Attrition and Resource Management in RPGs

Jay Barnson editorializes on attrition and resource management in RPGs, inspecting the traditional and low-attrition model to compare how (video) games challenge players using attrition mechanics (or lack thereof).

With the traditional approach, encounters can vary wildly in difficulty. The adventurer’s may face a powerful adversary one minute, and them some pathetic underlings the next. They have to approach each encounter carefully, weighing it’s potential threat and expend resources carefully to respond. If you don’t recognize the danger until too late, your party is going to find itself in deep trouble in a desperate fight. But overkill can be just as bad blowing your most powerful spells and items to wipe out a minor threat can weaken you just as badly as severe damage. Though it’s definitely fun once in a while to face combat challenges with former foes that are now easy to defeat (without being utterly useless).

With the low-attrition model, there’s really no point in relatively weak encounters. The player will never be weakened enough for the encounter to provide any real challenge or threat, and the player won’t suffer any sort of attrition from them to make future encounters more challenging.As a result, encounters under the low-attrition model tend to be pretty even in difficulty and if the designers aren’t careful (as seems to be the case in Dragon Age 2, according to reports I’ve not played it yet) boringly similar and repetitive.