A while ago I asked whether you are a do the good thing first or save it for later sort of person, like eat the best part or whatever.
Now I’m curious if it was a zombie apocalypse, would that change your calculation?
So not in daily life, but if you found something good but you know you’ll likely die soon.
Do you consume it all now (not just food, but media or friendship), or do you dole it out to yourself to make it last?
I’m increasingly of the opinion that finite consumables are bad game design.
It’s bad design because it fails to account for that exact psychology you described - we humans are loss-averse creatures, and so we hoard them without any benefit.
Much better systems IMO are those which have consumables that naturally replenish over time like mana, or that you fill between fights like the estus flasks in souls games when you rest at a campfire.
These are better because they still challenge the player with managing limited resources, except it’s only limited for the duration of a fight or area, not across the entire game like finite consumables are. It encourages players to use them because they know they’ll get it back, and indeed if you don’t use your mana pool when it’s right there to use, then you’re underperforming.
So yeah. Finite consumables were a natural addition in the early days of gaming which model how real life works, but these days we’ve got much better and more engaging ways of handling the same problem.
Per-encounter resource used are generally better for me, yes.
It’s one of my big problems with DND. Almost the whole thing is centered around per-day so there’s this constant pressure to avoid actually using anything. Like, you could end the fight with a 3rd level spell, or you could slowly end it without spending any resources. It takes longer to play but is otherwise mechanically superior. Deeply anti-fun for me.