What does "Old School Gaming" Even Mean? (Part 3) Resource Management

 

Greetings, old school gamers!

Today we are into Part 3 of our series about what even is "old school" gaming.

The picture today is of a medieval merchant counting gold pieces. That's because our third point concerning what old school gaming even is is about resource management.

I was first exposed to this idea in a very old module from the 1980s called The Throne of Bloodstone. That module begins with an article that is several pages long by none other than Dave Arneson. The module was written for levels 18 to 100.

Now you may say, “Level 100? That's unbelievable!”

Here's a brief explanation of how that worked in first edition D&D.

 These days level limits in D&D are in the form of a hard cap. If you are playing rules as written from the core books, the levels just stop at 20. Yes, there are some boon type things after that, but the levels just stop at 20. That's a hard cap.

In first edition D&D, instead of a hard cap on levels, there was a soft cap. What this meant was that for each level your character earned the amount of experience points that you needed to get to the next level would just keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Eventually the number of experience points that you needed to get to the next level would take you years of play to achieve. So this was a soft cap rather than a hard cap.

That's why Throne of Bloodstone was marked for levels 18 to 100. It was supposed to be a module to show how D&D could cover epic play.

Dave Arneson's article was written to teach the GM how to run games for such high level characters. What he taught was that high level D&D becomes a contest of attrition and resource management between the dungeon environment and the player characters.

According to Arneson, the boss of a particular adventure knows full well that a party of player characters could slay him, her, or it, provided of course, that the group had their full hit points, that their spells were fully charged, and that their magic items were fully charged.

Therefore the point of the dungeon environment was to get the party to be beaten up as much as possible so that when they finally faced the final boss they would not be at full hit points. They would have drunk all their healing potions. Many of their precious spell slots would have been cast away hours ago.

It was also important that locales such as the Abyss or the Underdark had story reasons for being impossible to teleport home from, as high level characters would want to teleport home to get more stuff from their high level personal treasure piles.

This was of course before 5e. Now in 5e, a group of players who can arrange for their environment to allow them to rest undisturbed for 8 hours straight is suddenly fully healed of hit points and their spell slots and magic items are fully recharged. This is too easy. This was my biggest shock as a game master looking at 5th edition for the first time.

In the olden days, groups actually learned how to conserve things. For example, if someone wanted their wounds to be healed, they might slam down a healing potion. Then, they would be smacked upside their head by another player calling them a dummy because once the healing potion is drunk it's just an empty bottle,  however if they had the cleric heal them the cleric's spells were a much more renewable resource. The cleric could simply pray for more spells the next day. But, that potion was gone.

So players actually learned how to conserve things. They learned how to play cautiously. They learned how to play as a team. And they learned how to think into the future about their resources. In 5e D&D, this aspect of the game is pretty much gone.

One example of how Dave Arneson explained that this could work, is that a group of 20th level characters might come upon a set of doors that opens up onto 100 orcs. These would be stock monster manual orcs nothing special. It would not be worth the party's time to fight them. The wizard could simply take the entire 100 orc swarm out with one Fireball spell. However, that would be one Fireball spell gone from the wizard's spell slots that day. See how this works?

So for this entry in the series of what even is old school gaming, I posit that part of old school gaming is resource management.

What do you think?