SEVEN (colors, not sins)

[Trill]

[*] Red scrubs either have a rage token or they don't.
[*] Brown scrubs just have static bonuses - often they "are" equipment so golems and shit are just bigger numbers with no resource scheme.
[*] Yellow scrubs have enough magic points to use their defensive power once (presumably at the start of combat) and their healing power once (presumably later).
[*] Cyan scrubs show up with two powers prepared, which they will presumably use on the first rounds of combat, so Cyan monsters are an early threat. Sometimes these are kiting powers and they'll do hit and run or something to soften you up? (seriously, should we have that or is it just annoying?)
[*] Green scrubs typically have a lifecost power that they'll want to spam, so they have a shorter clock than other mobs.
[*] Indigo scrubs will alternate between their delay and big strike action most rounds, so are simple to run.

what about violet scrubs?

[DrPraetor]

Oops, I was changing things around and copying and pasting at the same time. Edited above.

[DrPraetor]

https://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?p=50588 ... ht=#505883

Obviously I haven't thought much about the upper ends of the spectrum. The concept with Harriers is that anything which pounces and disengages or does swoop attacks or sits around the edges doing ranged attacks is a Harrier.

Level 1
Boggle (Brute)
Giant Ant (Brute)
Zombie (Brute)
Corallax (Controller)
Dretch (Controller)
Pixie (Controller)
Giant Rat (Harrier)
Harpy (Harrier)
War Dog/Wolf (Harrier)
War Horse (Harrier)
Wisp (Harrier)
Cobra (Lurker)
Giant Scorpion (Lurker)
Giant Bee (Ravager)
Legion Fiend (Ravager)
Skeleton (Ravager)

So... what color is what?

Color	Brute	Controller	Harrier	Lurker	Ravager
Red					Legion Fiend
Brown				Giant Scorpion
Yellow			War Dog
Cyan		Corollax	Mustang
Green	Giant Ant		Wolf	Cobra	Giant Bee
Indigo	Boggle	Pixie	Harpy
Violet	Zombie	Dretch	Giant Rat		Skeleton

http://choisey.free.fr/3.5/Core/Dungeon ... l%20II.pdf
The Corollax
just by the way
is a tucan
with color spray.

How hard would it be to crap out a full 35 monsters per level? Monsters don't need to justify their existence or have protected space or anything, so there's no harm in procedurally generating a full sweep of them, except in so far as you run out of ideas and they're lame.

The "orc" and "goblin" were missing from Frank's list, but I wonder if that was on purpose - to avoid the racism? But if I'm going to have (some) undead be people and not monsters...

Color	Brute	Controller	Harrier	Lurker	Ravager
Red	*Marauder	Spark	**Raider	Newt	Legion Fiend
Brown	Sand Golem	Illstone	Dust Devil	Giant Scorpion	Animated Dagger
Yellow	*Defender	Shield Spirit	**Slinger	**Patroller	War Dog
Cyan	Azure Ape	Corollax	Mustang	Shimmer
Green	Giant Ant		Wolf	Cobra	Giant Bee
Indigo	Boggle	Pixie	Harpy
Violet	Zombie	Dretch	Giant Rat		Skeleton

*These can be of any medium-humanoid type, with slight modifications.
**These can be of any small-humanoid type, with slight modifications.

[Username17]

How hard would it be to crap out a full 35 monsters per level?

Well, that's 700 monsters and still gives you crap coverage because you only have a single minion of each level per faction. Now, Dungeons & Dragons has significantly more than seven hundred monsters. However, I think it's fair to assess that a lot of them are lame. Further, it's equally obvious that the number of monsters that aren't shit in D&D is pretty limited at both ends of the level scale. One of the main reasons people sometimes talk about levels 5 through 9 as the "sweet spot" of D&D is that that is where the best monsters live.

One of the core issues of course is that the kinds of things you'd want colors for are the kinds of things that aren't necessarily appropriate for all enemies. Like, I don't give a single shit what elemental vulnerabilities Mook #4 has or what resource management systems are available to Giant Rat #6. There's some value in factions because presumably Necromancers have minion Skeletons and Dark Dryads have minion Twig Blights and shit, but even then "Goblin Warrior #5" could plausibly show up on either team with an appropriate jersey change.

Whatever elemental color wheel you happen to have, you need enough monsters to create encounters in power nodes of each type. But that doesn't mean you need a full set of monsters of each monster type of each level. It's totally reasonable if there aren't any 1st level power node encounters, and it's totally defensible to have every creature in an air node be some flavor of harrier.

You can make some sort of cube block where you have X rows and Y columns and Z levels and fill those cells so that you have X*Y*Z things. But you shouldn't do that. Procedural generation of content is possible, but usually inelegant. You could make a Level 3 Fire-Element Lurker, but you probably shouldn't do that just because there's a slot to fill.

The strain on the monster manual is pretty intense. Dungeons & Dragons has many hundreds of monsters, but it probably has more like dozens that are things you'd actually look forward to fighting. The more you lean on procedural generation, the more it's going to look like Nethack. And Nethack doesn't have anywhere close to having enough palette swap monsters to get where you're going with this.

-Username17

[Orca]

Maybe a halfling patroller (yellow) is a level 2 creature in your monster list but it's easy in your system to add a level or two, or similarly you have a junior/lesser/basic template and a advanced/major/greater template to vary its stats from level 3 with. It hardly makes sense that every patroller would have the same stats, and done right it lowers your workload a bit.

[DrPraetor]

Certainly, yes, you want rules for building monsters and for templating monsters up and down. But, however easy or however hard those are to use, you should provide a full range of respecs on your common humanoids. So there should be a range of example goblin, halfling, bugbear etc. war parties fully specced out. Anything less is not an RPG, it's some ideas and "go figure this out yourself."

Each monster needs rules of engagement. So when you encounter a red/brown warband with an Earth Elemental, two Trolls, and a Troll Smith (Elite) - what happens before the combat music starts playing? You roll Stealth / Survival / Lore / ...? and how is the combat positioning dictated by those results?

Consider the doppelganger, which is going to try and infiltrate the party before combat starts. How quickly does the party figure out who is who and where is the doppelganger in relation to the other monsters in the same warband - who are presumably taking advantage of the confusion to strike from ambush? The advanced doppelganger needs more aggressive rules of engagement, not just bigger numbers.

Likewise, as the halfling patroller moves from level to level, she gets new rules of engagement - maybe the level 2 patroller strikes from ambush while the level 3 patroller calls in reinforcements if the battle drags on, that sort of thing.

This is especially true for humanoids, who are going to stay relevant for plot reasons when you really don't care if the monsters swap from winter wolves to oreads, since either can be minions of the ice witch just fine.

[Username17]

It is absolutely necessary to have goblin enemies available at all levels. Mirror matches are an essential portion of the game, and if your game can't handle an evil paladin facing off against the hero paladin, I just don't even want to talk to you. Further, a D&D game that follows an "adventurer, conqueror, king" setup, which is what D&D inspired games should aspire to, is going to want "large numbers of goblin spearmen" to be relevant at all levels of play. At least for sufficiently large values of "large."

But it's also important to note that the needs for monsters are not static at all levels. The typical campaign follows a pattern in which the first few adventures are defined by the players having relatively little mobility - you adventure in the semi-tamed frontier of the border village, the camps of the caravan you are protecting, or the forgotten sewers and slums of the city because that is what you can reach. The adventure locations are prescripted and drawn from a relatively short list that doesn't have much in the way of chaos demons or rocs or whatever on it.

At higher levels, you have more freedom. Maybe you continue to patrol the borderlands as they come under assault by giants and demons, but maybe you tear off into the high wilderness or the deep underdark. Maybe you go to an exotic fantasy locale like under the sea or a magical land where you walk on rainbows or get rained on by fire. The vistas open up tremendously because you can face monsters whose presence is normally incompatible with human habitation being within fifty kilometers or travel through regions whose environments require superheroic abilities to adventure in.

The key issue is that there are actually very few examples of low level adventures that don't involve some form of people committing crime. Like, maybe it's bandits raiding from nearby caves, maybe it's a death cult kidnapping people to their lair in the old sewers, but it's almost always people who are criminals. They could be criminals inspired by evil gods, or criminals who are raiders from a rival civilization, but the underlying enemies are generally people, and those people have fairly recognizable goals and abilities. If there are "monsters" in the classic sense, it is because they are pets and warbeasts of the people, or perhaps environmental hazards that the people are hiding behind. You can probably name a few exceptions such as "undead are rising from the old graveyard," but I submit that there are few enough of those that you could plausibly list them all on your fingers. And further, in most of those cases it turns out to be some people doing a crime anyway. While "kill snakes outside the village to XP dance" missions are certainly possible, no one fucking likes those.

At the highest level of play, there are again relatively few available adventures. The kingdom is under threat by either giant monsters or a rival kingdom, and that's pretty much it. You either march an army to the Gates of Mordor or you dive into the Demon Web Pits yourself. There isn't a lot more for Witch Queens to do.

It's the spaces between where D&D characters take to the seas (or under them), explore alien landscapes, and conquer strange and hostile civilizations.

What this means is that there genuinely isn't a need or even desire for the monster manual to be prism shaped. Procedurally generating monsters to fill arbitrary color by role by level gives you too many monsters at either end and probably too few monsters in the middle.

-Username17

[jt]

Filling in a flat X challenges per level makes some sense, though for the reasons Frank points out a differing amount of those challenges are plausibly monsters at each level. Conspiracy plots and monsters, actually mostly monsters, armies and giant monsters.

Though even then, people will realistically play more of the early levels since they usually start down there and give up early. And it's plausible that some types of content get burned through more quickly than others. A war against the Rotting Druid and his army of zombie deer and bone ents might take a longer than usual entry, but it'll last several sessions. A manticore might be one of three monsters you face in a single session and you never use any of them again that campaign.

[DrPraetor]

While I'm in existential agony over stealth rules, some rambling.

Frank is not a fan of open multiclassing, and neither am I - but I am a fan of open "subclassing", which I'm going to brand as "kits" and which will work like the extended feats that Frank and K dumped from Tome.

So a 1st level character will have a class and two kits, which might be something like Mage (Fair Folk / Pyromancer) ("generic human" is achieved by not taking a non-human kit.)

Kits are colorless unless they have a resource scheme. If you only have a resource scheme from a kit, you get the mook version detailed in a previous post. So our Mage (Fair Folk / Pyromancer), has magic points, but she only has a rage token not a full rage meter. You get two kits at level 1, and additional kits at levels 4 (adventuring), 7 (heroic) ,10 (heroic) ,13 (lord), 17 (epic).

This makes the game more difficult to balance. Using different resource schemes for different characters also makes the game more difficult to balance - but I think the tradeoff is reasonable in these cases.

Nothing has pre-requisites and the only restriction is that you can't have more than three resource schemes running at once. Every level, you can trade in a previous kit (or two previous technique picks, see below) for a new one of the same tier; this is to avoid trap options. So if our Mage (Fair Folk / Pyromancer / Light Wielder) 6 wants to grow into a Geomancer at level 7, she can chuck Pyromancer in favor of any Cyan, Yellow, Brown or colorless adventuring kit to stay within the three color scope; or, if she just decides that Daggerweaver is a better fit for her lifestyle than Pyromancer.

You can also get swaps as plot devices / quest rewards - so if you reach the legendary sword master Yi Lin, you can swap into the Swordmaster kit. This should ensure that people are never stuck with kit selections they don't like.

One thing your class and your kits (to a lesser extent) let you do is to learn techniques. Techniques come in circles, which are rebranded spell levels. You can write as many techniques as you want on your character sheet, but you have a fixed number (basically, the same as the D&D 3E wizard spells known) which are "active" meaning you actively benefit from them. At each level, you can pick two techniques of your highest-available circle and write them on your sheet.

Techniques sometimes do and sometimes don't have a direct correspondence with various actions you can take - this partially depends on your resource scheme. Violet characters - for example - can generally only use one special move every other round so they don't care that much about how many special moves they can choose from.

[DrPraetor]

This is another rambling post because it starts to synthesize issues that came up in a lot of other threads; so someone not current on the board may find it, at best, confusing.

Here's a conceit: there are places of power (and probably power lines too) that spawn mana-color-appropriate monsters spontaneously, both the ravage the countryside and to live in ruins that will also have hazards and traps and shit.
Wherefore is this reverse-engineered: well, you want to play ruin explorers because this is basically D&D - so there are magical dungeons with displacer beasts prowling around in them, that's a given. If there are a lot of those, it's even better. Beyond that, while as Frank said most low-level campaigns start out fighting "criminals", you want to give play groups the freedom to dial up and down the murder level to taste; you want to give this without forcing people to engage in a lot of self-examination about how comfortable they are with describing stabbing an orc to death over Doritos, because this is a game you play for fun. So if you can deal with these issues without confronting or even particularly acknowledging them, that's a design success. The diplomacy rules need to robustly support accepting the surrender of clearly-defeated enemies - both because the players may be squicky about the killing and because if someone wants to write "advanced diplomacy" on their character sheet, there is a good chance that they want to contribute to a reduced body count one way or another.

Here's a conceit: The world political order is relatively new. Building on that, the previous political order was dominated by belligerent color-advocates (seven warring teams of demons, essentially), so you have veterans from both the wars to overthrow them and the awful wars they fought between them, which overlapped.
Wherefore is this reverse-engineered: shamelessly lifted from http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56993 - I think there are even more good reasons to take this conceit than are listed in that thread, but it gives plenty, including ancillary support to the other two conceits.

Here's a conceit: There are extremist organizations (associated with the various colors). These are likely to be relics of the prior period of demonic rule.
http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=52316&start=0

What makes an antagonist organization different from a “normal” organization in After Sundown is not that they are “the bad guys” ... the Antagonists in this setting ... are not willing to live and let live with the members of other Syndicates and cults.

The party has an Elf Necromancer and an Orc Paladin in it, so anyone who hates Elves, Necromancers, Orcs or Paladins is an antagonist by definition.
Wherefore is this reverse-engineered: You want to feel justified in stabbing some people in the face. But, you can't say "it's okay to stab orcs in the face", because then it is you who are okay to face stab. Aha! We have solved the riddle.

there are antagonists, who we can kill on sight because they think it is okay to kill orcs on sight, which makes them Nazis.
As an ancillary to this, you can have spirit allies or flunkies who are a source of dramatic tension (although this must be measured carefully), because they don't like it that you're hanging out with a Paladin. A crucial mandate: This needs to be a source of melodramatic hooks for adventures and not a game-mechanical penalty that might discourage Paladins and Necomancers from teaming up. We want Paladins and Necromancers to team up, that's the whole frickin' point.
One area of concern - do we want areas that are still demon ruled and where the Elf is in danger or a liability? With reservations, I think we do - the mix of tropes where Garfunkdriel has to wear a disguise or pretend to be a slave while Simoneus does the talking is too rich a trove to just abandon. You don't want to have areas where Garfunkdriel just has to stay at home, though - that's ++ungood. Also, I think if someone wants to write Elf on their character sheet they probably want someone somewhere to hate them for being special and graceful.

Utterly unrelated to the above - more on resource management schemes.
Red has a rage bar. Red gets a mixture of techniques that give a passive benefit for having rage tokens, and which spend rage tokens to do something impressive. The rage-havey and rage-spendy tracks want to be good enough that you'll generally pursue both, in spite of the built-in anti-synergy.
Everyone has a logistics check to produce gear without fiddly tracking, Brown adds some fiddling tracking back to power their techniques. Some techniques provide options that require logistics, some techniques boost the logistics check in ways/contexts.
Yellow has mana points. You can dedicate magic points to defensive advantages (which want, in general, to be more interesting than a numerical bonus), or you can spend them on healing which makes your defenses go down in order to budget them, essentially. Yellow isn't going to be spamming stuff (except maybe healing, which implies that there is a high tension level because people are at a risk of dropping, and I think that means heal spam is okay.)

[DrPraetor]

There are non-combat techniques, and they may-or-may-not interact with your resource scheme. They definitely take up technique slots.

Further, every color can get techniques which just "do stuff" and don't use up resources. So you could have a red technique that gives you a rage token whenever an adjacent ally gets hit and damaged - this doesn't cost you a rage token to use, obviously.

You never encounter the door. So how do techniques get used out of combat?

Rage tokens evaporate at the rate of 1/minute if you don't use them. "Shield biting" or "Self searing" is something red characters can do to get a rage token outside of combat, but it only gives 1 rage token; nonetheless, if you feel the need to do so, you can use red combat techniques out of combat - and, yes, given a pre-combat situation (either a skill test or the intrinsic nature of the combat setup) that lets you time the fight properly, you can start the fight with 1 rage token in this way.

Logistics checks can absolutely be made out of combat, and there are Brown techniques that provide magic ropes, set traps (magical or otherwise) and so-on when the combat music isn't playing.

Mana can be spent or allocated on Yellow abilities outside of combat, and it recovers at whatever rate or is freed up when you turn the abilities in question off; but Yellow techniques used outside of combat interact with Mana points in exactly the way they do during combat.

for the remaining colors...

Cyan has Vancian casting. In general, you trade techniques for actions 1:1, so Cyan techniques are pretty potent as individual actions - you get various flavors of haste, as well as call lightning; these can go ahead and be a big deal when they go off. Some of these are useful partially or only outside of combat, but they're still just Vancian spells so you cast them and then reprepare them the next day if you want. Yes, Wanderers have non-magical abilities which are also exhausted and reprepared this way.

Green techniques do you damage. There are long-term injury rules which may apply to some green techniques, but in general you just use them outside of combat as much as you want and then heal yourself up. It may be important how many square meters you can fill with webs in an hour - this will depend on how quickly you can heal yourself and we won't pretend that isn't how it works.

Indigo has a winds of fate deck, which naturally requires an expanded explanation. Indigo techniques don't correspond 1:1 to cards - some of them add cards, some of them remove the default cards (each class has a default deck at first level) and some of them alter the shuffling or drawing mechanics on a situational basis. One key feature is that the card drawing is the resource scheme, so you don't get an ability to draw a new hand once per day or anything like that which would require you to track a different resource! "Discard and draw a new hand if an opponent engages you" would be a valid Indigo card/technique, though. Outside of combat, you can rifle through your deck at a rate of roughly 2/minute, so that's how fast you can use each card in your deck, if this should come up.

Finally, Violet techniques are mostly either passive bonuses of some kind (including skeletons and homonculi as pets, for example), or actions that in turn require an action to prepare. You are free to spam these out of combat at the rate of once every 12 seconds or 5/minute therefore.

All of the above restrict what spells/abilities you can get in a host of ways. Yellow can go ahead and get a spell that summons a lantern archon which hangs around as long as you keep the mana invested; violet and green cannot - when violet and green get pets, these pets use up a technique slot per pet as a "passive power" (maybe you can take 2 turns and a corpse to replace your pet zombie, or go into the woods and take some damage to replace your pet wolf).

"Sol Gate" to travel along Yellow ley lines is a lower-circle spell than "Fire Gate" to travel along Red ley lines because the Yellow version costs Mana while the Red version just requires you to light a bonfire and get really angry at it first. Brotherhood of Blood is a red technique that causes other martial types to have a mancrush on you - it eliminates Diplomacy penalties for tribal animosity. You don't use it in combat - and it doesn't interact with the rage tokens at all.

[Username17]

I think what this underlines is that "in combat" resource schemes often (but not always) translate quite poorly to "out of combat" challenges. The time scales are so different that the distinctions between many in-combat timers simply stop mattering altogether. Cool-down, warm-up, and Tide of Battle are all essentially identical since they are basically "ability can be used 1/X rounds" differing in the precise order that those rounds come in. And yes, that's super important during combat, and really feels different and all that, but out of combat three rounds is some fraction of a minute and it just doesn't fucking matter at all what order those seconds come in before and after a power is used.

On the other hand, some power systems will have significant meaning outside of combat. An Essentia Pool is distributed between your power slots whether you're taking actions that take one combat round or one hour. Drain based damage has precisely the same meaning in terms of healing times and costs whether it is incurred during a 12 seocnd combat round. "Per encounter" charges aren't really relevant on the overland map, but "daily" charges sure the fuck are.

Which all goes to hammering in that the entire idea of colored resource management schedules just isn't going to fly. Some characters can meaningfully have the same resource management system for their abilities that are used in combat and their abilities that are intended for out of combat use - and some just can't. So it isn't just that you don't actually want Berserkers and Druids to use the same resource management system for their in-combat abilities (although you do not), it's that neither the Berserker nor the Druid want to use the same resource considerations for their special attacks and their exploration contributions. Having the Berserker stab himself in the leg or kill a chicken in order to track a beast to its lair is the kind of thing you might do as a fucking joke - that can't be your actual game system.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Your complaint has nothing to do with the colors.

Everyone has to have rules to use their designated-combat abilities outside of combat, because it is going to come up. This includes Berserkers.

Then, Berserkers - whether or not you specify they are Red - either have a second resource scheme for tracking abilities not meant to be used in combat, or they don't, and their non-combat abilities are usable at will. This (obviously) restricts the kinds of abilities you can hand out to the Berserker, but it often isn't that big a deal, since non-combat challenges aren't all meaningfully divided into "turns", "negotiation spam" shouldn't be an issue (if it is, you've designed your negotiation skill challenge poorly).

Now, in my specific writeup, all seven colors share a resource scheme in technique slots. If you use a first-circle technique slot on "Brotherhood of Blood" it isn't available for other techniques, which is an opportunity cost even if "Brotherhood of Blood" doesn't have uses per day or interact with rage tokens.

If you prefer, you can think of the resource matrix as:

Color	Combat	Non-Combat
Red	Rage Bar	At will
Brown	Logistics Limit	Logistics Limit
Yellow	Mana	Mana
Cyan	Vancian	Vancian
Green	Hit Points	Long Term Injury
Indigo	Winds of Fate	At will
Violet	Multi-turn actions	At will

So Red, Indigo and Violet can't be given non-combat abilities that you would want to spam, but the other colors certainly can.

[Username17]

The lesson of 4th edition (and Tome of Battle, for that matter) is that trying to have your combat abilities "not work" or "work differently" out of combat is intellectually insulting and stifling to the imagination. It is unacceptable for a role playing game. So you're going to want characters to be able to use their combat powers out of combat with the same rules - if players want to "encounter the tree" they can fucking well do that.

If the Assassin can spend a turn aiming and perfect shot a crossbow bolt into an enemy Orc, he should be able to spend some time aiming and perfect shot a crossbow bolt with a message wrapped around it into a window. If the team needs the Berserker to turn into a devil bear outside of combat they will want to harmlessly slap them until the ragebar fills enough to do that - and they should be allowed to do that.

But characters will still have out of combat abilities that have meaningful limits on when and how they can be used that will not and can not be meaningfully related to what their primary combat shtick uses. The Berserker might make magic swords, which will take time and resources; or they might be able to call on a favor from the frog shamans that is simply expended when used - and neither of these things involves the character getting angered up so that they can ultimate off their rage bar.

Which is the fundamental weakness of attempting to attach everything to colors in this manner. Once the characters are characters in a role playing game rather than a fighting game, they will necessarily have abilities that operate outside any particular resource framework that combat will or even can give a shit about. Combat can't tell the difference between once per hour, once per day, or once ever; but exploration and kingdom management and shit absolutely can.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I said -

Finally, Violet techniques are mostly either passive bonuses of some kind (including skeletons and homonculi as pets, for example), or actions that in turn require an action to prepare. You are free to spam these out of combat at the rate of once every 12 seconds or 5/minute therefore.

and you said-

If the Assassin can spend a turn aiming and perfect shot a crossbow bolt into an enemy Orc, he should be able to spend some time aiming and perfect shot a crossbow bolt with a message wrapped around it into a window.

Which is what I just fucking said.

So now I say, Frank, you don't have to read what I'm writing in this thread. But if you don't, any posts you do make are just shit-posting.

You need to *explicitly state in the rules* that all in-combat abilities are usable under the same terms out of combat; and, since you're writing rules down, you should add those up and do the math therefore. So it's not enough to say, "you can cast Webs out of combat and use the same injury/recovery rules"; you should also crunch the numbers, produce a table of how fast you get injured on average by spamming a particular power, and provide that for people to look it up.

As yet another issue, with no bearing on whether Barbarians and Sorcerers both have rage bars because they're Red, you might need additional out-of-combat resource schemes. I hope you don't, because it makes the game more complicated, but this has nothing to do with whether the game-space and resource schedules are divided by colors or not. Even if the Barbarian is the only one who gets a rage bar, you still have to decide whether you want to keep track of favors that can be used once per season, whether these count in some sense against your technique slots or chakras or whatever, or if these are somehow gated for people who swing a large diplomacy bonus. You absolutely do need rules for contacts, allies, henchmen and agents, I don't deny that for an instant.

There are a lot of ways to handle favors from the Frog Shamans, including:
[*] You could track favors as a sort of equipment, that are used up. Okay, I'm willing to call that another resource management scheme, although I wasn't thinking of it in that way.
[*] You could have a variety of passive bonuses that you could choose from a special Frog Shaman favors list, which go in technique slots, like having them loan you a Frog warrior as a guide / meatshield, or having their blessing against poison, or their advice (a passive bonus on some lore challenges), etc..
[*] You could subsume these into a Diplomacy check, possibly in combination with one or the other bullet points above.

But, I say again, this is entirely orthogonal to having these techniques/bonuses be Red, and to having Red use a rage bar.

[Username17]

Which is what I just fucking said.

I know. That was the part where I was agreeing with you.

The part I wasn't agreeing with you was the part where I expanded to note that people need to interact with the world during exploration, logistics, and social challenges in ways that don't meaningfully interact with combat resource management systems. And while you could make things be sufficiently game-like that characters used their combat resources for other facets of the game, this isn't going to be very much like a role playing game. That's a pursuit of weird design sensibilities over and above functional role playing game design.

As yet another issue, with no bearing on whether Barbarians and Sorcerers both have rage bars because they're Red, you might need additional out-of-combat resource schemes. I hope you don't, because it makes the game more complicated, but this has nothing to do with whether the game-space and resource schedules are divided by colors or not.

This is where you go off the rails. People do have other resource systems that function out of combat. They just fucking do. People have gold. Gold doesn't work like a rage bar, but you can do various stuff with it. You just can. Trying to winnow things down so they fit into a color scheme is ultimately futile because you've already lost because characters also have gold that is gone when it is spent.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

And I say again, this has nothing to do with the colors.

Yeah, player characters are also going to have money. This isn't a given - there are perfectly satisfactory games that abstract money away entirely and you never keep track of it - but that's not what you want for a D&D variant, where people want to haul sacks of treasure out of dragon lairs and then spend it.

They're going to be in one place - and not another - so long distance travel is going to be a limited resource, for many things they'd want to achieve. Downtime is a resource, and if you ignore it entirely, the game becomes dissociative.

At the same time, you don't want to go the Ars Magica route where more than half of the game is devoted to managing your day-planner. You don't want to go the routes of some games with money, where you are keeping track of individual arrows; you want to abstractify that stuff away where practical.

There is a tough balance there - not as tough as Shadowrun - because if the characters are going to the mountains, of course they bring climbing gear. But, you don't want to have them waste time specifying every contingency, halting play so they can tell the DM they're searching for secret doors all the time, and so on. This is all a big design challenge for any D&D clone, and involves some overhead.

Forget the colors for a moment, and consider the Barbarian with her rage bar.

Does she need another resource management scheme, for her class features/abilities?

Maybe she does, but I would prefer not, because it compounds with the overhead above and means you have more stuff you need to keep track of, on top of money, favors, and so forth.

If there is going to be a second class-feature resource management system - Elan points, let's say - it wouldn't be class-specific. Those classes which do get resource management that makes sense both in and out of combat (like Vancian casting) can get non-combat abilities that use their resource, and then they might also get non-combat abilities that cost Elan. Now substitute "class" for "color" in the previous paragraph and ask if it makes any lick of difference.

[Username17]

Forget the colors for a moment, and consider the Barbarian with her rage bar.

Does she need another resource management scheme, for her class features/abilities?

Maybe she does, but I would prefer not, because it compounds with the overhead above and means you have more stuff you need to keep track of, on top of money, favors, and so forth.

The answer, whether you think that's unfortunate or not, is simply "Yes." Yes she does. If she is going to have challenges and actions that are not relevant on the time scale that filling and expending her rage bar is relevant she will still want and need abilities that are relevant on those time scales. And that necessitates the existence of resource management systems that are relevant on those time scales for those abilities to use.

Abilities that interact with sailing ships, training armies, searching ancient tombs, tracking beasts to their lairs, or whatever else happens on a scale where the rage bar isn't relevant will not use the Rage Bar mechanic because the rage bar isn't relevant on the time scale they take place in. But those abilities still have to take place in some kind of context, and that context will be a resource management system that is relevant to them.

There is a thing that happens when you try to fit things into a reductionist single resource management system. And that's that you make FATE. Which is sort of fine for what it is, but fundamentally it's a game where you seek out relationship problems with your girlfriend because it powers up your FATE points so that you can spend them on being super lucky in the final showdown against Doctor Octagon. And while you could make a reasonable case that this is the best way to simulate characters in Game of Thrones, it's completely "dissociated." Obviously, the characters are unaware that being "on camera" during many minor inconveniences directly adds up to them winning the final battle because that's stupid and makes no sense. Outside of some very weird games the player characters aren't supposed to know when they are and are not "on camera" in the first place.

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

I'm writing the "book of challenges" first; as a brief aside, I think you need individual entries for challenges other than individual monsters - so you need entries for fortified temples, for snow storms and storms at sea, and so forth. Do the NPC adversaries and natural challenges need non-combat resource management? When things go "game of hexes", I suppose they do, but that can be a real headache.

So because of the writing order, I'm somewhat punting on this question. The player characters can potentially have monster-manual entries as pets, but simplicity is there at an absolute premium, for example on questions of how many people the Doppelganger can shapeshift into and imitate in a given day or week, if you manage to get one as a hench-creature.

People in the real world believe that they are owed a fixed amount of luck; so, in fact, it wouldn't be dissociated for the game to actually work that way. I don't like a system where you build luck points by having bad things happen to you and then spend them for limited-use non-combat abilities, [EDIT] but the problem isn't that it's dissociative. The player characters would know that is how things worked.

I'm open to the possibility that resource management is a requirement for having nice things. You'll notice that I didn't assign "at will" to any of the different colors combat-scale abilities; every color provides some at will or passive or situational-reaction or what-have-you abilities, but every color needs a gating resource scheme as well. My theory is that fighters having only at-will abilities is a (major, perhaps insurmountable) hinderance to giving fighters nice things.

Maybe the same is true out of combat, but I'm more skeptical:
[*] Let's say you have the ability "Sea Wolf", where you can always take the aggressive stance in any naval engagement. Does this need to cost luck points or be otherwise use-limited? I don't think that it does - you get to use it for however many naval engagements you have.
[*] Any army training benefit can apply to your entire army (however big it is, however often it fights), or to some limited number of squads or whatever, but is that really a resource management scheme?
[*] Likewise any benefit that applies when searching tombs can apply whenever you search (or whenever your search meets certain conditions), whenever you track, and so on.

"Only useful (given condition X)" can be viewed as a resource scheme, and certainly in that light, yes, you want to give people bonuses "in forests" and that becomes a resource scheme. Reactive / gated abilities can even be a bigger pain to track than counting Elan points out; this isn't a trivial question.

But, I do not think it is a given that non-combat abilities need to have restrictions like: usable 1/month; costs $500; requires you to budget 0.1 seasons of laboratory time; etc.. Maybe they do and this is the only way to give people good abilities! But, I'm hoping to design around this and make all non-combat abilities usable "whenever they come up".

[Username17]

you get to use it for however many naval engagements you have.

That is a once per encounter resource scheme. You can hide this fact by making it "always on" and "not stack" or something, but it's still a thing that happens exactly once per naval encounter, and if was something like a chooseable bonus action you'd need to be explicit about the once-per-naval encounter nature of it.

Any army training benefit can apply to your entire army (however big it is, however often it fights), or to some limited number of squads or whatever, but is that really a resource management scheme?

Yes, that is also a resource management scheme. A bonus that applies once per minion you have, or once per minion you have up a to a maximum number of minions is still a resource limit. Indeed, just by saying it like that you can already see how the players would like to distribute minions between characters who had those two resource management systems.

Likewise any benefit that applies when searching tombs can apply whenever you search (or whenever your search meets certain conditions), whenever you track, and so on.

Depending on what the ability is. There are some abilities that you can hide as an always on bonus. If you "track faster" or something, you can describe it as the character having a continuous passive ability to reduce the tracking times. But if have an ability like "When you search, you find d6 extra Gil" or whatever, you're going to need some defined limit on how many times you can declare that, or people are going to declare that they are searching the couch and searching their pants and shit.

But the bottom line is that abilities need resource schemes that are relevant on the time frames that the abilities are relevant in. And that's why having a fixed number of monolithic resource schemes is not a realistic goal.

-Username17