This Feature is part of my long-running True Scenario Designery Course about advanced encounter, adventure, and campaign design. If you’re new to it, The True Scenario Designery Course Index will help you catch up.

This is an Office Hours Feature. It ain’t part of the main course body. Instead, it’s a casual side discussion of something that came up in one of the main Features.

Is Attrition Inertia? Let’s Chat

In my discussion about the Inertia Gameplay Dynamic, I asked if y’all would be interested in a side discussion about whether Dungeons & Dragons’ long-standing Attrition Dynamic counted as Inertia and why it definitely doesn’t. Well, the votes are in, and literally severals of you practically demanded I do it.

I’m gonna try to keep this short — stop laughing; I said try — but this might get a little technical. I’m building on a lot of shit I’ve already analyzed and I can’t stop to re-analyze all my points. If you need to review something, it’s easy enough to find it in my fifteen years of untagged, archived Features with joke titles that tell you nothing about the content. If you can’t find something in the archives, use the barely functional search bar.

Real talk: you might have noticed that I’m switching to clear titles, less jokey headings, and introductions that clearly establish connections between my Features. I’ve heard the feedback. I’m doing better.

Enough preamble… let’s do it to it.

Attrition: Running Out and Running Scared

Dungeons & Dragons — and lots of tabletop roleplaying games including those totally eschewing D&D — is built around an Attrition Dynamic. I explained all that back in my Feature, Maybe You Just Don’t Get Attrition.

It’s like this…

Attrition is a gameplay dynamic whereby individual challenges aren’t designed to end your game — or your character’s life — but, rather, to chew up resources. So, apart from the risk of failing to overcome any individual encounter, there’s this overarching challenge about managing your resources so you can always handle the next challenge. The game’s less about whether encounters kill you and more about how well you handle each encounter.

That makes sense, right?

Now, there’s still a risk you’ll fail any given challenge — or die — and that risk increases the longer you push forward and the worse you manage your resources. However, Attrition means that even individual challenges that can’t possibly kill your character still mean something. They still cost you something. You don’t have to constantly risk yourself in life-or-death struggles.

Moreover, Attrition plays well with other play dynamics and structures, like Challenge Progressions and Boss Fights. If there’s a boss at the end of the dungeon, you’ve got to manage your resources well enough not just to reach it, but to beat it. Play well and you’ll have a resource advantage going into the Boss Arena; play poorly and you might not come back out.

The Attrition Dynamic also makes strategic choices meaningful. That is to say, it makes the choices you make outside of individual Encounters important and impactful. Without Attrition, you don’t have to agonize over whether to press forward or retreat to camp for a rest. Without Attrition, there’s never a downside to exploring literally every side path. Without Attrition, there’s never any reason to sneak past a monster, avoid an encounter, or look for a safe shortcut past several challenges.

Attrition ain’t just about how you handle encounters, it’s also about your choices between encounters.

The best thing about Attrition, though, is that it’s hard-coded into the game. If you follow the encounter-and-adventure-building instructions in the DMG and you know literally nothing about game design, you’ll still end up with a meaningful macroscopic challenge over and above the individual gameplay challenges in each Encounter.

This, by the way, is exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about when I say crap like, “The Game Designers should build good game design principles right into the system so Game Masters don’t have to be design geniuses to build good adventures that are more than just encounter gauntlet delves.”

Older than D&D v.3

Attrition’s been an important gameplay dynamic since the very early days of D&D. Even back before proper game design had been invented when Gygax was slathering balance spackle over his game in a thousand, weird, random ways — because he did — Attrition was doing its job. No one knew why, but that was okay. It’s not like cavemen had to know about oxidation reactions and protein denaturation to cook meat over a campfire.

Attrition actually drove one of the primary play strategies in old-school D&D. Attrition was why players often sought clever, creative ways to circumvent or shut down encounters. They’d do almost anything to avoid getting sucked into a fight. This is before, by the way, we discovered combat should be a fun part of gameplay rather than a punishment. Back then, combat was deadly-dangerous and it chewed through your very limited and very difficult-to-recover resource pool. It took weeks to heal damage and, if you wanted to rest, you damned well better leave the dungeon. Sure, you could try to barricade yourself in a room and set up warding spells to give you peace, but unrelenting wandering monsters could smash through your barricades, and carrying around pitons to wedge doors wasted valuable space in your pack, and memorizing the alarm meant maybe not having any other 2nd-level spells available or whatever.

This worked because old-school D&D gameplay was about delving and exploring. There was less goal-and-quest gameplay. Mostly, D&D was about how far — or how deep — you could go before you had to come back. Then you’d rest and go back for more. Goal-oriented adventures did exist, but the goals were mostly about exploring, delving, and clearing sites, so it was more of the same, really.

It wasn’t until Ravenloft — the original good one — that a different approach emerged to live alongside the delve-and-plunder style of play. It was still delvey, but Ravenloft had a cat-and-mouse game with a villain advancing an agenda and specific goals for the players to accomplish to spoil that agenda. It didn’t invent this shit, but did galvanize a movement, and so was one of the most significant modules ever published. It basically started the war between Game Designer Game Masters like me and the OSR Cromagnons who still think fire comes from the sky and has to be captured when it lands if you want to roast a mammoth haunch.

I’m kidding, I’m kidding. We have fun here… that’s what we do.

The point is that D&D’s modern Attrition Dynamic is basically a direct evolution of the oldest elements of game design present in the earliest versions of D&D.

So Attrition is Inertia!

Last time, I explained that Inertia is a gameplay dynamic that either inexorably pushes the game toward a loss or opposes and undoes the players’ progress toward victory. Or it does both. Inertia ain’t a challenge to overcome; Inertia is a force pulling the game toward disaster.

Attrition certainly seems like it’s that, doesn’t it?

First, the longer you delve, the harder it is to win because your resources are always running out. Second, to recover your resources, you have to retreat from the adventure for a bit. That means giving up ground. Third, some resources — like Hit Points — are literally a countdown to death. By my own arguments and explanations, Attrition is just a specific kind of Inertia.

This is where I’d usually do the thing where I pretend the Feature’s over and then say, “Surprise, losers, that’s totally wrong! Here’s another 2,000 words explaining the opposite of everything I just said!” I’ll skip it though. Y’all know something’s wrong with my conclusion because I wouldn’t have asked the question, “Is Attrition Inertia” if the answer was a boring-ass “Yes.”

What Progress Are You Losing Really?

Let’s put aside the old-school stuff and stick with modern adventure design. The kind we’ve been talking about with Goals, Outcomes, Elements of Challenge, and all that other crap I’ve been running on about. We ain’t talking about delve as deep as you can run when you hit Balrog.

So, you’re on a quest, right? Theoretically, if you don’t manage your resources right, you’ll eventually have to choose whether to push forward in a depleted state or drop back to some safe space to rest and recover before starting another sortie. That sure sounds like losing progress, doesn’t it? But is it?

Don’t lose sight of the context here. I’m talking about these gameplay dynamics as if they’re all you — you’re the Game Master or Scenario Designer now — as if they’re all you do. Pretend you know nothing about game design and don’t add anything extra. You just put together the pieces according to the instructions in the DMG and run that game. By itself, without you bringing any skill to the table, what progress do the players lose when they retreat to rest.

Turns out, they don’t lose much.

Practically speaking, heading back to camp — or back to town — really doesn’t cost anything. In modern D&D, time is mostly meaningless unless some clever designer adds some extra element to the gameplay and most adventures are pretty static. Nothing changes if you leave them alone for a while. It’s not like the monsters respawn or new monsters move in to replace the old or the remaining monsters dig in and shore up their defenses. Or gather their treasure and flee the site; wouldn’t that be hilarious?

Effectively, then, retreating to rest and recover just hits pause on the game. The party can just go back to where they left off and keep going.

In modern D&D, resources are also really cheap. Short rests are freely available even though they shouldn’t be and most of modern D&D-dom doesn’t bother with the wandering, random monsters that would stop the characters from sitting still for an hour to bandage their wounds. A single night of sleep literally anywhere in the world gives you back all of your spellslots with zero issues and, again, there’s rarely a wandering beast to mess up your sleep schedule. At worst, you need two nights if you overspent your Hit Dice. Food is inexpensive, forage is easy to come by, inventory is space is plentiful, and even torches and lantern oil don’t much matter when every spellcaster can bring an infinitely-castable light cantrip.

In short, even though Attrition is constantly tugging you back to camp for a nap to rest and recover, there’s nothing that makes retreating risky, costly, or consequencely and you can return easily to wherever you left off without trouble. By itself, then, Attrition doesn’t provide Weak Inertia.

Dying Ain’t Losing

Attrition fails as Weak Inertia. It doesn’t cost any progress. Not by itself, anyway; not in the rules as writ. But Attrition surely increases the odds of losing, right? It works as Strong Inertia, doesn’t it? The longer you play, the fewer resources you have and therefore, the more likely you are to fail an encounter. Moreover, you’re more likely to die. Your character is anyway.

Here’s where this gets tricky and technically nitpicky…

I talked a few weeks back about how dying and losing are totally different things. Remember, a well-designed adventure has a few different Outcomes built in and some of them suck and make the players feel like losers. We can casually call those undesirable outcomes Loss States. They’re how players Lose the Game, right?

Inertia is a gameplay mechanic that pulls the game toward a loss, but in a well-designed adventure, that’s neither defined as “failing an encounter” nor as “everyone dies.” A single character death is a kind of Attrition, really, it ain’t losing. Meanwhile, if the entire party dies… well, the adventure is over and the players can’t win anymore, but they also didn’t get a Loss State. They fucked up so bad they Game Overed.

Do you get what I’m saying? It’s a picky point. Attrition in D&D doesn’t pull you toward the Scenario’s Loss State. It might cost you an Encounter and, as a result, might make the Scenario harder to win, but it’s pulling you to a generic Game Over rather than a proper Loss.

Imagine if the adventure’s about curing a plague. A proper Loss State is something like, “The plague kills everyone,” or “The plague kills the named NPC the player-characters care most about,” or whatever. Attrition doesn’t move the game toward that ending, it just determines whether the characters die before they get to a proper ending.

What’s funny is, if you look closely at these gameplay dynamics and compare old-school delve-as-deep-as-you-can gameplay against modern do-the-quest gameplay, there’s an argument that modern D&D should be wildly deadly while old-school D&D should have scrupulously careful encounter balance.

Why?

In the old-school approach, you win by getting as far as you can and every retreat starts a new game. Meanwhile, with costly resources, wandering monsters, and long recovery times, retreating also meant losing ground. You had to fight back through conquered territory which wasn’t nearly as fun as seeing new places. As such the game already had plenty of elements of real challenge and so you didn’t need death on the table at all.

Meanwhile, in modern D&D, Attrition isn’t really a big deal and players start almost every Encounter with full or nearly full resources. Thus, the major challenge element is, “Can you cross whatever finish line the quest defines before an Encounter kills you?” Thus, every Encounter should be some flavor of very deadly.

Now, that’s just a fun little observation. I ain’t saying modern D&D should actually be deadly and that old-schoolers should finally give in to the dark side of balanced encounters and careful challenge progressions. For one thing, they’d have to switch their Character Creation systems and for another, I don’t need two communities of rabid whackjobs coming at me with torches and pitchforks. I’m just going where the game dynamics lead me.

All of that aside…

Is Attrition Useful?

Given everything I’ve said above, it might shock you that I stand by my point years ago that Attrition is a pretty great dynamic and it’s got a solid place in modern D&D. You’ve just got to know how to use it.

True Scenario Designers building good Scenarios can’t Inertia by Attrition alone. Not anymore. There are too many missing mechanics to make Attrition work as Inertia, for one thing. We’ve dumped wandering monsters, prohibitive encumbrance, high supply costs, and long recovery times For another thing, Attrition doesn’t pull the game toward proper Loss States like Inertia should. Loss States follow from the Scenario’s designed Outcomes and its Macrochallenge.

In modern D&D, Attrition is more of a pacing dynamic. It creates these moments mid-game where the action’s got to stop periodically, but it also rewards players who handle encounters well and conserve their resources. Attrition also lets players make strategic mistakes by not resting when they should and resting when they shouldn’t. Those things aren’t meaningful by themselves, but a True Scenario Designer can make them meaningful.

As I noted above, a very powerful boss monster or climactic Encounter that represents the major element of Challenge turns Attrition into Inertia. If the goal is to beat the boss and mismanaging resources makes the boss harder, Attrition really does lead to a proper Loss State.

Time wasted resting usually doesn’t matter, but if there’s a mechanic in the Scenario that makes it matter, every retreat increases the odds of a loss. This works equally well with soft timers as with hard timers. Consider, for example, if, in that plague Scenario, every day carries a random chance of killing some number of NPCs in town. Every day wasted resting means a toss of the dice as to whether the PCs are going to find someone they really cared about didn’t make it.

The point here is that Attrition ain’t Inertia by itself, but it provides True Scenario Designers with a play dynamic they can hang things off to make Inertia happen if they know what they’re doing. In that respect, Attrition is kind of like an unfinished Inertia mechanic. It ain’t Inertia by itself, but it’s a good ingredient for Inertia as long as you know how to cook with it.

But the most important takeaway point is that I managed to bring this in at under 3,000 words. So if you’re one of the assholes who laughed when I said I was trying to keep this short, I’ll accept your apology in the comments.