Strength loss v Fatigue Loss

[Chris Rice]

Originally Posted by Skarg

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?



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.

What's painful is that I as a GM don't like book-keeping, I leave the players to take a note of their lost ST and I trust them to do so. Where lost ST is just one thing, that's ok, but keeping track of two things is obviously more tricky. I like the idea of marking off hits with a slash or a cross depending on whether the hit is damage or fatigue.

To answer your other points:

1. If it matters whether you are cut by an axe down to 4 ST or down to 4 ST due to fatigue, why don't the rules differentiate or give a penalty. As the rules stand, an Orc can chop away at you with an axe all the way down to 4 ST and it will have no effect on you at all, as long as the wounds are less than 5 points each. It won't affect your ability to heft a weapon, score a hit with it, jump the chasm, etc. So what sort of wound is that? It's only relevant when it comes to healing? That's illogical.

2. These are all temporary effects, which you recover completely from after a turn.

3. No. The meaningful effects you mention would now happen when your ST gets to 3 or below. (See my answer to point 1). If I've been "massively butchered" by having my St reduced to 4 but am suffering no penalty then I've not really been "massively butchered" have I?

4. I'm not sure what you mean by that. Once again I'm following the logic, but the logic of "effects of wounds" v "time and means of healing" don't currently match up.