View Single Post
Old 04-22-2017, 08:50 PM   #1
cupbearer
 
cupbearer's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Canada
Default Weariness as a narrative resource

Hi,

What if prolonged journeys far from home and a warm bed, as well as the day to day stress of facing danger and the elements of outdoors had the mechanical effect of slowly eroding the parties will-power and of producing weariness? In the Gurps Fantasy game i plan to run, much of the story is concentrated around journeys taken by a group of Questing adventurers, and in my search to make Weariness of being on the road a mechanical element of the game I came across "The One Ring rpg". This particular game was interesting to me because in their random encounters rules, in addition to telling you what monsters you might find on your journey, they also had mechanical effects for how high or low the characters spirits were... the characters could become tired, and eventually miserable and this made them weaker in a mechanical way. I wonder how we might be able to model weariness (in this case of the hard life of an adventurer) as a resource the players manage in GURPS terms?

Does anyone know of any stuff in RAW that might help with this? My idea is that i would want the characters to have a mechanical reason to not camp outside, and to want to order an ale, and sit by a fire, or to spend a winter in a city rather than head out into the cold tundra etc.... I know i can hit them with exposure rules and whatever else, but the truth is that people need a break sometimes, and i believe in this tale we are weaving together it is in genre to be weary of the quest itself...

In the absence of existing rules, why not read a variant i propose and let me know what you would add, or if you think it works at all?

Using Stress/derangement to model weariness as a resource:

Gurps horror has a cool stress mechanic that is supposed to simulate facing terrifying or otherworldy threats, but what if you adapted this to relate to other kinds of stress, such as not being in a warm bed, or travelling through dangerous woodland? Stress would work similiarily to the RAW, but instead of derangement there would be 'Misery' and if you got too much of this you would gain a depression based disadvantage, or lose Will, for instance. Perhaps it could be bought off with time, maybe using training rules to buy off points by doing tasks that weren't dangerous and were comfortable (in down time probably).

What do you think? Do you guys have a better way to do this, perhaps?

Oliver.
__________________
Oliver.

Last edited by cupbearer; 04-22-2017 at 09:09 PM.
cupbearer is offline   Reply With Quote