[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

I think mostly becuase it is very, very easy. I'd say easier than most other fatigue systems. Probably not that useful, but easy.
IMO, fatigue isn't as big a deal as (over)encumberance.

You're correct of course; I just thought the round to round bookkeeping was more finicky than necessary, even if you did want to track fatigue. I suspect it was only done that way because it fit with the hit point and magic point models of RQ3.

I thought that too. Problem was, with a 5 minute duration, characters could cast spells before moving into position. For instance, tossing up some bladesharp and protection before sneaking up under silence. In play, the 2 minute/ten round thing was easier for us.

Why was that a problem? In those cases where you had warning, I don't see a little magical prep as being a big issue. At the lower end you still only had so many spells, and at the upper end most opponents who were worth your trouble could usually find ways to buy time to get their own spells up.

It's a solid method. A few games use fatigue levels, and that works out okay, too. Doing something strenuous requires a test, and the more strenuous the more difficult or often the test.

I probably wasn't clear but that was the RQ:AIG approach. Essentially, if you got into a situation where fatigue-significant rolls were liable to be made, you checked to see what the characters had been doing before, and made a fatigue check (or more than one if they'd been doing things like marching cross country for two days at an accellerated pace) and applied the fatigue levels then; they then made another check every ten rounds in combat. As I recall there were four or five different levels with different levels of penalty. Only thing wrong with it (and this was easily fixed) was that instead of applying as penalties to the base, they were applied as modifiers to the roll which made it quickly both impossible to get critical or special results and too easy to get fumbles. But shifting it to a modifier to skill made that go away.

I also liked the way the James Bond RPG handled it. You got so many minutes of activity, based on stats, and then you were exhausted and suppered a penalty (about 1/2) to rolls. In extreme cases (like in the outback on a hit day) exterion counted at a faster than normal rate.

I can see the benefit to that in simplicity, but I think its a little deterministic for my taste.

Not entirely. A wounded person should tire faster than a healthy one. So an

Yes, but I'm not sure the latter is really true; I'm not sure a tired person shocks out faster than a fresh one, or if so, to a significant degree.

injury penalty would seem appropriate. Likewise someone who is exhausted is more likely to pass out from an injury, and vice versa. The bit in all those

Do you actually have some evidence this is the case?