In Dying on the Pass, players take on the role of characters who are chefs, servers, porters, managers, buyers and specialists trying to make one service work while the rest of their lives refuse to remain politely outside. The team juggle the professional with the personal in a high pressure environment where every day brings a fresh menu of challenges.

Yesterday, we covered the meta currency of Regard, which works a little like a Fortune Pool (Sanction p 45) but with a specific connection to reputation and how you might leverage it to get what you need, when you need it—like black truffles, an out-of-hours plumber, or an extension on credit.

Today, we consider the essential heart of character generation, the Reources, which miraculously match the #RPGaDay2026 prompts for the next few days. Almost as if it were planned.

Resources

Endurance represents staying power. Long shifts, aching feet, repetitive prep, heat, noise, hunger, difficult people and the ability to keep functioning when you should probably have gone home six hours ago all fall within Endurance.

You should watch Terry and Richie Peel Mushrooms with fair warning of foul language. But, this is not only an example of an Endurance task—the peeling—but a beautiful example of a scene between two characters.

Composure represents control, precision and judgement. It covers delicate preparation, timing, presentation, reading a customer, handling confrontation, remembering six things simultaneously and appearing entirely calm while everything behind you collapses.

Check out Tina Ruins Her Potatoes. As GM, you might appreciate the ways that this scene might play out. Do you run it with more than one Challenge, or just focus on a single roll. I think Composure is the heart of this scene, but it could have been an Intensity Challenge from Sydney, or an Endurance Challenge at the outset to juggle the separate tasks to create the final potato dish.

Intensity represents urgency, energy and commitment. Use it when moving fast, taking control, improvising, pushing a team, turning an idea into something real or simply refusing to let the moment get away from you. Intensity can be physical, emotional or creative.

A perfect example of this appears in the fifth season of The Bear, which immediately sprung to mind when I was thinking about statting up the Genre. You need to watch the episode Caramel (season 5, episode 7) where the pâtissier runs out of a key ingredient for the last dessert of the service and Carmy creates a brioche crunch in an instant. It’s the perfect encapsulation of a Challenge check on Intensity in Dying on the Pass.

The definitions of these Resources should remain deliberately loose because we’re not dealing with something as focussed as Physical or Intellectual, but neither are we dealing with straightforward Challenges. Preparing the same dish might use Composure when executing it perfectly, Intensity when recovering from a mistake, or Endurance when it is the hundred-and-twentieth plate of the evening.

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More specific than my piece today, how does Endurance figure for your character or game? I look forward to reading about it in your RPGaDay post.

#RPGaDAY2026