Fatigue, wounds, unconsciousness, and death in the new TFT

[zot]

In the new TFT, will fatigue from spell casting still cause death or will it cause unconsciousness?

Also, will characters still become unconscious at ST 1 and die at ST 0 or will the rules allow more "padding"?

[Nils_Lindeberg]

Or maybe just let fST be the padding. By keeping track of them separately and one turns into the other once the first runs out. Cast too many spells and your fatigue will turn into wounds as you go unconscious and if you take damage and go to zero you start losing the remaining fatigue you have.

If you want it more lethal then let the shift over go for 1 for 2. So if you take 12 hits when you only have ST 4 left, you take those 4, fall to 0 ST and take another 16 fatigue and probably die instantly. If you had 8 ST left you would have taken 8 fatigue after ST hit 0.

And if you want to keep track of it just use circles for regular wounds, and squares for fatigue and make one group per wound. And once you get heal you erase two or three of the circles and cross out the rest to show it is no a long term wound. And you can do that to all wounds. Once you get the hang of it, it works really well. But house ruling wise we only have a number for fatigue since we can't heal it. Just resting anyways.

[Shadekeep]

I always tracked fatigue separate from actual wounds. As a GM I wouldn't typically allow voluntarily losing fatigue to the point of death. If something did cause a massive loss of fatigue in one feel swoop and brought someone to the death point, I would game that as a heart attack or similar. There would be a chance to throw a save from it or get treatment, depending on the physicker sciences at hand, but that's pretty much the only time fatigue loss could be fatal in and of itself.

[JLV]

A simple set of colored tokens would allow tracking the stuff separately as well. Red is damage, blue is fatigue, for example...

I suggested a system my group from about 25 years ago used, which I'd more or less stolen from SPI's old War of the Ring game; squares, that you mark off with a front slash for fatigue, or an X for damage. If you are all out of empty squares, you fall unconscious, and any additional damage is just marked with a backslash in one of your "fatigue" squares which converts it to straight damage. It worked very well for us for a campaign that lasted almost four years.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by JLV

A simple set of colored tokens would allow tracking the stuff separately as well. Red is damage, blue is fatigue, for example...

I suggested a system my group from about 25 years ago used, which I'd more or less stolen from SPI's old War of the Ring game; squares, that you mark off with a front slash for fatigue, or an X for damage. If you are all out of empty squares, you fall unconscious, and any additional damage is just marked with a backslash in one of your "fatigue" squares which converts it to straight damage. It worked very well for us for a campaign that lasted almost four years.

I prefer the two tracks method...
two adjacent rows; Top is damage, marks left to right
bottom is fatigue, marks right to left. X's used on "unused boxes".

D: ⇒	☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒
F: ⇐	☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒

after 7 HP and 5 fatigue, it looks like

D: ⇒	☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒
F: ⇐	☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒

Another 5 fatigue

D: ⇒	☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☐☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒
F: ⇐	☐☐☐☐☐☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☑︎☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒☒

The overlap is clearly KO.

It can be done with forward and back slashes on one track, but that's harder to mark healing upon.

[Chris Rice]

I still feel that all this separate tracking of fatigue loss v wound loss sits uncomfortably with the simple elegance of the system. The concept didn't really exist in the original game Melee and came about later when Wizard was introduced.

As I've stated before, any form of ST loss before the score drops to 3, isn't really a "wound" as it has no lasting effect on the character. Sure, you can be knocked down, suffer a -2DX, pushed back etc, but those are only temporary effects and the character can act at full efficiency afterwards.

I think it's far simpler just to regard all hits before the ST score reaches 3 as fatigue/minor bumps and bruises, which can then be recovered from quickly between encounters.

However, I realise that I'm in a tiny minority (perhaps a minority of 1) on this, and the new rules will almost certainly stay pretty much as they were, so there will need to be some way to separately track fatigue ST loss v wound ST loss.

To that end, a single track is simplest, with a slash for fatigue and a cross for wounds. I still don't like it, but it's probably the best that can be done given that the system wasn't really designed for different types of ST loss.

[Skarg]

We tried using track boxes for a while. Different people tried different systems. It's kind of fun that you get a visual.

Maybe I'm just peculiarly good at math, and/or maybe playing and GM'ing TFT for years made me especially good at small-number arithmetic, but to me it seems quite easy to note wounds and fatigue:

-1 -3 (a 1-point scratch and a 3-point wound)
-2F (two points of fatigue)

Writing -3 is to me just as easy and clear as ticking three boxes, and writing -7 is easier than ticking 7 boxes. To me it's also at least as visually obvious that that's 6 total points, as looking at 6 ticked boxes.

I even have no problem with doing more complex notes for the wound systems I use for GURPS:

-2 A (a 2-point wound with an arrow still stuck in it)
-4 cr L arm (a -4 crushing wound to the left arm)
-2 cr head unc (a -2 crushing blow to the head made the figure unconscious)
-9 cut (a -9 cutting wound)

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

... As I've stated before, any form of ST loss before the score drops to 3, isn't really a "wound" as it has no lasting effect on the character. Sure, you can be knocked down, suffer a -2DX, pushed back etc, but those are only temporary effects and the character can act at full efficiency afterwards.

I think it's far simpler just to regard all hits before the ST score reaches 3 as fatigue/minor bumps and bruises, which can then be recovered from quickly between encounters.

However, I realise that I'm in a tiny minority (perhaps a minority of 1) on this, and the new rules will almost certainly stay pretty much as they were, so there will need to be some way to separately track fatigue ST loss v wound ST loss. ...

I think wounds before the last 3 points are pretty clearly actual wounds, because otherwise the logic of what happens and why severely breaks down. (e.g. "So 2 crossbows missed me but the third caused me to fall down and be about do die on another hit, but I'm somehow not actually wounded?") I can relate to thinking wounds should cause a lasting penalty to performance, but to me that implies the opposite sort of house rule (adding lasting penalties for lesser injuries).

[Shadekeep]

Originally Posted by JLV

I suggested a system my group from about 25 years ago used, which I'd more or less stolen from SPI's old War of the Ring game; squares, that you mark off with a front slash for fatigue, or an X for damage. If you are all out of empty squares, you fall unconscious, and any additional damage is just marked with a backslash in one of your "fatigue" squares which converts it to straight damage. It worked very well for us for a campaign that lasted almost four years.

I like that approach, it has an elegant simplicity to it.

[Jim Kane]

Originally Posted by zot

...Also, will characters still become unconscious at ST 1 and die at ST 0 or will the rules allow more "padding"?

I know some people have expressed a want to extend the life-span of a character in play, but for TFT I personally like that death is swift and sure, with no *wiggle room*.

In Champions (Hero Games), a figure had to go fully negative ST to die, which was great *for that system* and genre; but for TFT, I prefer SJ's original, elegant, and deadly concept of unconscious at ST 1, and dead at ST 0.

Cidri is a very dangerous and deadly place, in deed.

JK

[Anomylous]

I've generally played it so that fatigue counts towards unconsciousness but not death (and ak_aramis's two-tracks system is a much more elegant notation for this than the simple hatch marks I've always used).

I'm fairly confident the rules on unconsciousness/death will be edited/revamped - likely in the direction of being less harsh, because it would be tough to make them MORE harsh, and everyone and their dog seems to have house rules softening the blow of ST 0.