I feel like D&D really needed some sort of generic endurance mechanic which these various abilities could draw from, like you gain 8 fatigue or something and can use Quicken Spell without the level adjustment. Psionic characters can actually do this with power points/expending focus, but it's something that you really want to work in at the basic mechanics of the game - you don't want twelve different flavors of resources (fuck Pathfinder and its Ki points pool or whatever).
So what should a universal "do stuff and get tired" mechanic in D&D look like?
Something tied to the CON stat, FORT, hit points?
Tying it to CON or hit points would be interesting. But there are basically two variations you're looking at: counting up and counting down.
Counting down means you wake up in the morning with X stamina, and as you do things throughout the day that draw on that core of strength or power, that pool of X diminishes. Having various abilities all draw on stamina gives a degree of versatility: the issue isn't necessarily how many abilities you have, but the opportunity cost of using a high-cost power once versus using a lower-cost power multiple times. It also means you have a single centralized mechanic that can be affected by different abilities that increase or decrease the stamina pool, affect how much stamina you can spend in a round, etc. Stamina would recover after a period of rest, like healing but much faster.
One of the side-effects would be that if you have multiple abilities drawing on stamina but stamina doesn't increase regularly with levels, you may end up having a lot of options but relatively few good ones. If you're a drow monk, for example, and your race's natural spell-like abilities draw on the same pool of points that your stunning fist uses per day, you're probably not going to use your spell-like abilities very often because you want to be able to hit things later. This would discourage some of the odder gish-class characters that combine multiple resource mechanics - Bard/Barbarians, for example, are a bit more limited if raging once a day means they can't sing as much, and vice versa - but that sort of assumes you have classes that are mechanically similar except for the stamina mechanic, which might not be the case.
Counting up means that fatigue accumulates as you do things, and you get penalties that accrue once the fatigue goes over a certain limit, like -1 for every point over your level, or -1 for every 10 points, depending on what your fatigue schedule is. Counting up requires more bookkeeping - with counting down, you can give every player a bunch of M&Ms and they get to eat them as they use up their stamina. Can't do that with fatigue, since you have no idea how hard the PCs are going to push themselves. This can leader to longer effective recovery times if high-level spells and powers have really big fatigue costs, so that the characters that use them are feeling the effects days later...which is interesting in and of itself.
An alternate schedule is the Drain Test - that's basically what Shadowrun did; you make a Fort save against the Stamina/Fatigue and if you pass you only lose/gain half of it, maybe none of it with the right feat or class ability. Tying it to Fort save encourages multiclassing with classes with a high Fort save and races with a high CON/Fort Save.
You could, like Shadowrun, also combine the idea with Casting from Hitpoints - although this gets a little weird in D&D, because you have a lot more hit points to deal with and lots of magical healing. Given that wizards/sorcerers tend to have low hp, this encourages multiclassing with fighters and barbarians who have relatively high hit dice.
Execution counts for a lot, and depends on a lot. If spells and maneuvers cost stamina/fatigue to cast, for example, that means wizards and warriors are drawing out of the same pool - and if you have linear warriors/quadratic wizards but the wizard's costs are increasing quadratically but their resources are increasing linearly, that can substantially change the balance of the game a bit. It still lets wizards taste Real Cosmic Power(TM), but... well, a 1st-level wizard casts Melf's acid arrow and then has to go lie down for a while, and a 10th-level wizard casts Meteor Swarm and then have to go lie down for a while.
Stamina isn't a universal fix, is what I'm saying, but it opens up some interesting possibilities. Because whenever you introduce a new ability, you don't need an entirely original mechanic which is never going to be referenced anywhere else - it just has a stamina cost.
Are you envisioning this as being the main resource mechanic, or as a way to power minor abilities, riders, etc.? In the latter case, I think you'd want something closer to psionic focus; a single point or small pool that you spend a point at a time, replenished trivially between combats or somewhat expensively in combat (swift action to regain a point of stamina?).
You get 4/day of your best things and 8/day less impressive things. You recover these by doing a class-specific action when you make camp, and the class entry actually says what that is. If you don't like those numbers pick some others. If you want it to go up with level, make a table based on character level. edit: Or if you want to make it really D&D-y, make it your highest ability mod and the sum of your highest two ability mods, maybe even force people to pick up a class feature that lets them use a specific ability mod for this.
Anything smaller is limited via the action economy (make it take multiple actions across turns if you have to) instead, because tracking large amounts of small resources is annoying. If you want to make lots of use of bankable multi-turn actions, like the martial adepts (they recover then use maneuvers), then you'll also need to introduce a cap on how many of those can be prepared at once.
The wizard gets 4/day of their highest level spell (or lower) and 8/day of their second highest (or lower). They recover by checking their notes and preparing the set of spells they'll use over the day; this preparation is when they actually use their daily resources. They can cast their fourth highest level of spells or lower for free using a full round action, and the game doesn't have spells like Nerveskitter that would break this. The sorcerer is similar but with a smaller known list and spontaneous casting; they might also have some other disadvantage in exchange for getting to spam low-level spells sooner and with quicker actions.
The barbarian can rage 4/day from the start. They pick up a variety of feats of impossible strength and agility as they level up, which they use however they want from the 8/day pool, and some of these become free as they become less impressive. They recover their abilities by sharpening their weapons, properly stretching, drinking themselves into a coma, and passing out for at least four hours.
Last edited by jt on Sun Dec 09, 2018 10:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
Modern combat rounds are six seconds. Oxygen debt from high effort won't hit for something like 40 rounds, heart rate can't keep up eventually and starves the brain of Oxygen, you fall down. You might sprint, max effort, but that makes you fall over after 2 rounds, brain runs out of O2 massively quicker, different reason, not enough time for the blood to circulate. There's not a lot of in between.
If anything, you want some sort of ... encounter power limit to represent max effort. But those are bad for the game, so maybe just don't. Unless it's like, a thing you can spend instead of dying, those can be good.
Like if 4e's second wind was triggered by dropping below 1 hp, and also gave you back all your encounter powers. But was only usable daily. Adrenal dump, "fuck, that hurt".
Depends on your system as to how you attach that sort of idea. In 3e, something like a little Rage and speed boost for a few rounds maybe, 1/day heal and go, triggered by what would have killed you otherwise, maybe an extra standard action for a round.
Otherwise, if you have food, you'll be fine. It hurts more later in the day, but as long as you haven't pushed your heart too hard early, and keep your salts up, humans can just go for days. Takes about four days before you even need to sleep, or rather before the hallucinations and double vision gets dangerous. But we're Zombies, everything else overheats and dies, poor horses.
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I reject the entire premise of this thread. The purpose of resource management systems is to break up the monotony of players using the same abilities over and over again. Endurance calculations such as spell points or endurance batteries often fail to do that. In most cases, players will attempt to figure out the most efficient way to spend their mana, and very frequently that won't substantially change over the course of a single fight. If the best use of mana for this battle is Firaga 2 this round, it's probably Firaga 2 next round, and the round after that.
Frequently spell point systems devolve into players figuring out the most powerful spell they can use every round of a projected battle and then using that spell every round. While 4e's pile of encounter powers results in the "five moves of doom" where you spam the same order of actions every round, many spell point systems simply have "one move of doom" endpoints, at which point you might as well not have a resource management system at all.
There's room for lots of different resource systems in D&D. Players have different likes and dislikes. But Spell Points is certainly one of the ones I'd approach more cautiously than most - because it's so easy to devolve into move spam.
One of the SEGA Streets of Rage games has superpowers (close combat though) that drain HP every time you use them.
It's a real bane though since when you're down to the line against a boss you need every last drop of HP but you also need to finish them quickly before they pull some big whopper of an attack on you.
Then you die.
So you just die faster when you use your specials.
FrankTrollman wrote:Frequently spell point systems devolve into players figuring out the most powerful spell they can use every round of a projected battle and then using that spell every round. While 4e's pile of encounter powers results in the "five moves of doom" where you spam the same order of actions every round, many spell point systems simply have "one move of doom" endpoints, at which point you might as well not have a resource management system at all.
Maybe each subsequent use of the same power in a round costs progressively more MP?
The first Firaga 2 costs 10 Mp, the next one costs 50% more and so on an so forth.
So the first round you open with Firaga on the mummies and you deal 50% more damage because of their weakness. On the second round you either cast Firaga again for more MP and more damage or you drop to Firaga 1, or change to Blizzara or whatever.
And after 5 minutes or something all of these extra costs revert to normal.
Fatigue being a thing you GAIN rather than Stamina being a thing to SPEND seems easier to slot into an existing system, but it'll still take a lot of fine tuning.
The Shadowrun drain test translates to D&D as a fort save or hit point damage... but that also requires a balancing of hp and FORT for this sort of thing which I don't know how much work it'd be and I imagine gets quadratically screwy with higher levels.
You can still have a memorization mechanic for what spells are available to you. You can still have slots as 'buffer before you take hit point damage'. Say a wizard can cast lower level spells without problem but accessing the highest level forces a fort sv. If they fail then they have a fatigued condition until a short rest. So you could nuke with your best spells and risk fatigue or save it up for a finishing move.
Thinking of other untested ideas...If you're using a bloodied condition then being fatigued sets you at 50%hp+1 if you had more HP. That would really drive the idea that "hp isn't literal wounds but also stamina and stuff".
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Now I'm thinking... even beyond hit boxes, "wounds are a thing you accumulate and then you make a save to see if you take another wound or die"
Last edited by OgreBattle on Mon Dec 10, 2018 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
FrankTrollman wrote:The purpose of resource management systems is to break up the monotony of players using the same abilities over and over again.
That's at best partially true. Another useful and orthogonal purpose is to limit the number of tasks you can accomplish in a given timeframe. This ensures that a cycle of "venture into dangerous area, do things, retreat to safe spot, rest" is established.
Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ's blood in the firmament.
rasmuswagner wrote:"Do accounting to see when you can have less fun" is a common failure mode of fatigue systems.
I don't think that's NECESSARILY how it has to work. We are talking about an optimization problem that makes it so spamming your best attack isn't the only consideration. Rather than '1/day, per encounter, at will', it is possible to have something cost 4 points, 3 points, 2 points and 1 point. Assuming that those points are balanced in some way, you could choose whether to do the most expensive thing twice, or each thing once, etc. If there is NO cost, presumably doing the action that would cost 4 points would always be optimal.
For quite a few players, having meaningful choices during play is a huge part of the appeal - having unlimited 'MOST AWESOME' attacks would get repetitive and boring. Unfortunately, many RPGs have a single set of optimal actions (or a single sequence of optimal actions) and thing can get repetitive. Creating a situation where disarming an opponent is sometimes better than stabbing them in the face turns out to be really hard.
Last edited by deaddmwalking on Mon Dec 10, 2018 10:53 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Another reason to have a fatigue system: "Jon fought a dragon, then he fought an even bigger dragon, then he fought a yet still bigger dragon" is less interesting than "Jon fought a dragon, then tired from this he fought an even bigger dragon, then utterly exhausted from this, he fought a yet still bigger dragon."
It's standard storytelling to have both external and internal conflict, and "being tired" is the most boring, but also most universally applicable, version of an internal conflict.
And it links your encounters together. Without a fatigue system of some sort, it doesn't really matter whether you did these things on the same day or not. Every encounter lives in a bubble where it doesn't affect the others.
If that's the case, then just mark a tally at the end of every one of your turns in combat. Every 5th round get a stacking -1 fatigue penalty to every d20 roll you make. When you rest for 8 hours, erase all the tallys and the penalty becomes -0 till the 5th round of combat for the day.
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shadzar wrote:those training harder get more, and training less, don't get the more.
Lokathor wrote:Anything worth sniffing can't be sniffed
D&D does "is tired by fights" trivially by removing unlimited healing between fights. Eventually someone is tired because there is not enough healing for everyone. Falling from high cliffs onto sharp rocks is quite tiring even for great heroes.
But fatigue gets to be fun when something good happens as a result of fatigue, and you can't have that different to hit points or people will deliberately do shit to be fatigued all the time.
Serious, just fatigue is hp loss, and maybe heavy armour in the heat is a little damage, once, to help represent that. But when you're low on hp, you're "fatigued", so you get some nice bonuses and maybe tell a cool story about what you did with your last gasp effort.
But having people get tired and run out of good things to do while the fight is still happening, or anything where you do less damage over time, that's low level 4th edition, and most people just hate that. Go the other way, more damage over time, 13th Age.
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Action Points that you use to do an extra action, reroll, enhance a roll, are functionally kinda like a stamina/fatigue system where if you have them you can do more and when you run out you'll be more vulnerable, take more caution, or just retire from the dungeon for the day.
Action points can also be an additional cost to the strongest abilities, like the highest slotted spell for a wizard.
To solve the "spam best power" problem with a stamina system, would introducing a stamina reduction attribute be useful?
example:
A PC would have stamina reduction 3 and 15 stamina points.
If a low level power costs 4 stamina, the above PC would only pay 1 stamina point to activate the power. On the other hand if a high level power costs 10 stamina, the above PC would pay 7 stamina points for its activation.
Which means a best power is no longer a very simple matter to calculate.
Making the best power calculation harder to do doesn't mean it lacks a unique universal solution.
That is, making the rules harder to understand does not improve game balance - balance between competing tactical options, in this case, but this applies more generally.
The issue with fatigue in games like Runequest (https://forum.rpg.net/index.php?threads ... es.772737/) or Shadowrun for that matter, is that it was never really a resource management or game balance scheme. If there was a meaningful intent behind it, it was "simulationist"; that is, we feel that these things should make you tired so we want to have rules for it.
In most editions of Shadowrun, having even a single box filled was such a big penalty that drain was essentially a self-destruct button for casters. You could give a D&D Barbarian a "rage strike" where after doing it, you had to pass some Fortitude save or be out for 2 rounds, something like that. Risk of being knocked out of the fight is a legitimate resource management scheme but the response is going to be - as in Shadowrun - to charop your way out of it if at all possible. So Shadowrun magicians across most editions simply acquired whatever bonuses they could get their hands on and then chose spells that were unlikely to hit them with any drain.
If you can't charop your way out of some risk of being woogled by your own maneuver, then you'll save it until later in the fight (doing other maneuvers first, right) or whatever and that becomes a resource scheme. You run into the contrary risk that people will simply decide the special move isn't worth it, as is the case with high-drain spells in Shadowrun generally.
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If you want to avoid having a universal best ability for a character, you'd need narrower powers.
Power X might cost half as much to use as power Y, and does the same amount of damage, but does that damage as a very commonly-resisted power. Do you buy Power Y and use it always and then grab some weird utility powers you might use once each, or a bunch of power X-like things to use in combat against different resistances? Each situation still has a solution, but your character might not have the correct response for every situation. Maybe some abilities function better if you've done another ability first, or do small amounts of ongoing damage for longer fights, or are otherwise useful depending on the situation.
I also like the idea of Earthdawn's illusionist spells Ephermal Bolt and True Ephermal Bolt. Ephermal Bolt can be disbelieved if the opponent know/guesses you're casting an illusion, giving them a bonus on resisting it. True Ephermal Bolt applies a penalty to their resists if they try to disbelieve that one. Spamming either one is worse than changing it up. It probably devolves into an annoying guessing game, or arguments about the opponent not being smart enough to be allowed to guess or whatever, but the idea is there.
