Strength loss v Fatigue Loss

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

Frankly, this is a bit of a pain to keep track of and it's not that easy to explain to new players.

We never found it a pain at all.

ST 12 -6 -3F

Means the character has a 6-point wound and 3 points of fatigue. What's painful?

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

Since it doesn't matter (in terms of an ongoing effect) what wounds or Fatigue you suffer until your ST reaches 3, it is logical to assume that all damage received until ST reaches 3 is fatigue. Once your ST reaches 3 you are "wounded" and suffer the -3DX penalty stated in the rules.

This has a number of advantages:

1. It is no longer necessary to take a separate account of ST lost to Fatigue.
2. Characters are a bit more robust as they can recover more quickly between encounters.

There may of course be disadvantages I haven't thought of. Or the whole idea may be nonsense. That's why I put the idea out here for your comments ;)

I would say this doesn't work for me at all. Immediate reasons that come to mind:

1. The meaning of what happened to the character is very different. In a campaign, it matters whether you are cut with an axe or just tired. They heal at different rates for logical reasons. All that continuity would be lost with this system.

2. You're not right that there is no effect of wounds until ST 3 remain. There's the -2 DX penalty for damage per turn. There's falling after taking a certain amount of damage (not fatigue). There's the retreat effect due to damage, etc.

3. The loss of meaningful effects of events like "I got massively butchered but lived" would be erased if you could say "oho, my ST is 4, so I can just rest all that damage up. It would be surreal.

4. It would be a bit like other RPGs that give out piles of non-representative hitpoints and claim no one is really hurt until the very end of their hitpoint pile. That severely undermines the logic of what happens during play and what the consequences are.