenge to survive. Built on Free League’s Year Zero Engine, this game uses an abstract resource called consumables which your characters will have to find regularly, because food goes bad and you can only carry so many things. The game focuses on the dangers of the road, although not all dangers are terrifying - you’re not fighting orcs all the time - sometimes you’re just battling mosquitoes and cold weather. There’s also rules about building, maintaining, and defending a stronghold, which sounds kind of similar to building and defending your house in Terraria. There’s a lot to keep track of in Forbidden Lands, and as long as you don’t mind playing characters with a somewhat loose moral compass, this game might be for you!

A Fistful of Darkness, by monkeyEcho.

A Fistful of Darkness is a Weird West Fantasy hack of Blades in the Dark with heavy emphasis on the fantasy part. It’s not intended to be an accurate history lesson or a simulation of past times. It is designed to be a cinematic game which lets you play all those Weird West tropes towards the end of the world.

Imagine a world with the magic and mystery of the frontier: wide open plains of the Old Wild West in all its beauty and madness, where violence and sacrifice dominate every single day. Now add the Hellstone rush, underground mayhem in mines and brand new sciences & machines. Don’t forget immigration, injustice, vigilante justice, outlaws, gunslingers, slick talkers and setting suns. This all in the face of an impending doom: Demons and the four riders bringing the end of the world as you know it. How do you make it to the top of this powder keg, which side will you take in the impending war and how much will your soul suffer? Let’s play to find out!

Forged in the Dark games abstract your resources a bit, but the Hellstone of A Fistful of Darkness is so important to the setting that you’ll find yourselves doing whatever you can to get your hands on it. It’s a crafting material, it’s currency, and it’s the bringer of mutations and curses, what with it being a demonic material and all. Because you’ll be running a group playbook alongside your own characters, you’ll be working together to improve your tools, allies, abilities and home base, especially if you choose the Scavengers Posse. If you like action and suspense as much as you like inventory and communal goals, then this game is for you.

LOOT, by Gila RPGs.

Do you love loot? Then you're in the right place.

Go on quests, find loot, do it all over again. Your character is entirely defined by the loot they wear and carry. Loot is generated and passed out at the end of each quest with a dynamic loot pool system.

This is an application of the LUMEN system that eschews dice. Players have a number of uses for each of their approaches, which can be spent to overcome obstacles. Complications arise when you have to cobble together a solution using a different approach, or when you avoid marking an approach at all. This is a game still in a free playtest, so the designer is happy to hear feedback if you decide to give it a whirl!

[8bit-tincan]

I fucking love resource management games!! like yes give me wood and let me give you bricks in return this is great!! Let me build fancy houses for my little people in the screen!!

[space-blue]

I watched the 3 season 3 TBB episodes and it's all again tying to Palpatine clones! And I am. Upset!! That EVERYTHING must now tie in to the Palpy clones because Disney just could not take the L on the "somehow Palpatine returned" meme.

So it's all about project necromancer, just like Mando all ended up being about cloning and Grogu's M count, and Kenobi had to rip JFO's entire ending to show us from Jedi in amber... I hate that it feels like a curse over anything coming out in this time period. Most importantly : it is SO boring.

Why must Disney ruin the punch and twist of its shows, when they could tell original stories? You want to engage us into dark sithly biddings?

GIVE US A GAME!!

If everything has to be about Palpatine doing necro shit keeping dead jedi in vats and using their blood to splice a force sensitive clone, then let me play that!

Give us a game in which

I do force sensitive children hunting!

Blood resource management!

Building evil bases across systems!

Sending minions (like Cad Bane or custom made inquisitors) on child kidnapping quests!

Let me build genetic facilities and unlock genetic and dark force skill trees! Let me do Sith factorio!!

Passing bills and racketeering entire systems to help fund my dark deeds!

Let me build up and repair Vader's amour, customize it, so he can go on more dangerous missions and harvest more force sensitives and rogue Jedi!

Chose the right dialogue to brainwash my inquisitors!

Have rebellion crushing minigames, and risk of losing precious DNA sources and rarefied Kaminoan cloning specialtists!

Let me give birth to deformed blobs that scream in pain and die, until I manage to craft the first Snoke!!

Let me play a Dark Sith Cloning Sim!! Let me be dark and fucked up!!!

Now that would be engaging and fun, and that would leave space for stories to be told during the empire and post empire eras that don't revolve around Palpatine's deals.

Of course it's 2D pixel art BTW.

[sailorastera]

I'm very proud of my husband because his base building, resource collecting, cat in space game MewnBase IS DONE!

His 1.0 release was last night. 🥳

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/743130/MewnBase/

Itchio: https://cairn4.itch.io/mewnbase Congrats hubby. ♥

[gothtransandroid]

Contemplating: Necromancy and the Utility of the Skeleton

From aesthetics alone the skeleton does many things for the necromancer. A clear benefit is simply in the knowledge of the subject being a dead thing in and of itself. With any variation of the corpse from zombie to revenant there can be doubts at a glance as to what one is dealing with but moving bones are distinct at most distances and let a person know that any harm they deal to it, accidental or otherwise, wont hurt a living thing. On the other side, the person seeing the skeleton will know that it won't feel pain and has no nervous system holding it back in how strong it will strike someone else. This functions as a form of deterrence from combat as well as telegraphs the danger of handling the skeleton beyond its designated task.

The skeleton, contrary to common sense, is less cost effective than a zombie in terms of raising. The mechanism of imprinting magic upon a corpse via its soulless form means that with less material there, there is more work and more raw magical structure needed to maintain the skeleton. This being said, the zombie will decay and are a short term solution sonits better to invest as a skeleton will be cost effective over time and has the added benefit of not smelling awful. Many an old necromancer cut their noses off and burned their sinuses not just to resemble a corpse in their horde as camouflage, but more so to kill the smell of working with so many zombies.

At an average weight of 20 pounds, the human skeleton is very portable if a single servant is needed and one is conserving their magic between uses. This does covert an unit of 100 servants to about a ton, which could staff a mansion easily and handle all tasks besides handling guests and the cooking for obvious reasons. Like with other skeletons, a human skeleton can utilize their ribs as a means of storage or carrying tools to keep their hands free. Special tools could easily be made for a gardener or a maid to reach in and tend to their tasks while having free hands and look presentable if a chest cover is used to tastefully hide dirty or worn tools.

Besides issues of durability which can be addressed with coatings and reinforcements to the structure of the skeleton, bones tend to still be sturdy even when dry and set, only they cannot self-repair so any damage will need prevented or filled as it occurs. Skeletons are not an unlimited resource, as are bodies in general, but those gathered and maintained properly in a closed and respectful environment can last a lifetime.

[ooc-miqojak]

So, Fabledom is HELLA cute - but once you hit a certain population threshold, it really starts to become a challenge...cute, or not! But it is super aesthetically pleasing, so I thought I'd share a shot. ALSO you can free-build in this game, so you can just enjoy a cozy, cute city builder with no resources to hold you back, no happiness to juggle, etc! And that's something I love. Sometimes I want the challenge...and sometimes I want to make a cute kingdom!

[lind-l-t4ylor]

Apologies for the delay. Life got busy. I got a few more minutes to toy with my factory.

Largely just experimenting. Seeing how things interact and connect. I want to unlock wiring as soon as possible. Speaking of which:

The tech so far.

-Automation (autocrafters)

-Stone Wall

-Logistics 1 (splitters, underground conveyors)

-Electronics

-Fast and Filtered Inserter Arm

-Steel Processing (Steel Beams)

-Green science pack

[fogaminghub]

🐜✨ Are you struggling with the "Chase the Butterfly" mission in Empire of the Ants? Look no further! Our new blog post is here to help you master every objective and catch that butterfly like a pro! 🦋💪 Learn strategies, gather resources, and celebrate your victory. Dive in now! 

[sprintingowl]

Wear And Tear

Pharmagothica released a few weeks ago, a 137 page survival horror ttrpg that focuses on resource management, caution, and lateral thinking.

It takes place in a near future where companies rule walled cities, and the wilderness outside is infested with the bioweapons they created.

Tonal influences include Parasite Eve, Resident Evil, Fallout, The Last Of Us, Kingdom, and an assortment of related media.

The game's engine is built on Mork Borg, which means d20+stat checks, character classes, and Omens---a limited currency you can spend to reroll bad dice.

Pharmagothica also expands on that framework, adding careers, crafting, the ability to poach special abilities from other classes, and a lot of other smaller mechanical tweaks.

This week I released Wear And Tear, a supplement that adds another 39 pages and expands player options with new equipment, new abilities, new classes, and weapon maintenance---a mechanic that encourages players to sometimes use cheaper, weaker gear.

Both Pharmagothica and Wear And Tear are available for free, but you can also support development if you want to.

[nicholasandriani]

(via Level 4: Reflecting on the Game Design Journey of “Trail Guardian: The Ranger’s Journey”)

[thetalentedmrwulf]

Abstractions in tactical RPGs

I'm definitely getting to the point in my RPGing, or at least in my DMing, where I find I have less and less patience for bean-counting. Ammunition, coins, et al.

No, that's not right either. I understand their purpose in games that require them, and I find my preference moving towards games that don't, but I'm losing patience with people who both insist that you can roleplay anything but that not only refuse to understand abstractions, but directly bitch about them.

By example - in Pathfinder 2E, Alchemists can just make x alchemy items a day with an abstracted resource called infused reagents. These last for one day. If they wait until the middle of an encounter, they can whip it out on demand, but there are less than if they planned ahead. Seems rad. My Alchemist gets to do alchemy stuff all over the place not unlike a spellcasters uses spells even in a game that likes bean counting or specificity.

Then why do so many content creators that normally gush about how anything is roleplayable throw little fits over where these come from? Who gives a shit? Maybe they have their own alchemy kit, or a satchel like Honey Lemon in Big Hero 6, or are mixing their spit into something because they're suffused with chemicals. It literally doesn't goddamn matter. Why die on this hill?

Just seems silly. I hope in the PF2 remaster they keep adding stuff like this. There's a phenomenal feat that lets you pull a random item out of your pack because you planned ahead for just such an occasion that's really been making people die on hills and I don't get it. The game has been moving away from being a skill-based board game with RPG elements for years and those old versions still exist. There's plenty of space for tactical social/physical/mental encounters with abstract shenanigans. Stop fussing already.

[captaingimpy]

Comparative Analysis: The Design and Impact of "Oregon Trail" and "Papers, Please"

Introduction In the world of video games, few titles manage to transcend the boundaries of entertainment to offer profound insights into the human condition and historical contexts. “Oregon Trail” and “Papers, Please” are two games that do just that, using the medium to educate and provoke thought through the lens of resource management and ethical decision-making. This essay explores the…

[puregag]

Struggling with rostering? Time to upgrade your rostering system!

[shallowseeker]

Hey Shal, I have a question about your family diner meta. Mad respect, but in the Leviathan arc Biggerson's is made out to be a bad thing. I was wondering if you have any thoughts on that, since in the Cas tablet meta where Naomi attacks Cas, you talk about Biggerson's being bigger sons -> better than their fathers because of their bigger hearts is a good thing? Anyway, I'm hoping this comes across as a friendly question!

I tend to shy away from writing about some stuff from that season, because a lot of it seems very era-attenuated. Example: how an average librarian is referred to as "Chubby" and her beau as "Chub-chaser" in Repo Man. In general some of the mean despair over "fat people" in this season comes off Hollywood-seedy and thoughtless, but it's soooo of the times.

For a little while in this era, the documentary SuperSize Me reigned supreme in every bit of small-talk and in every classroom. Jessica Simpson was a frequent target of weight-shaming, including this hugely publicized fiasco from 2009, when she looked like a walking dream BTW.

In this way, SPN is like a time capsule. (Like how, if you were alive at the time during post-"war on terror," Torture was the big topic in every current events class, verging on a buzz word. This obsession with torture looms larger in early-mid SPN because ot it.)

///

Yes, Biggerson's is a BIG motif in season 7, and with negative connotations. It's a nod to SuperSize Me. It's especially damning for the punching-down attitudes in Hollywood.

I want to point out that although the name is cheeky, Biggerson's wasn't even inherently bad in-world.

The Leviathan was a rotten supplier to this family chain industry, dosing its food with additives, which mirrors a lot of the real-world chatter about trans-fats, partially hydrogenated oil, etc. People were working really hard to get them banned!

When you get down to it, the people inside Biggerson's were being actively preyed upon under the guise of family together-time.

///

What I think... I want to carefully pivot to, maybe...

is the dark side of humanity and family, that of consumerism and exploitation.

I think overall that the family diner itself is still a positive motif, but as with every motif, there's a shadow side--the uncharitable side, a side that can be carried to extremes.

And the "shadow self" of the family diner motif is excess and greed exploiting the family by ravaging its most basic requirement to survive: shelter and nourishment.

They are making humans into livestock.

This was also a rampant idea in the 2000s: about selectively breeding farm animals so that they get dumber and dumber, until they're easy to subjugate for meat, assembly-line style.

I think they briefly touch on this again in season 12...with the Moloch monster and family business of meat packaging.

Anyway, SPN was trying to loop this idea in, too.

///

So, yes. BIG erson's. Bigger Sons. Etc. Etc.

You want your kids to be better than you, with "bigger hearts" and more kindness. But bigger and stronger can have a heck of a downside, too.

But at its heart, the family diner also represents communion and community. It is, after all, the weak, vulnerable human family that Cas wants to protect in season 8.

It's both things at once.

(ASIDE//

And Cas becomes the ideal/idea/motif of the always-working dad/husband who wants to provide for you but doesn't indulge in happiness or nourishment for himself. At least... not until the family is safe/cared for.)

///

ASIDE 2//

Flagrant consumerism is a big part of Nephilim concept, too, and that's a very ancient story.

Theirs was an extensive appetite that so drained the world they had to be eradicated to save the world. In a very real symbolic sense, We are the Nephilim. (On the nose maybe, but we are empire: too tall, too strong, too wasteful, war-mongering, dominating etc. etc.)

And my point is, I think humans have always been aware of the tension and war that comes with the competition for finite resources. Resource-hogs. It's not just a modern, "American" concept.

In early days, our conceptualization of gods and demi-gods mimics the food chain. Ergo: If gods are above us, they're like other stronger animals...they want to eat us. Thus, sacrificing to them is a way to appease them. (Psychologically.)

Humanity and religion are historically oriented towards pooling our resources to survive. Many religions, even the big ones imho, are a clever family-extension devices, that's why it they’re so littered with parental components.

(It's used to bind people “under one roof” and funnel the resources appropriately.)

Certainly, that how Cults and Causes start; in meaningful ways they're all baby/early religions. And when enough time goes by, and the leaders die, etc etc...they devolve to myth and respectable religions proper.

The ultimate difference is just... time.

If angels are royal families, ancient knights-and-tribalism, then Leviathan were supreme capitalism.

It worked well in theory, even when the execution was sometimes lacking to too campy to get the satire across. Especially coming from, you know, Hollywood. And Biggerson's is a warped shadow of that appetite symbol.

[nickstanley]

Schneider’s Creek

I just learned that an Environmental Study will be conducted on this concrete creek to determine what sort of improvements can and should be made. The reason for this change is flood mitigation (to prevent flooding). The brochure discussed widening and naturalizing the banks of the creek, this is something I am 100% in favour of! This could become a really beautiful area when the naturalization project is approved and completed. 

[wealmostaneckbeard]

The core components of the survival horror genre are guns, monsters, mysteries, and dwindling resources.