The Gaming Den

Has anyone tried to hack out a new system for attrition and exhaustion of abilities other than the daily/encounter/at-will or previous 'spells/manuevers per day' model? Is there any practical way to use 'fatigue' as a sort of mana pool representing physical potential either on a per-encounter or per-day or even ongoing basis?

What I'm doing is tying magic more closely to physical exhaustion. Two reasons.

First, I want my system to allow greater cross-class or even non-class based ability selection, but in order to prevent a multitude of arcane elemental barbarian ninjas, there has to be some sort of cap on ability usage that preserves level as the most significant divider in terms of relative power and potential. So, fatigue pools.

Second, I admit in writing these rules I have a certain type of setting in mind, which is one where 'high magic' exists but can only be used with deadly consequences. So I want spellcasting to actually be physically punishing and draining to push things somewhat to the 'low magic' direction where you can't just casually toss fireballs around en masse.

And frankly, I don't want two separate pools for this stuff (spells/maneuvers). Even contemplating one is a pretty big can of worms to open, because it requires assigning 'cost' to virtually everything.

The other problem is trying to use it to handle routine situations like running, swimming, hanging onto a ledge for dear life, and subdual damage. While not entirely unrealistic, it seems like a frustrating game mechanic that you win a lengthy fight and are badly winded, only to drown while leaving the dungeon because you didn't have enough fatigue points or whatever left.

Every resource management system represents fatigue to some degree in one way or another. For example: in Shadowrun you suffer a randomly generated amount of fatigue damage when you cast a spell, and that damage causes you penalties to your actions. In WoD, you spend fixed numbers of power points, and when they are used up you suffer critical existence failure on your magic powers. In D&D, a Wizard pre-spends their power on a set of effects that they can then call upon later, and again when they are gone it's critical existence failure. In Mechwarrior, you accumulate points of "heat" when you use your weapons, and you get to lose a certain number of points each round - if the total ever rises enough, you start taking damage. In Diablo, you have a pool of mana and every ability use drains a fixed amount of it, if you don't have enough left you can't use the power (critical existence failure); and then you regain mana at a fixed rate over time.

And so on. Every system complicated enough to have a resource management system at all has a fatigue system of some kind. Whether your expenditures are charge based (like D&D) or numeric (like WoD), whether over-expending causes you permanent damage (like Mechwarrior) or just critical existence failure (like Diablo), whether your energy reserves fluctuate on a per-round or per day basis, whether you suffer penalties for draining your batteries, and so on and so forth are all valid choices. They change how the game works. And none of them are right or wrong in abstract.

-Username17

I suppose what I'm aiming for is more similar to Mechwarrior, then. I'd like to cap the ability use universally, but leave some room for extending/exerting oneself to do heroic things...with a price. I'm somewhat familiar with Mechwarrior but never actually played it beyond the computer games.

My hope is that I can preserve some semblance of order in how I rank cost for ability use in order to keep level advancement and ability/spell acquisition flowing somewhat logically. If I can limit the difference in costs, I can make it easier to remember and not pose an annoying bookkeeping burden on players as do they things.

I'm more concerned about enemies using this and slowing down the DM - it's a heck of a lot easier to use the fourth edition/miniatures game system where you can just do X once or twice per encounter, full stop. Maybe it won't be so bad, especially if mooks are just doing basic attacks or repeating the same one or two things over and over.

Hegemonic wrote:I suppose what I'm aiming for is more similar to Mechwarrior, then. I'd like to cap the ability use universally, but leave some room for extending/exerting oneself to do heroic things...with a price.

So, what are you looking for exactly? Something like extra daily/encounter actions than your normal alotment, but at some cost?

I guess the obvious cost could be HP damage and/or fatigue, but every time I see a system like this, there's usually some loop that the person didn't think about giving you unlimited extra actions. I don't know much about 4E, so I can't give any specific examples, but it would be akin to using fatigue/HP damage in 3.x only to have it totally mitigated by Lesser Restoration and Cure Light Wounds.

Seriously, there's a variant in Unearthed Arcana's spell points that tracks your SP by fatigue, but not only does losing SP make you fatigued, removing fatigue gives you SP! You can literally spend 3 SP on Lesser Restoration to gain a third of your SP back, so once you have 10+ SP, it's a free roll. They had another optional variant that would let you cast below 0 SP at the cost of taking lethal and nonlethal damage equal to the spell's level. So, let's think about this: a 1st level cleric casts himself below 0 SP at the cost of 1 HP and 1 nonlethal damage several times. He then casts Cure Light Wounds for 1 SP and heals an average of 5.5 HP and nonlethal damage. So, on average, he can mitigate five and a half castings with one spell that he spontaneously can cast anyways.


TL;DR: If you go the route of extra actions at a cost, you need to make sure you aren't handing out infinite action loops.

Has anyone tried to hack out a new system for attrition and exhaustion of abilities other than the daily/encounter/at-will or previous 'spells/manuevers per day' model?

HERO system endurance rules fit your criteria

• Everybody gets an END stat
• Everybody gets a RECovery stat
• Most* things you can do cost end (Running, using Str or melee weapons, using superpowers/spells)
• At the end of each 12-second turn, and whenever you are willing to lose an action (and turn your forcefield off) you heal back an amount of END equal to your REC
• When you do something that costs END, you have the option of spending more END to "push" and be more effective with it. (this represents an all-out sprint, or an adrenalin-boosted lift and the like. In superheroic games, characters are expected to do this a whole lot, in merely heroic games there are added restrictions on it)
• If you spend more END than you have, you take dice of STUN damage. Thus you can knock yourself out via strain and overexertion, and while players know when they are risking it the randomness of the dice prevents them from knowing precisely how far they can stretch their luck.
• If you getting knocked out, your END pool is reduced to zero - this simulates a character being a little woozy after a KO.
• For issues longer than combat, there are optional long-term End rules based on the ratio of End Burned per turn to REC stat. These are ignored most of the time, but they boil down to: the harder and longer you exert yourself, the less END you have left in any fight before you rest.

*There are exceptions and ways to build abilities that are on the uses/day or at-will models.

So basically, most abilities (including stuff like moving and swinging a sword as well as casting fireball) are paid for out of the same pool - this pool refreshes pretty continuously, but not as fast as it is depleted during combat. This leads to a system where folks can use most abilities a couple times during an encounter, but fatigue can render people unable to use any abilities after they nova until they can rest for an action or two. Usually the pool will fully refresh between encounters, save for cases where they are in very quick succession and/or the Long-Term-End option is being used.

I'm more concerned about enemies using this and slowing down the DM

And oh goodness, does tracking END turn into a bookkeeping nightmare if you are running like a 6-on-6 supervillan team vs superhero team fight in Champions. Seriously, one of the suggestions in the rulebook is for GMs to just flat-out ignore End for NPCs.

I found Star Wars d20 (mostly based on 3E, not SAGA) to handle "magic" in a pretty decent way. Using force dealt you damage (not a lot, but enough that you can burn away a quarter of your HP if you toss on 3 potent buffs in the first two rounds (there was a "quicken" ability that burned more hp to get off a second buff in a round).

I had "force heal" which could only be used once per minute and didn't heal too much.

Since most of the powers I used were either "Self buff to inflate your numbers at the cost of some hp" or "Impose a penalty to someone else with a roll" it worked out pretty well with hp damage being how you kept track.

HP damage just fails as a workable tracker when you have:
A) The ability to burn HP to heal HP back in combat
B) Effects that last longer than the hp damage by a margin you care about.

That said, I've always been fond of "at will" mechanics that have optional "Fuck you, I'm going to die next round anyways so am going to take some big penalty to make my last stand" option.

RobbyPants wrote:

Hegemonic wrote:I suppose what I'm aiming for is more similar to Mechwarrior, then. I'd like to cap the ability use universally, but leave some room for extending/exerting oneself to do heroic things...with a price.

So, what are you looking for exactly? Something like extra daily/encounter actions than your normal alotment, but at some cost?

I guess the obvious cost could be HP damage and/or fatigue, but every time I see a system like this, there's usually some loop that the person didn't think about giving you unlimited extra actions. I don't know much about 4E, so I can't give any specific examples, but it would be akin to using fatigue/HP damage in 3.x only to have it totally mitigated by Lesser Restoration and Cure Light Wounds.

Seriously, there's a variant in Unearthed Arcana's spell points that tracks your SP by fatigue, but not only does losing SP make you fatigued, removing fatigue gives you SP! You can literally spend 3 SP on Lesser Restoration to gain a third of your SP back, so once you have 10+ SP, it's a free roll. They had another optional variant that would let you cast below 0 SP at the cost of taking lethal and nonlethal damage equal to the spell's level. So, let's think about this: a 1st level cleric casts himself below 0 SP at the cost of 1 HP and 1 nonlethal damage several times. He then casts Cure Light Wounds for 1 SP and heals an average of 5.5 HP and nonlethal damage. So, on average, he can mitigate five and a half castings with one spell that he spontaneously can cast anyways.


TL;DR: If you go the route of extra actions at a cost, you need to make sure you aren't handing out infinite action loops.

Absolutley, that's a major concern. Doing this requires reworking a lot of things. I don't want Fantastic Free-Action Fatigue Potions turning combat into a Diablo-esque nukefest, and even though I want abilities that restore fatigue to self/party or allow you to swap HP for fatigue, I will need to find a way to stop feedback loops. That is not the MAIN focus of the system, it is simply a feature - I'd like to have mages paying in blood to cast certain spells, and berserkers raging themselves to death's door for damage bonuses, but primarily I want to rework the attrition system into a more dynamic daily pool.

I will probably do two things: First, fatigue restoration in combat will be severely limited. Second, any exchange of HP for fatigue will be A) again, severely limited in use and B) depend on spending feats/training on an ability to do so. I may keep second wind and simply adjust it to be a fatigue ability and restore a fraction (1/4? 1/3?) of one's fatigue once per day as an action usable by anyone. Or perhaps I'll make that covered by action points, if I decide to keep that.

I am trying, in as simple a way as possible, to make the way powers are used less stratified and more dynamic. There are about eight billion problems with this, this is just my first attempt.

Other problems: Abilities like daily abilities, chained together repetitively, may be gamebreaking in many situations. For instance, an ability equivalent to the 4E PHB2 'Turathi Highborn' daily power 'Thrall of Turath', allowing you to significantly damage an opponent, plus ongoing damage, plus domination - that's a bit much even if using it three times means you can't do anything else. This means coming up with the fatigue cost for abilities is going to be complex and necessitate being based on the effects included rather than just the level of the ability, OR making abilities of the same level similar in their impact, which takes out the more fantastic abilities at lower levels.

Of those two, I'd lean towards finding a way to quantitatively measure each ability in terms of effects included, damage potential, etc. but it's going to be a lot of work and require writing an entire new system, not just a 'add on'.