Constant Encumbrance during daily activity and fatigue?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Anthony

The line between 'fatigue' and 'damage' is not as precise as RPGs like to pretend; when walking you accumulate minor damage to muscles, tendons, and joints. This usually heals fast enough that it can be ignored, but the damage is nonlinear and if you overdo it you may need down time to let the damage heal.

But I'm not overdoing it as far as I can see. It's that doing something once is fine and almost trivial without any lingering consequences, but doing more than half that every day builds up to muscle pains and sleep problems.

I am over 40 which while not old by Gurps standards is certainly not young in real life.

(I was never athletic growing up to my late 30s, so all this first hand experience is kind of novel to me. Also I don't have enough base knowledge to truly know what's normal for people in general and what's just odd about my body specifically. Sorry if I'm talking out of my rear.)

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

But I'm not overdoing it as far as I can see. It's that doing something once is fine and almost trivial without any lingering consequences, but doing more than half that every day builds up to muscle pains and sleep problems.

That implies it takes you more than a day to fully recover from whatever you're doing, and thus repeating it causes cumulative effects. In any case, if you're building up muscle pains and sleep problems, that means you're overdoing it...

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Anthony

Only if you define 'fatigue' as 'calorie cost', which doesn't accurately describe how GURPS uses fatigue (penalties for long shifts and lost sleep, both of which are treated as fatigue in GURPS, are not primarily caloric).

That way leads to madness, because it means that mice would not burn a single Fatigue point in a week while elephants would nearly every minute.
I would burn more walking than would a toddler sprinting their heart out to exhaustion.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Anthony

That implies it takes you more than a day to fully recover from whatever you're doing, and thus repeating it causes cumulative effects. In any case, if you're building up muscle pains and sleep problems, that means you're overdoing it...

It's only for many days in a row, and not major pains or anything. It also doesn't take much to screw up my sleep. It's mainly annoying, because nothing hurts or feels off that day, only the next at the earliest. I stop for the day due to boredom, not fatigue.

If I'm injuring myself, then by goodness, I should feel it within 24 hours at least.

[Extrarius]

How about some form of "long-term" extra effort, whereby you can increase productivity or some other relatively arbitrary statistic by +X% for 1FP per day, and it doesn't recover until you spend a day doing only light activity (nothing that costs FP) and only as long as you're in relatively good health (not missing FP for other lasting reasons, like missing sleep)?

This could easily cover somebody really exerting themselves to keep up at a new job (to help cover for lower skill levels, unfamiliarity penalties, not enough muscle for the task, etc) while allowing them to recover easily (if they have regular time off, like weekends). In some cases, if you choose not to use the "long-term extra effort", you might put your position at risk because you'll struggle to perform the required duties in the required time. Over time, you'll learn and increase skills, attributes, familiarity, etc, and will find your job much less taxing.

As for game effects, I'd let players use it in down time to earn extra money (increase earnings/day by whatever +X% increase is decided upon), or to reduce the amount of time required for long tasks (which I'll arbitrarily define to be 4 hours or longer).

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

It's only for many days in a row, and not major pains or anything. It also doesn't take much to screw up my sleep. It's mainly annoying, because nothing hurts or feels off that day, only the next at the earliest. I stop for the day due to boredom, not fatigue.

If I'm injuring myself, then by goodness, I should feel it within 24 hours at least.

TBH I think it's probably just a matter of very slight daily increments that individually fall way below the granularity of GURPS (or even what you experience) and only have a noticeable effect when they accumulate over a long enough time!

[Pursuivant]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

That way leads to madness, because it means that mice would not burn a single Fatigue point in a week while elephants would nearly every minute.
I would burn more walking than would a toddler sprinting their heart out to exhaustion.

The way around that is the MET (Metabolic Equivalent Task) measurement that physiologists have come up with. It scales with mass (at least for humans).

When it comes to calculating actual caloric needs, figuring out calories required would be a nightmare, especially since different species of animals vary in digestive efficiency.