How to Manage Your Resource Pools to Maintain Tone

Last week, I talked about Resource Pools, and how they can affect the tone of a game. If you haven't read the post, go back and read it. Trust me, this next article will make a lot more sense with the background understood.

As I mentioned previously, Dungeons and Dragons is at its core a game of extraordinary individuals becoming heroes. PCs start off small and weak, struggling to take down foes. But with every victory, they gain experience, allies, and items. Upon leveling, each character will increase not just their health, but a variety of abilities that can help in different situations. Together, these various limited use items are the character’s Resource Pool, and get spent over the course of their adventures, being steadily drained to deal with the challenges that arise. We mentioned last week that a deep Resource Pool will make challenges less difficult. When the party has more to throw at a problem, there will be less of a worry that they cannot overcome the obstacle. Accidentally triggering a trap might not seem like as big of a problem when the party has access to a vast amount of healing and full health pools. This change in the game's difficulty can also influence how your atmosphere comes across.

The reduced difficulty that comes from deeper resource pools can also affect the story at the table, especially with themes. This rings true when you might lean into resource scarcity as a storytelling tool. Horror is a great example, as resources can have a strong effect on horror if you let them. The shadows in the corner are less scary when the wizard has both a shield and fireball at the ready. Why should a paladin fear the night when they have a handful of undead-melting smites at the ready? While not the only way to evoke horror, resources can certainly play a role.

If you decide to use resource pools to assist with storytelling, you will have a few methods that you can employ to control them. You will first want to keep the resource pools relatively shallow. Avoiding an excess of magic items early in the game can prevent the party inventory from looking like a dragon’s hoard. You will also want to focus on having a steady source of encounters that drain the party’s resources over an adventuring day. Giving the party a reason to spend resources throughout the encounter not only helps drain the pools. It depletes resources in a way that feels more rewarding than trying to keep them scarce. This will allow you to tell the stories you want.

A Word of Caution

These methods can both be powerful tools for a DM to use. While draining the party resources up at every opportunity  can prove beneficial to the story, your players might not want to tell this tale. What you do to amplify the excitement can, if used excessively, detract from it. When your players feel constantly beaten down, it will make them feel less like heroes and more like normal people unable to change their world. So when trying to do this, it is important to remember a few things.

Let your party know even before the campaign starts you aim to make encounters more difficult and give some broad examples. This will prepare your players for what your campaign will present. They can express how they feel about this, as well as plan for this in character creation. Low resource pools can be a bit more interesting when you have characters that are prepared to handle them.

Also, try not to keep your party drained all the time. If the players rarely have time to refill the pools of their characters, it will feel like you are making a game that is out to punish the party. That lack of feeling of power can easily drain the enjoyment from players, making it feel like they lack the ability to make a difference in the world. Giving your characters the chance to refill their pools and take on battles at full power helps affirm their abilities as seasoned adventurers.Resource drain will be best served gradually. Just as horror is best done in a growing fashion, so is the steady drain of resources. This steady increase makes the peak moments of your game much more noticeable. We can say the same for resource draining. Your party will only truly appreciate the moments of dire need when they have moments of great power and resources at their disposal.

So communicate and use this sparingly.

Don’t Let the Pools Get Deep

The first, and easiest way to manage Resource Pools is to prevent them from getting too deep too quickly. Pools increase in two fundamental ways, from items received while adventuring and through the very act of leveling, act of leveling. We can manage both in different ways, but one of the best ways to limit this power creep can be done simply by controlling the amount of loot the party receives.

Magic Items

The DMG has recommendations on amounts and types of items briefly in a few places. Looking specifically at the section talking about “Tiers of Play” we can find some decent guidelines on what the party should be getting. In the first tier, 1-4 or “Local Heroes”, the book mentions that the party should wear mundane gear and stick to spells under third level. Any magic items they find, the book states, should be kept as either a consumable item or limited to a few uncommon permanent items. The section explains the other three tiers, ending with “Masters of the World” at 17-20. 

With this knowledge in hand, we can understand the expectations of the game system regarding offering magical items to the party. Simply put, we will want to try to either be under or meet the recommendations in the DMG. Although drastically different from what you might expect from a DnD game, limiting magical items will prevent your party from feeling overly powerful at an early level. Potions can help the players recharge, or grant them more powers early on than they would normally have access to. Wands and other magic items can also give the party an extra amount of castings in a day as well. A sword simply being a +1 allows it to bypass many resistances a creature might have. It's exciting to give the party magic items, especially if they are items you crafted yourself for individual PCs, but you will want to keep this balance in mind. However, this can make the game feel a little bit mundane without having some magic items to put a spin on standard players’ choices. But I have ways of dealing with that.

One compromise you can have is giving out limited use items. Balance is much more easily maintained when an item only has a few uses before it goes away. I have used both Sly Flourish's Relics AND Don.Jon's Cyphers in the past with outstanding success. Both locations take their inspiration from the Numenera RPG by Monte Cook, specifically the cypher system. In Numenera, Cyphers are single-use magical items. Both options above use this as a framework, creating objects that have a limited set of uses. I see this as a more interesting option than a potion or scroll, and these items are designed so that any character can use them. A crumbling arrowhead that allows a casting of the Shatter Spell, or a pewter ring that allows a single use of the Shield of Faith spell can add flavor and a little extra power to an encounter.

Another option is to make more specialized magic items for the party. A +1 weapon can change the tide of battle with 5e’s bounded accuracy and bypass a lot of damage resistances. But what if instead you gave a weapon that gave a bonus when fighting a specific type of enemy? Or only activated in specific circumstances. A mace that does +1 damage (and is magic) when used against the undead. A sword that, when the wielder is at half health or lower, gains offensive buffs. These can allow the party to get strategic with their ways of dealing with foes, swapping out to certain weapons in order to gain a minor advantage. You will, however, need to monitor what you give to the party. Sometimes those small abilities can add up, and you do not want your efforts to be for naught.

Character Levels

Besides limiting magical items, the other option also comes from looking at the Tiers of Play. Simply put, as players get to higher tiers of play, they become more and more powerful, gaining renown alongside. No matter what you do, that means that their resource pools will deepen. Since this is the case, if you want to keep your game horror centric, you will probably want to limit it to the lower tiers of play. While you can definitely lean into horror elements at the higher levels, it can become more difficult to maintain that horror atmosphere. Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft has given a variety of higher CR monsters, but these monsters may not bring the same feel to your games.

A game where the campaign ends in T3, or even T2, will give you a much easier ability at keeping pools shallow and draining those pools. It is just important to make sure your party is aware. When you pull the game together, this should be one of the first things that you let the party know about. Players can sometimes have an assumption about campaigns, assuming they will go until 20. Or maybe they are used to having a higher tier of play. So making sure they know about this ahead of time is very important to communicate to make sure we meet all expectations.

Draining the Pools

Now that you have prevented the Resource Pools from getting too deep, the next step is adequately draining them. As mentioned early, a gradual spending of the spells, abilities, and even health of the party is going to help you build up the horror in a game. We should do it alongside the increase of tension and fear in your game, in order to synergize the feelings for a better overall power.

ADHERING TO THE ADVENTURING DAY

One of the easiest ways to do this is trying to adhere closely to the idea of the Adventuring Day. As outlined in the basic rules, this idea is that you aim to meet a certain amount of XP for a party, based on an XP amount. This should amount to about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day, according to the DMG. So in a “day” of adventuring (game time between Long Rests, not IRL) the party should have six to eight combat encounters to deal with in order to drain their resources. This can be adjusted, with more easy encounters or less deadly encounters, but ultimately the range of six to eight is recommended. This allows for enough time for a party to run down their resources, making the final encounters that much more challenging and scary.

While the CR calculations are not an exact science, aiming to have the recommended amount of combat encounters can help steadily drain the pool. Each combat, when balanced properly, will drain a bit of the party’s resource pools. Characters will have to spend resources consuming abilities or spells. At the least, damage from enemy attacks will slowly deplete health, another large part of the Resource Pool. Having multiple combat encounters can help drain out some of the more powerful spells and abilities that have a duration to them. A lot of spells like haste or flame blade will last for anywhere from a minute up to ten minutes. Implementing multiple combats can wear out the uses of them over the course of the dungeon, allowing for time in between the encounters to consume them. 

This can seem daunting sometimes, depending on the party’s plans for the session. If the party enters a dungeon, six encounters might be easy to meet or surpass. While traveling, or in a town, however, this might be a bit more difficult to reach six combat encounters. My best advice in this is to not force it. If it does not feel like it's fitting into place, then do not force it to work. Combat that feels out of place and only exists to drain resources will feel jarring to your players, and might cause them to question the authenticity of the world around them. There are options besides combat, however.. You can work to incorporate more opportunities to drain pools into the rest of the game simply by offering the players a chance to spend their abilities outside of combat.

Other uses for Abilities

Often when players see a problem that can be overcome or completely negated with a creative use of their abilities, they cannot help but jump at the opportunity. A building in town caught on fire with a family trapped inside. The party could rush in, buckets at the ready, or they could lean into their powers. The warlock summons powers to fly through the roof, while the druid summons water to make the process easier. This method has the additional benefit of making the character in question feel exceptionally powerful. The players will feel excited at getting to play the role of heroes, and those around them will notice.4th edition actually had a method of offering opportunities for a party to approach a non-combat challenge and spend their abilities in order to progress. Referred to as Skill Challenges, they represent a montage of action from the party. I won't go into great detail here, but the basic formula is that the party has a challenge ahead of them, broken into multiple “phases” by the DM. In order to complete the skill challenge, party members will have to come up with ways their characters would try to overcome the particular challenge, either using a skill or spending an ability. The party, rushing to escape a collapsing house, comes to a doorway blocked by a fallen bookcase. The party can stop, and attempt to move it through strength, or the wizard could spend a spell slot to cast Magic Missile, ensuring success. A powerful tool, you can learn more about Skill Challenges here.

A Different Approach

Now we have talked at length about minimizing the effects of Resource Pools. You can keep the pools a bit more shallow by limiting the amount of items you throw at the party, or just plain keeping the level low. You can encourage the players to use more of their resources by focusing on a consistent amount of encounters in between rests and by providing other opportunities to spend these resources. Both methods will work, but the result might not be something that you or your party find entirely enjoyable. Maybe they want to cleave through their opponents with amazing powers, or amass a hoard of powerful artifacts. What do you do in this case?The last option is to embrace the increase in power and just accept that the pools deepening is a natural part of your DnD game. While I have talked at great length about the relationship between resources and building a Horror Atmosphere, this is not the only way to create a horror game, just one specific way. Lower resources might create a campaign that either you or your players do not enjoy. Maybe your party likes to have a lot of magic items, and to everyone that feels like the game. The table could also find that they prefer to feel ultra powerful, and that the shallower pools do not make them feel that way. If everyone at the table, you included, agrees with this statement, it only makes sense to continue this way. But how do you maintain an enjoyable game? You have some options, however, to adjust to the changing game.

Increase with the Party

First, you can scale your encounters to match the deepening pools. Balance will waver as the party increases in level, and can be difficult to avoid. So you can just choose to not avoid it, and lean into it. Alongside your players leveling, give them more tough challenges. Choose monsters that will hit harder and make the traps they run into deal more damage. After all, a lot of the higher CR monsters are not only more deadly, they can provoke a fear all of their own. If you scale alongside your party, they may still feel the horror you are trying to give them.  This method, however, can have drawbacks. 

Encounters can take longer when you increase the difficulty. Harder hitting enemies, although scary, can cause the party to slow in order to prevent a TPK. As you move farther from balance, it will become more on you to make sure that you are not unfairly stacking the deck against your party. Since the CR calculation system expects a certain balance, when you move away you will find it more a guideline than fact. The system itself already has many issues when used to determine combat, and this will just add to it. This method can rely heavily on your intuition as a DM to know what is enough and what is too much. 

Rely on other Tools

Another option is to adjust the focus of your storytelling, and not relying on the fear of scarcity as much. In this case, I specifically look at running horror. As I had mentioned before, horror does not have to have a direct tie to the lack of resources a party has available. Early in the campaign, it can be much easier to focus on the combat elements of your setting for the tone, but that does not always have to be the case. Gothic Horror, for example, focuses very much on the horrors of humanity. A Vampire can eventually become a seemingly mundane threat. Cosmic Horror focuses heavily on unknowing, unfathomable creatures from beyond the stars. However, if you focus on how this creature manipulates, deceives, and uses those around it for its own gain, that will be a horror in its own right. This can work, but it may not be as satisfying for everyone. You maintain a lot of the elements of horror, but the combat element might not feel like it matches up. In a game like Dungeons and Dragons, where a lot of the spells and abilities revolve around being used in combat, this can alienate a large part of your game, so it can take some work to balance out.

Change the Story

Finally, you can just embrace the change and run with it. In my original explanation that cited Resident Evil, we determined that the game transitioned from straight horror to a more action-horror hybrid. The game itself adjusted, changing up how the player interacted with it, at least regarding combat. I can confirm that I enjoyed the end of Resident Evil Village as much as the beginning, just slightly differently. Since a video game does it, you could certainly do this too by leaning into these new themes. Following this example, you can up the action while still keeping a certain horror skin around it. The party can revel in slaughtering the enemies that used to overwhelm them.

For a party, this method can be a great way for them to measure their progress. When they first entered the lands of Barovia, wandering wolf packs were something my party feared. They would dare not leave the safety of the walls if they thought they might get caught by a pack of hungry lupine enemies. But after the party has leveled, they can easily decimate any foe that comes against them. Wolves can (and have) come at them by the dozens, and they repel them with ease. The stark contrast to their earlier encounters will bring some satisfaction to them.

You end up with a game that will be much more satisfying in combat, but it might miss some of those themes you are trying to drill into the group. When the tone shifts from scary to a mixture of both horror and action, it can lead to a unique atmosphere at the table. If that atmosphere is not what you are going for, and something you do not want, it will be detrimental to your enjoyment at the table.

Final Thoughts

We now come to the end of our two-part series on Resource Pools, the Resident Evil Effect, and how that relates to cultivating an atmosphere in your game. While the abundance and scarcity of overall resources for the party does not inherently dictate the tone of the story, it can have a large effect on it. Having previously discussed the definitions, and how both naturally occur, we looked a bit at how they happen and how to control them. 

Preventing your games from prematurely being flooded with magical items, and sometimes limiting the max level for your particular game, is a good place to start. Players can easily end up with a surplus of magic items, creating an almost endless well of options for dealing with whatever you throw at them as the DM. Keeping them within the standard guidelines of the game, or even less, will help prevent the over-scaling that can cause issues. Maintaining these methods will help keep the wells that the players draw their problem-solving resources from shallower, avoiding an endless supply of tools. 

You can also work to drain these pools more often. Maintaining an Adventuring Day setup will give the party something to use put those resources too. You can take it a step further by incorporating more opportunities for your party to spend their spells and abilities, either to improve their chances on an action or for them to complete negate it. 

Finally, I talked about the possibility of just allowing this to happen, and changing your story to go along with it. Scaling the encounters alongside the party, shifting where the horror is in your game, and just leaning into the heroic elements of the game can avoid making the game feel hindered or shackled, and potentially maximize the players feel of the power fantasy that is so core to DnD. It will, however, alter the story in minor and not-so-minor ways as you do, and can ultimately cause some detriment to your story.

The Resident Evil Effect is very real, and it very much can affect the campaigns you play at the table. By being aware of it and planning to either combat it or to accept it as a regular part of the Dungeons and Dragons experience will better prepare you for the progression in your game.

Have you tried any of these methods? Do you have methods of your own that you like?

Either way, I would love to know the below. I look forward to hearing from you!