Running on Empty

Question: How much of an economy for Legend points and Willpower points do your characters have and how easy is this economy to maintain? Is running out of Legend or Willpower ever a serious threat in situations that aren't long, tense, drawn out battles between epic cosmic figures?

Heh, I actually laughed at this. The idea of a game in which only giant, epic, world-ending battles drain resources to zero was that foreign to me.

We've found that Legend and Willpower are almost always at a premium in our games; nobody is ever able to spend them like candy without running out, and it seems that characters seldom find that they always have enough to do whatever they want. It's easy for battles to run a Scion dry, especially if they happen to be a combat-oriented character, but there are tons of powers and situations in the game that aren't used for battle and still require the investment of resources. Our players are good about stunting and conserving, but even so they simply run out sometimes, or inform their bandmates that they can't or won't do X or Y because they don't have the Legend to spare right now or need to save it for something else. It's not that rare an occurrance, and it definitely doesn't always happen as a result of combat.

Some of this probably comes as a result of us running fairly long stories; our stories usually last somewhere around four sessions as Heroes, eight around Demigods and god knows how many as they increase past that point. We don't consider a story over until the major plot points of it have been accomplished (or, you know, looked at and run away from, whatever), so stories have a very variable length and as a result the full end-of-story refills don't happen very often. If you're running a game in which the story completes every session or every other session, you're much less likely to see characters run low on resources than if you run one that stretches for several sessions in a row.

Some character archetypes are more prone to running out than others, as well; characters who function as healers or psychopomps (or both - sorry, Vivian) for their bands end up spending a lot of Legend and Willpower on everybody else, and that can bleed them dry or see them with precious little left over to spend on other things. Conversely, purely mental types tend to have more Legend sit around unused during the long stretches of combats or people-wrangling, and then blow it all at once in huge dumps for their brainy powers. Some pantheons, like the Aztecs and Irish, have more Legend recoupability than others, but even they run out once in a while.

Willpower's a lot less of an issue, generally, because it's very easy to get back; once somebody's got Blessing of Importance/BFF/Believe Your Own Press (or, ideally, more than one somebody), that's an easy in-game replenishment source in addition to being able to get some back through stunting. But then again, the Willpower pool is much smaller and is a character's only defense against the dangers of Virtue Extremities, not to mention varying from character to character depending on their permanent total, so it has to be managed a lot more closely despite being easier to regain.

I wouldn't say our characters are out of resources all the time or anything - as you'd expect, they have plenty at the beginning of a story and are desperately trying to keep their gauges above E by the end - but in general, they're very aware of what they're spending and what other possibilities they might be trading away to do so. I don't think that's a bad thing at all, since it's very mythic to sometimes have to choose between two badass options rather than always being able to cover all bases, and they're not usually suffering so much that they can't get anything done. Resources should be something that players have to manage at least a little bit; you don't want them to feel like they can never do anything cool because everything's too expensive, but if they can always use whatever powers they have without having to think about it, you might as well just make everything free.

The players themselves might have a different perspective on it, though, so if you guys want to weigh in, please do.