"When I do something physical in a big manner or spend a lot of mental energy on something I get tired" is easy to grasp and relatable to most RPG gamers I hope.
With DnD as it is though "I fight/cast so hard I get tired' is a bunch of unrelated fiddly mechanics that rarely interact. Like only somebody with the Rage class feature can actually gets tired in the middle of swinging weapons around while the ranger two weapon flurries around. The wizard/sorcerer seems to be mentally taxed by memorizing/casting, but rarely does their casting interact with the actual game mechanic of exhaustion.
Like... everyone has hit points, most people follow the same action economy (and really everyone should be on the same page for that), something like "I fought so hard I am very tired" should be standardized too.
This could just add extra book keeping to an already fiddly game though.
But some thoughts for a DnD type game...
*Every class should benefit from taking a short, long rest. Not saying they all use the same mechanic, but all of them have a reason to take a break.
*Everyone has 1 action point, regained by a long rest. Represents being well rested to deliver your best performance, mental focus, etc.
*Everyone has a Second Wind point, regained by short rest. SW is used to reroll a save, remove fatigue, regain some hp. Class specific effects include... warriors getting an extra attack, clerics getting an extra use of channeling, wizards empowering a spell, rogues taking 20 on a check, etc.
*More 'fatigued until end of encounter' conditions, like from casting higher level spells or too many spells
Well I don't really like the barbarian rage mechanic to begin with and feel a "do something awesome but consume stamina" action is really just part of the standard warrior portfolio.
Stamina as universal mechanic in class based games
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OgreBattle
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Stamina as universal mechanic in class based games
Last edited by OgreBattle on Fri Jun 22, 2018 5:45 am, edited 1 time in total.
Using your characters attributes to engage with the setting is good.
Fiddly accounting is bad.
Thus, unless every idiom involves exertion - in which case, by the way, it likely involves dramatically exerting yourself again in times of crisis and thus may not be best represented mechanically by expending a single fatigue token - adding fatigue rules just for the sake of having everyone use the fatigue mechanic is bad.
Resource management mechanics in general are a good idea only in so far as they support storytelling in an idiom or create interesting tactical choices for the characters in the (typically combat) minigame.
Fiddly accounting is bad.
Thus, unless every idiom involves exertion - in which case, by the way, it likely involves dramatically exerting yourself again in times of crisis and thus may not be best represented mechanically by expending a single fatigue token - adding fatigue rules just for the sake of having everyone use the fatigue mechanic is bad.
Resource management mechanics in general are a good idea only in so far as they support storytelling in an idiom or create interesting tactical choices for the characters in the (typically combat) minigame.
Chaosium rules are made of unicorn pubic hair and cancer. --AncientH
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
When you talk, all I can hear is "DunningKruger" over and over again like you were a god damn Pokemon. --Username17
Fuck off with the pony murder shit. --Grek
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Thaluikhain
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I don't see it being super fiddly, it doesn't seem very difficult to bother tracking.
The problem I do see with it narratively, is that it reinforces the idea of the 15 minute adventuring day.
If everyone feels they need to use these action and second wind points every other encounter, they're going to want to find a way to rest to recover them. Afterall, they're essential. If the party never needs to use these action and second wind points, then the system is just another fiddly thing people avoid interacting with.
In addition to that, it seems odd there's only 1 point involved before needing to rest. Lets say a combat lasted 4 turns and the warrior swung his sword 5 times because he used his SW to gain an extra attack. But if the combat had lasted 5 turns he wouldn't need the short rest to recover the effort put into that 5th attack. Regarding the casters... so I gain one extra channel or empower one spell... but now I can't cast any other high level spells or I'm limiting then umber of spells I can cast for that one boost which may have ended combat a turn earlier but wouldn't have been an issue if I hadn't bothered.
The only way to really counter that is to make sure that extending the combat beyond a handful of rounds isn't a very good option for players, but in terms of the actual length of time spent in combat it's usually pretty short already anyway. If you made everything interact with this exhaustion mechanic and gave more than one point to represent that(the warrior swung his sword 6 times regardless of how many turns of combat and is now tired), that screams of being incredibly fiddly without a computer handling it for you and the players, and annoying from a player perspective.
Now if this system represented the exhaustion from a few hours of hiking through a forest and the party having to deal with being tired when they get ambushed after they've made camp and not properly setup a watch, that could be interesting.
The problem I do see with it narratively, is that it reinforces the idea of the 15 minute adventuring day.
If everyone feels they need to use these action and second wind points every other encounter, they're going to want to find a way to rest to recover them. Afterall, they're essential. If the party never needs to use these action and second wind points, then the system is just another fiddly thing people avoid interacting with.
In addition to that, it seems odd there's only 1 point involved before needing to rest. Lets say a combat lasted 4 turns and the warrior swung his sword 5 times because he used his SW to gain an extra attack. But if the combat had lasted 5 turns he wouldn't need the short rest to recover the effort put into that 5th attack. Regarding the casters... so I gain one extra channel or empower one spell... but now I can't cast any other high level spells or I'm limiting then umber of spells I can cast for that one boost which may have ended combat a turn earlier but wouldn't have been an issue if I hadn't bothered.
The only way to really counter that is to make sure that extending the combat beyond a handful of rounds isn't a very good option for players, but in terms of the actual length of time spent in combat it's usually pretty short already anyway. If you made everything interact with this exhaustion mechanic and gave more than one point to represent that(the warrior swung his sword 6 times regardless of how many turns of combat and is now tired), that screams of being incredibly fiddly without a computer handling it for you and the players, and annoying from a player perspective.
Now if this system represented the exhaustion from a few hours of hiking through a forest and the party having to deal with being tired when they get ambushed after they've made camp and not properly setup a watch, that could be interesting.
I don't consider the 15 minute workday to be a problem with this paradigm. The 15 minute workday is an existing problem for which some solutions exist, with various trade-offs. If you aren't applying any of those solutions, then the 15-minute workday is going to be a big problem and this addition will not make it significantly bigger. If you are applying one or more of those solutions, then this addition will not undermine any of them.
Sure, it doesn't make the 15 minute adventuring day worse. I agree that there are plenty of other mechanics that already create that problem and this specifically doesn't. However, adding mechanics that reinforce the issue means more things to eventually remove or change if enough people decide they're finally tired of that.Chamomile wrote:I don't consider the 15 minute workday to be a problem with this paradigm. The 15 minute workday is an existing problem for which some solutions exist, with various trade-offs. If you aren't applying any of those solutions, then the 15-minute workday is going to be a big problem and this addition will not make it significantly bigger. If you are applying one or more of those solutions, then this addition will not undermine any of them.
I see it as a step in keeping the status quo, which is not the direction I'd like to see things go overall.
One difficulty is that stamina is a time-based mechanism and the time you have to work with on a tabletop is not very granular. A videogame can give every player its unbroken focus at once, measure in frames per second realtime, and go on for hours of turns or make five minute an eternity. Tabletop is comparatively constrained.
Let's suppose our nominal position is a three-round fight with one big nova somewhere in there and that we want the player to think about when they're going to use it. We would call this a success if this is a serious choice and they don't run the same script every time.
Some questions we can ask the player: Are you in a position to critically hamper the enemies for the rest of the fight? Do you think the fight is going to go into overtime and want to make an asset that will last for all those turns? Did you spend some time positioning or preserving/running up your meter and end up in a place where you can clean up or suddenly end the confrontation? Do you need to outlast an enemy's up-period and get your jabs in during overtime? Do you need to try and get in kicks on a critical enemy right away to make sure they don't spend their nova?
You can easily stovepipe everyone's powers so that their bigger ones are from a different pool and they simply get one per fight, but I think even with the constraints, a stamina-point system with cross-class appeal is not out of reach. At a glance, you could say:
-Fighters assume stances that give them a choice of free simple maneuvers plus complicated ones that take a bunch of stamina points. They can switch stances for a smaller stamina expenditure.
-Rogues have tricks that require stamina points to use, but they can also use them for free if they fulfill a particular status requirement. They also have tricks that let them reposition and set up the conditionally-free tricks.
-Berserkers pay stamina to rage but then get back a little more than that; they can use the profit each turn or save it up for a particularly devastating strike. They can use a big move sooner if they're okay with being put below the threshold to continue the rage.
-Wizards show up with a handful of preselected spells. Some of them are really powerful but can only be used with a lot of stamina, so one shouldn't prepare too many of those. Stamina can invoke metamagic on the less extraordinary spells or permit unprepared casting.
-Acolytes can straight-up waste an action entirely to pray, whereupon they're hit with a headbashing buff and small pool of spells from their Winds of Fate deck. The spells are exhausting but they get back stamina whenever they focus.
-Necromancers show up with a bunch of stamina already invested in shambling corpses. He can energize or detonate them, or recall the stamina invested in them and spend them on hexes.
-Artificers move stamina points freely through their network of magic items to enable and operate them. If they choose to give up flexibility to lock their points into something for the rest of the fight, then that thing gets a bigger ability.
-Psions have a minute stamina cost on their individual actions, but they enjoy taking extras; either they invest in an extrapersonal entity that fucks things up on its own accord, or they employ a mind-schism or broken causality to use their smaller powers at double-speed.
Let's suppose our nominal position is a three-round fight with one big nova somewhere in there and that we want the player to think about when they're going to use it. We would call this a success if this is a serious choice and they don't run the same script every time.
Some questions we can ask the player: Are you in a position to critically hamper the enemies for the rest of the fight? Do you think the fight is going to go into overtime and want to make an asset that will last for all those turns? Did you spend some time positioning or preserving/running up your meter and end up in a place where you can clean up or suddenly end the confrontation? Do you need to outlast an enemy's up-period and get your jabs in during overtime? Do you need to try and get in kicks on a critical enemy right away to make sure they don't spend their nova?
You can easily stovepipe everyone's powers so that their bigger ones are from a different pool and they simply get one per fight, but I think even with the constraints, a stamina-point system with cross-class appeal is not out of reach. At a glance, you could say:
-Fighters assume stances that give them a choice of free simple maneuvers plus complicated ones that take a bunch of stamina points. They can switch stances for a smaller stamina expenditure.
-Rogues have tricks that require stamina points to use, but they can also use them for free if they fulfill a particular status requirement. They also have tricks that let them reposition and set up the conditionally-free tricks.
-Berserkers pay stamina to rage but then get back a little more than that; they can use the profit each turn or save it up for a particularly devastating strike. They can use a big move sooner if they're okay with being put below the threshold to continue the rage.
-Wizards show up with a handful of preselected spells. Some of them are really powerful but can only be used with a lot of stamina, so one shouldn't prepare too many of those. Stamina can invoke metamagic on the less extraordinary spells or permit unprepared casting.
-Acolytes can straight-up waste an action entirely to pray, whereupon they're hit with a headbashing buff and small pool of spells from their Winds of Fate deck. The spells are exhausting but they get back stamina whenever they focus.
-Necromancers show up with a bunch of stamina already invested in shambling corpses. He can energize or detonate them, or recall the stamina invested in them and spend them on hexes.
-Artificers move stamina points freely through their network of magic items to enable and operate them. If they choose to give up flexibility to lock their points into something for the rest of the fight, then that thing gets a bigger ability.
-Psions have a minute stamina cost on their individual actions, but they enjoy taking extras; either they invest in an extrapersonal entity that fucks things up on its own accord, or they employ a mind-schism or broken causality to use their smaller powers at double-speed.
This signature is here just so you don't otherwise mistake the last sentence of my post for one.
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JonSetanta
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HP damage should be stamina.
More HP, longer times between rests.
And I agree about the "everyone needs a short rest thing", but it means something else for spells. Spells are powerful. You'd have to reduce the number of spells known and/or slots for all caster classes.
More HP, longer times between rests.
And I agree about the "everyone needs a short rest thing", but it means something else for spells. Spells are powerful. You'd have to reduce the number of spells known and/or slots for all caster classes.
The Adventurer's Almanac wrote: ↑Fri Oct 01, 2021 10:25 pmNobody gives a flying fuck about Tordek and Regdar.
Stamina is one resource mechanic, but there are others that produce different ways for different players to interact with the game and meaningfully different outcomes. The only reason I can imagine you would want to limit yourself by putting all characters on the same mechanic is if you were trying to support open multiclassing.
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Foxwarrior
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Um. OK. I do endurance training on mountain bikes, for 12-hour races.
So, physically, what are you doing? The things that make sense to me.
Fights: Oxygen debt, like a sprint, everyone can train to go longer than the fight is, and recovery is literally just breathing. You can do this twenty times over a day, way more than there is fights, and you can't really do it long enough to do much harm to yourself.
Everything else: don't work so hard as to tax yourself. Like, the difference between a day job and an event isn't that much, cycle tourists aren't hugely slower than solo time trial cyclists, seen the bastards turn up and place at events and then just carry on touring because it wasn't even hard when it's your day job.
Even in an event you don't really push yourself as hard as you do in training, because you don't want the associated performance drop. In training you seek out that drop because that's how it gets further away, but it makes no sense to push that button in a deathtrap dungeon, as it were.
If you mean, like, what happens if they do a 10k run in a dungeon, and it's like optimal event speed because uh, reasons, well, they need to stop and eat, or they'll slower after that for the next one, but not all that much slower. It'll "hurt", but eh, you get used to that, and if there's a dragon chasing you, yeah, it'll hurt and you probably won't even notice.
The thing is, there's nothing your body really does in a ten minute rest that is a thing, if anything stopping physical activity for ten minutes just makes you go slower. Unless you needed to stop for a feed, or a poop, so there's plenty of abstract reasons to put short rests in an RPG, it just doesn't do much endurance wise. Rests are measured in days (every week), weeks (every season), and months (every few years).
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You can accidentally sprint, running a bit fast and ending up in oxygen debt is totally a thing everyone does, but if you're not doing that, and you eat, and you have salt and water, human beings can run for days. We are zombies, you will wear through multiple pairs of shoes before you need to stop for sleep, and with an hour or two of sleep every few days and input of the correct vitamins you can just keep going as long as your fat reserves hold up.
Other animals get hot, they literally cook themselves with prolonged exercise, an hour can easily kill them. Humans sweat, so we don't, and the next limit is getting too skinny, which takes weeks.
Sure you can burn about as much body fat in a day of exercise as you can put on in a week of eating, but you know, that's probably not what you mean by recovery.
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And from a game perspective, dropping all your encounter powers and then having to spend the rest of the fight using at-will stuff is fucking terrible.
Like, don't do that. It's bad. Works better the other way, where using enough at-will stuff lets you use special encounter powers, and a few of them lets you do the daily finishing move, but eh, it's still a bit five moves of doom.
: that is what actual work feels like. All day. You work for a bit, get "tired", and then just keep working. It doesn't actually slow you down.I fight/cast so hard I get tired
So, physically, what are you doing? The things that make sense to me.
Fights: Oxygen debt, like a sprint, everyone can train to go longer than the fight is, and recovery is literally just breathing. You can do this twenty times over a day, way more than there is fights, and you can't really do it long enough to do much harm to yourself.
Everything else: don't work so hard as to tax yourself. Like, the difference between a day job and an event isn't that much, cycle tourists aren't hugely slower than solo time trial cyclists, seen the bastards turn up and place at events and then just carry on touring because it wasn't even hard when it's your day job.
Even in an event you don't really push yourself as hard as you do in training, because you don't want the associated performance drop. In training you seek out that drop because that's how it gets further away, but it makes no sense to push that button in a deathtrap dungeon, as it were.
If you mean, like, what happens if they do a 10k run in a dungeon, and it's like optimal event speed because uh, reasons, well, they need to stop and eat, or they'll slower after that for the next one, but not all that much slower. It'll "hurt", but eh, you get used to that, and if there's a dragon chasing you, yeah, it'll hurt and you probably won't even notice.
The thing is, there's nothing your body really does in a ten minute rest that is a thing, if anything stopping physical activity for ten minutes just makes you go slower. Unless you needed to stop for a feed, or a poop, so there's plenty of abstract reasons to put short rests in an RPG, it just doesn't do much endurance wise. Rests are measured in days (every week), weeks (every season), and months (every few years).
--
You can accidentally sprint, running a bit fast and ending up in oxygen debt is totally a thing everyone does, but if you're not doing that, and you eat, and you have salt and water, human beings can run for days. We are zombies, you will wear through multiple pairs of shoes before you need to stop for sleep, and with an hour or two of sleep every few days and input of the correct vitamins you can just keep going as long as your fat reserves hold up.
Other animals get hot, they literally cook themselves with prolonged exercise, an hour can easily kill them. Humans sweat, so we don't, and the next limit is getting too skinny, which takes weeks.
Sure you can burn about as much body fat in a day of exercise as you can put on in a week of eating, but you know, that's probably not what you mean by recovery.
--
And from a game perspective, dropping all your encounter powers and then having to spend the rest of the fight using at-will stuff is fucking terrible.
Like, don't do that. It's bad. Works better the other way, where using enough at-will stuff lets you use special encounter powers, and a few of them lets you do the daily finishing move, but eh, it's still a bit five moves of doom.
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