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RPGs with robust resource management

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Lilura

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Let's list 'em in this thread!

I'm gonna start with Swordflight, a module series for the NWN platform that is peerless in this respect; or, at any rate, I haven't seen its lvl of resource management outside of blobbers and roguelikes. See my sig for a three-part review, covering its resource management and reactivity etc.

Next up, Mask of the Betrayer does ok with its spirit meter but there are loopholes and its itemization is obscenely OP with blanket immunities, regen and the like.

The IE RPGs fail due to their general lack of rest restrictions. I'm not a fan of self-imposing them because that's the DM's job. Fallout, Arcanum, Temple of Elemental Evil and Jagged Alliance 2 also fail for various reasons, though 1.13 can be set up for robust resource management.

What other RPGs/mods have robust resource management? Hit me with 'em, pls.
 
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Baardhaas

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I can't think of any RPG where I'not swimming in resources towards the end. But I do tend to play as a hoarder, saving up all those precious goodies for the game's most difficult encounters. Where I don't use them because I don't know which encounter is the toughest before I've reached the end of the game.

But, for games with tight resource management in the beginning, Gothic 1&2 come to mind.

edit: Fallout2 with the Economy and Combat rebalance mod also does a good job at ensuring you think trice about every penny or bullet you spend. For the first half of the game at least.
 
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Lilura

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My memory is somewhat fuzzy on Gothic but I seem to recall that merchants can be beat up and relieved of all their items. But yeah, Gothic 2 (with NotR) is stingier and generally harder, overall.

But I do tend to play as a hoarder, saving up all those precious goodies

Swordflight punishes hoarders with the threat of kill off; f.e, if you refuse to use the limited consumables you probably won't survive the encounters. I know what you mean, though. It can be hard to know when to expend your resources if you're cruising along ok.

edit: Fallout2 with the Economy and Combat rebalance mod also does a good job at ensuring you think trice about every penny or bullet you spend. For the first half of the game at least.

I guess I'll look into it... over-itemized stimpacks and ammo thrown about like confetti were big issues in FO2. I'm pretty sure Killap addressed some of the stealing abuse in his unofficial patch, too. But still, faceroll.
 

Baardhaas

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Swordflight punishes hoarders with the threat of kill off; f.e, if you refuse to use the limited consumables you probably won't survive the encounters.
Heh, being a hoarder is enough punishment in itself already. The gameplay would be so much more fluent if I'd just use those scrolls and potions. Raising the difficulty to the point where using items is simply necessary would work, but it's also the flawed mind of the hoarder that is at fault here.

I'm pretty sure Killap addressed some of the stealing abuse in his unofficial patch, too. But still, faceroll.

Stealing is just badly done in Fallout, it forces the player to use quickload. There is no reasonable tradeoff. Either you succeed or you anger the whole town, potentially breaking the story. The system should have been designed so that a failed steal attempt isn't gameover. For example: If you steal in the NCR or Junktown, you get some jailtime or monetary penalty, steal from a gangster in New Reno or the Hub and you get your arms or legs broken (or both).
 

V_K

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Dark Disciples 2: All magic either requires expensive reagents or has very limited charges per rest, some abilites are available only as scrolls/wands, ranged weapons need ammo. Resting is only possible in safe rooms and only if you have food.

Legacy: Realm of Terror: Very limited inventory (basically, 4 pockets, one hand and a suitcase), guns need ammo. Resting is only possible in safe rooms and takes up food. Even worse, food is a finite resourse - there's a limited number of food items in the game.

The Summoning: No resting whatsoever. Spell points recharge by themselves, but extremely slowly. Weapons break at alarming speed.

Realms of Arkania: Basically, the king of resource management. Resting in unsafe areas may result in ambushes or catching a disease, if your party is ill-prepared. Well, largely anything can result in a disease if you're ill-prepared, and that includes stuff like e.g. wearing the right clothes for the weather. Resting to heal fully takes days or even weeks of in-game time. Potions are expensive as fuck. Weapons and armor can break.
 
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Lilura

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Raising the difficulty to the point where using items is simply necessary would work, but it's also the flawed mind of the hoarder that is at fault here.

Consumable use (and demands of resource management in general) is pretty EZ to enforce, yeah. It takes time for the hoarder to adjust, but if they're a learning animal they will realize that using what they loot beats save-scumming several times per encounter.

I disagree that hoarding is its own punishment, in all cases. Some ppl get off on having their inventory packed full of items they didn't need, cuz they're so "hardcore".
 

VentilatorOfDoom

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An NWN2 mod : The Maimed God's Saga.
You have to play a cleric of Tyr. There's no resting anywhere, except designated spots like your room in the mansion, you can only restore spells by praying at Tyr's altar and you can only do that once per day. You will never possess even as much as 1000 gold. Perhaps at the very end of the game when you are in the city(Waterdeep I think iirc) but for the most part there's just no loot to sell, and even if you find stuff to sell the merchant guy can't afford to buy it because he hardly has any gold either. There are no magical weapons/armors. You couldn't buy them anyway. You will soon learn the value of spells like magic vestment, magic weapon/greater magic weapon. At the very end Tyr will award you with a magical armor and a magical longsword, because you are his champion, but the game's pretty much over by then.
 

Siobhan

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I was gonna suggest RoA, too, though it really depends. With good nature skills, you'll usually be swimming in herbs since the inventory allows crazy stacks (99 per slot if I remember correctly). So diseases become mostly trivial, and you'll also be swimming in gold. In RoA2 you can completely break the economy by smuggling goods into Lowangen and easily rake up 1000s of gold pieces. And then there's of course the exploits to steal several books in RoA3, giving you at least 10,000 gold pieces total. Food and water also get trivialized halfway through RoA2 and RoA3 due to magical items (can't remember if RoA 1 has them). And except for RoA 1, poisons are rarely more than vendor trash.

So, yeah, the RoAs are probably the closest you'll get in RPGs to meaningful resource management, but it's still too easy to cheese. That said, finding a high-tier healing potion that can't be crafted or bought in a store always felt very rewarding, and you'd never sell those. That alone already beats 90% of all games with consumables.
 

Hupu

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Could you elaborate on how JA2 doesn't qualify?
Because I was thinking about a similar game: 7.62 Hard Life mod, in which while there's ways of making a lot of money passively, the difficulty of the enemies ramps up so much that quickly you become no good if you don't invest in the most expensive gear yourself. It's only the middle-game where you don't actually care about resource management, also there's some important cross-play between a diablo-like inventory management system, keeping your team light and carrying gear suited for a variety of encounters, the player always has to forgo something.
 
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Sacred82

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Realms of Arkania: Basically, the king of resource management. Resting in unsafe areas may result in ambushes or catching a disease, if your party is ill-prepared. Well, largely anything can result in a disease if you're ill-prepared, and that includes stuff like e.g. wearing the right clothes for the weather. Resting to heal fully takes days or even weeks of in-game time. Potions are expensive as fuck. Weapons and armor can break.

It's extremely easy in all RoA games to get all you could ever want via pickpocketing and haggling, and the "gather herbs" camping option is hilariously easy to abuse (which basically negates the Need for proper clothing)
 
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Lilura

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Could you elaborate on how JA2 doesn't qualify?

I'll just quote my post from elsewhere, if that's ok.

JA2 shares a similar prob: the dungeons/sectors are not deep enough to pose threat of sector reprisal, the itemization is too generous (C-7s, FN-FALs, Steyr Augs, 5.56 and 7.62 ammo thrown about like confetti), and the player has too much time to rinse repeat between taking sectors (i.e, mechanics fixing the gear and remounting gun barrel extenders, medics healing mercs etc.)

Fatigue was rarely a factor with good planning (e.g, not encumbering your mercs), and ppl generally don't take a fatigued squad into a sector because they can't hit the broad side of a barn. This is vanilla, though. 1.13 config XML lets you turn JA2 into a TRU challenge, for sure.
 

V_K

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I was gonna suggest RoA, too, though it really depends. With good nature skills, you'll usually be swimming in herbs since the inventory allows crazy stacks (99 per slot if I remember correctly). So diseases become mostly trivial, and you'll also be swimming in gold. In RoA2 you can completely break the economy by smuggling goods into Lowangen and easily rake up 1000s of gold pieces. And then there's of course the exploits to steal several books in RoA3, giving you at least 10,000 gold pieces total.
True, but most of these exploits are second playthrough stuff. Without prior experience or a walkthrough you're not very likely to figure them out until late game, and, well, what RPG doesn't have a broken late game?
 
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Lilura

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Did you ever get around to Swordflight Chapter Two, V_K? As with Chapter One, it doesn't break late-game. I don't believe its resource management can be cheesed, either: with extensive meta-gaming knowledge, no build or method that I know of seems able to trivialize its encounters, dungeons or campaign as a whole. You may know exactly what to do, but it still requires effort, planning and concentration to get through. That's my experience, anyway. Maybe you found a way to trivialize the first chapter (other than DebugMode=1 - dm_god, of course)?
 

V_K

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In Swordflight 1 there is one resource you can hoard: respawns. If you play the first half of the game carefully enough, in the late game you can afford to just die, rest at the plane of light, and respawn. I haven't started part 2 yet, but if consumables can be transfered, and the respawns are reset (which seems that way), then it might even be preferable to use respawns instead of consumables in the late game.
 

Siobhan

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True, but most of these exploits are second playthrough stuff. Without prior experience or a walkthrough you're not very likely to figure them out until late game
I wouldn't say so. It is very obvious that a character with good nature skills is crucial in a game about hiking through the wilderness, and just the herbs alone are already enough to buy whatever you want. And as Sacred82 points out, there's also pickpocketing and gambling, which you can save-scum. So while the RoA games won't be an easy ride for most newcomers, the hard part doesn't come from lack of money but rather i) resting not being an option in some dungeon romps (e.g. Riva fortress), ii) the inability to run back to town to fix equipment (because you're locked in or the next town is days away), and iii) potions not stacking in your inventory, so you can only bring so many. I suppose you could call that resource scarcity, but it's less about what you can afford and more about whether you can make use of the purchases.

Anecdotal evidence: RoA 3 was the second RPG I ever played, right after Albion, and I didn't recall finding it any harder than the latter despite Albion's lack of proper resource management. I then followed up RoA 3 by RoA 2, and again the resource management didn't pose a serious challenge. But I can see how somebody used to a DnD playstyle might end up with his party starving in the Phex temple dungeon because they got locked in with no food and water.
 

Siobhan

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Actually, that raises a question for Lilura: do you consider a game to have respectable resource management if you have abundant resources but can only use a very limited number in each encounter? Say, SR: DF, where you get plenty of items but can only bring so many to each mission? (putting aside that even on the highest difficulty SR: DF isn't hard enough that you'd run out of consumables during a mission)

If so, there's one easy fix from PnP that's rarely used in cRPGs: put a cap on how many consumables can be used before side effects kick in. Want to take two strong health potions within a day? Too bad, that's a major overdose so your character will only heal half the amount and see major stat reductions for the next few days. Combined with limited resting options in dungeons, that really limits what you can do even if your inventory is overflowing with potions.
 

V_K

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And as Sacred82 points out, there's also pickpocketing and gambling, which you can save-scum.
I really don't think save-scumming should figure into equation when we're talking about design. ;)
So while the RoA games won't be an easy ride for most newcomers, the hard part doesn't come from lack of money but rather i) resting not being an option in some dungeon romps (e.g. Riva fortress), ii) the inability to run back to town to fix equipment (because you're locked in or the next town is days away), and iii) potions not stacking in your inventory, so you can only bring so many. I suppose you could call that resource scarcity, but it's less about what you can afford and more about whether you can make use of the purchases.
Well the thread is about resource magangement, which doesn't necessarily means overall scarcity. Limited inventories are most certainly a factor.
I don't think you can have money problems in a game with respawning enemies and loot selling anyway.
 
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Sacred82

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And as Sacred82 points out, there's also pickpocketing and gambling, which you can save-scum.
I really don't think save-scumming should figure into equation when we're talking about design. ;)

I do think so, because without save-scumming, most games have tight ressource management, or at least fewer items than you could theoretically use. I never suffer from the too many scrolls or potions syndrome during an ironman game of Icewind Dale or Baldur's Gate.
 
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Lilura

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Respawns are reset and consumables (and other items) import, yeah. The starter zone of Chapter Two lets you limit no. of respawns to min 20, which is still more than enough to take the heat off in some of the harder encounters, if you manage to conserve them. Don't forget the experience point penalty is -25 per lvl; however, it's theoretically possible to exploit in that it's capped to prevent lvl loss.

You will still want to buff yourself with various spells, potions, scrolls, bardsong, wands and other limited-charge items in order to avoid a similarly tough time on your return, though.

Actually, that raises a question for Lilura: do you consider a game to have respectable resource management if you have abundant resources but can only use a very limited number in each encounter?

I guess, though no example of that springs to mind (that I've played).
 

Hupu

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I don't think roguelikes/-lites count as per the OP. Otherwise CDDA is also a good example (although better if you apply that mod that takes out fursuits and survivor gear)
 

Zed Duke of Banville

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Dungeon Master includes hunger, thirst, health, stamina, mana (though regenerating), severely limited inventory space both by number of slots and by weight, encumbrance that reduces movement speed if item weight passes certain thresholds, and lighting.
 

Hitoshura

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Strangely, I'm going to recommend Dragon Quest. If you decide to not grind, the dungeons are challenging as they are about resource management. Random encounters will not kill you but if you handle them poorly, you will waste resources on them. You don't have save points nor "recovery springs" near bosses, there's very limited inventory spots for HP recovery items and MP recovery is non existent. Games that don't allow for much party creation freedom is great here as it is easier to balance the game, for example try II or IV.
 

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