Oops! I forgot to schedule days 27 and 28!

Some roleplaying games focus on resource management heavily — what gear and supplies do you have? Where can you get more? What happens when you can’t get those things? When we were playing in the high school/college days, tracking the amount of rations (or even the weight of the stuff you were carrying) was often ignored in favor of the fun factor. You see this in a lot of video games where you apparently are carrying a multitude of weapons and other crap that no one could hump on a 20 mile ruck march, much less a 30 second sprint to cover.

I suspect this is why later RPGs tend to forego this in favor of more stripped down, hand-wavy approaches to food, water, etc. It’s not sexy. If you have an urban-based Shadowrun or Vampire: The Flirtening game, there’s always the 7-11 (or the worker there, if you’re a vampire.) most espionage games aren’t going to be worried when you brought enough MREs or water to keep you going for more than a day or two.

It is, however, an excellent element to ratchet up tension on a character. In Alien, this takes the part of “consumables” — food, water, air; everything in space is precious. When I most recently ran the Chariots of the Gods scenario for a high school RPG club, the kids were pretty smart and stayed in their vacc suits for much of the time. However, using the consumable rules, they were steadily ticking down on air. They might have water access in the suits, as well, but that was also limited. And they couldn’t eat; within a shift they were getting hangry. Worse, their actions to fix the derelict they had found were hampered by clumsy spacesuit fingers, getting into air shafts was difficult because of the bulk of the suits. By using discomfort, hunger (to the point it was pulling a die from their die pools), and getting close to running out of air, that eventually got them out of the suits…but into the dangerous environment I wanted them it.

Legend in the Mist does this with consequence tags like running low on supplies to work against their tests. Outgunned! uses the “Looks” consequence, in this case “Looks Hungry” to dock your die pool. Using hunger to motivate and hamper characters that ignore that basic function is a good way to nudge them in certain directions (in, say, a horror game) or slow them down if they’re pressing on too quickly on a story. “You all have a hunger -3 condition…maybe you should do some foraging or hunting…”