Resource management
Acquiring, holding, converting, and spending finite quantities that constrain what a player can do.
18 entries. Tie-break question: Is it about allocating a scarce pool now?
Hand Management
Players hold a private set of cards and must decide which to play, keep, or discard each turn, trading immediate use against future options under a hand limit.
Hit Points
A numeric pool representing how much damage a character, unit, or player can absorb; damage subtracts from it and reaching zero removes the holder from play or triggers a death procedure.
Income
At a fixed point in each round or on passing a trigger, a player receives resources at a rate set by a track, a table, or a flat salary, so the inflow is scheduled rather than earned by an action in the moment.
Inventory and Encumbrance
What a character can carry is capped by weight, slot count, or volume, so acquiring more than the limit forces the player to drop, store, or sell holdings or to accept penalties to movement.
Last Hitting
Only the attack that defeats a unit earns its bounty of gold or a similar reward, so players time a final blow on weakened enemies, and in the denying form may finish allied units to withhold that reward from opponents
Lives and Continues
The player holds a small counted stock of attempts, each failure spends one and restarts play from a set point, and exhausting the stock ends the game unless a continue is bought, so attempts are a rationed resource.
Loans and Debt
A player may take resources now in exchange for an obligation to repay later, with interest, a recurring charge, or a lasting penalty, so present capacity is bought at the cost of a future constraint.
Markets
Players buy from and sell to the game at prices the system sets and moves in response to purchases, sales, supply, or events, so the rate of exchange is a changing state rather than a fixed recipe or a negotiated deal.
Metacurrency
A scarce pool of points held by the player rather than the character, earned by play and spent to bend outcomes from outside the fiction, for example to reroll, improve a result, or avoid death.
Needs and Moods
Characters carry several decaying meters such as hunger, energy, and fun that must be refilled by spending time or items, and their combined level sets a mood that gates what the character will do.
Resource Conversion
Players exchange specified quantities of lower-order resources for higher-order goods, buildings, or effects according to fixed recipes, so progress depends on routing scarce inputs through the right conversions.
Resource Gathering
Players obtain raw materials by harvesting resource nodes placed in the world, such as ore veins, herbs, trees or fishing spots, which deplete and later respawn, so supply is fixed in place, often skill-gated and open to rivals.
Sanity
A separate track for a character's mental stability drains as the character witnesses horror or strain, usually through a roll, and falling past thresholds brings madness, breakdown, or removal from play short of death.
Stock Holding
Players buy fractional shares in entities such as companies or chains, receive dividends or bonuses in proportion to their holding, and may gain control of an entity by owning the largest block.
Threat and Aggro
Each hostile picks its target from a running tally of how much every player has provoked it, so a party controls who gets attacked by generating, holding, or shedding that tally rather than by position alone.
Upkeep and Attrition
Holdings such as units, workers, or ships impose a recurring cost in food, money, or supply each round, and failing to pay it degrades or removes them, so growth must be matched by income.
Usage Dice
A consumable such as torches, rations, or arrows is tracked as a die rather than a count; after each use the die is rolled, and a low result steps it down one size until a low roll on the smallest die exhausts the supply.
Victory Points
An abstract scoring unit awarded for heterogeneous achievements such as buildings, sets, regions, and completed goals, summed on a track or at game end, so that unlike pursuits are made commensurable and the highest total wins.