[Monday Musings] Resource Systems

     Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! Every Monday we bring you Musings on game design, and this week, we're talking about resource systems. Every game has them, whether they appear to or not. Resource systems fall into two broad categories: Implicit and explicit.

    Consider Yu-Gi-Oh for a moment. Your goal is to reduce your opponent's life points to zero by summoning and attacking with Monsters. You summon Monsters by playing them from your hand onto the field once per turn.

    Now consider Magic: the gathering. Your goal is to reduce your opponent's life to zero by casting and attacking with creatures. You cast creature spells by tapping lands to produce mana, which you spend to pay their mana cost.

    That's the difference between implicit and explicit resource systems. In an implicit resource system, you have a hard limit to what you can do-- summon one Monster a turn, take four actions per turn, attach one Trainer item per turn, et cetera. In an explicit resource system, your actions are dynamic, depending on how many resources are available. If you have three mana, you can play one spell that costs three mana, or one that costs one mana and one that costs two, so on and so forth.

    Games can also blend the two. Magic: the Gathering has an implicit resource system as well: you may only play one land per turn. This meta-layer creates a separate resource system that dictates the development of your primary resource. Do you play a land that enters the battlefield tapped, or do you opt for a basic to make the most of this turn?

    Games can also have more than one of the same kind of resource system. In Yu-Gi-Oh, not only are you limited to one Monster per turn, but you're also restricted to having no more than five Monsters in play at a time. There's an implicit resource system (the field limit) that further restricts the implicit resource system (one Monster per turn).

    It's not just card games, either. In competitive Pokemon battling, each Pokemon can only use one move per turn (an implicit system). Teams are limited to six Pokemon (an implicit resource system), and each one can have up to four different moves (an implicit resource system). 

    In Stardew Valley, on the other hand, you collect different types of materials to craft new items. The number and types of items that you can craft, depends on the amount and types of materials that you collect. And the materials that you can collect depend on the tools that you have available, which you acquire by crafting. This is a cyclical explicit resource system, where the output of one cycle affects the input of the next.

    Can you think of any other games that have implicit resource systems? What other games have explicit resource systems? How does the difference affect play? 

    I'll leave those questions to you. Let us know what you come up with below or over on the subreddit here! 

    That's all for this week. This Friday we're going back to Urbestia, the custom Magic set about a world of beast folk, to talk about Archetypes in the new landscape. Next Wednesday, it's more custom Magic with a Workshop featuring a new Elemental mechanic. Until then, check out FUR's new mechanics for an idea of what to expect on Friday, or check out the last Monday Musing on making a game in one hour!

See you soon!