[Nightshade]

Originally Posted by Atgxtg

Not everyone's, but close enough. In the same light, ONE guy bought a copy of the RQ3 rules, and it helped immensely. A lot of the reasons why RQ was considered "tough to learn" and D&D was considered "easy" had to do with the fact that when we played AD&D everybody had their own rulebooks, but when we played RQ we all had to share one set.

Well, no wonder then. Other than one specific player who's been chronically poor over his whole life, we pretty much took it as a given that once you played in a game for any length of time you were going to have at least the basic rules.

Even the gritty ones usualy don't. The thing that probably needed the most bookkeeping was how much ammo people had left.

You can run into issues with the gritty ones because they sometimes shade into commando games, so how much gear people could haul in those situations sometimes mattered, especially if the characters were freelance or quasi-freelance and thus controlled their own equipment load-outs.

With the exception of specialized gear (it sucks to loose the watch with the built in gieger counter), the only time equipment and encumbrance factor in is when people get cut off somewhere in the wilderness.

That can come up quite a bit in the above games, though.

Okay. I would think that to some extent it would fit in with other peoples personal experience too. Even things like a fever or bad toothache have affected my stamina.

I wouldn't have argued regarding illness, but on the occasions when I've been injured, even in ongoing pain I didn't notice this problem (at least immediately; it can come up over time just because such things interfere with your ability to rest, but that's not an immediate effect). In fact, in my 20's, this sort of thing came up several times when I was hiking and would have thought I would have noticed it. But ancedotal evidence is the weakest kind, so...