Weapon Durability Decay

Each item carries a use counter. Swinging, firing or blocking decrements it, and at zero the item breaks or becomes useless, sometimes with repair available at a price. Design consequences follow immediately: inventory turns into rotating stock rather than a museum, powerful finds get spent instead of hoarded, and a designer can hand the player something extraordinary without permanently flattening the difficulty curve behind it.

Intelligent Systems shipped Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light in 1990 with durability because its units die permanently and its weapons form a triangle of counters. Limited uses stopped players solving every map with one legendary sword and forced rotation through characters and armaments. Constraint suited a strategy game in which each battle is a resource problem inside a campaign that never returns anything you spend.

Durability is among the most reliably disliked systems in the medium and among the most useful. Breakage creates improvisation, prevents hoarding, and keeps a difficulty curve honest; it also generates busywork, punishes attachment, and encourages players to save their best equipment for a moment that never comes. Where it works, replacement is fast and generous. Where it fails, repair becomes a chore performed in menus between fights.