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.

[Skarg]

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

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.

They do, but they're trying to be simple too.

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

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.

I agree it's not nearly as gritty or realistic as it could be.

It's a wound in a game with less focus on detail than GURPS, which penalizes you -1 for each point of damage. Personally I like adding optional and house rules for even more injury effects to GURPS. But this is about TFT, trying to keep things light but still based on things making sense if possible.

It's also a game where if you take take 4 damage, and then take another 2 damage in the same turn, you will be at -2DX, but not if you use a 2-fatigue spell after taking 4 damage. Same for the falling threshold.

It's also a game where if you take 1 point of damage-not-fatigue, and don't inflict any damage-not-fatigue that turn, your opponent can force you to retreat or possible roll vs. DX or fall down or into a pit.

It's also a game where after combat you can rest off fatigue but you have to use physicking, healing potions, or 2 days of rest per point to heal actual injury.

It's a game where damage is based on the size / type of weapons, armor worn, etc., literally being hit or missed, etc., which logically causes injuries, not just being tired.

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

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?

Seems to me the clear design intention is that at ST 4 you are heroically still able to continue fighting, but so injured that even you're liable to die and will certainly be staggered if you take even a little more injury.

To me what you said on 2 & 3 sound like arguments for longer-lasting effects of injury, which I'd enjoy.

But they don't make sense to me as meaning you're massively fatigued but not injured by say, being shot by a couple of arrows spread over two turns and dropped to ST 4 without a DX penalty. How could anyone get that exhausted that way?

Originally Posted by Chris Rice

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.

I mean all the things that follow from the difference between a RPG that literally represents hit-or-miss, damage to bodies, and armor reduction, as opposed to "abstract hit-point" games where a level 5 character has 5 times as many hit-points as a level 1 character, and almost all the hitpoints except the last few abstractly supposedly represent the character's ability to dodge, parry, block, have their armor be slightly bent, or whatever, but they conveniently all happen first and then mysteriously stop happening when out of hit points.

Imagine a TFT fight with weapons that don't do a lot of damage per hit. If only the last few points were actual injury, then that means the whittling down of the first batch of points is always abstract "fatigue", meaning it's pretty much impossible to hurt anyone until you have worn them down, which is just not how risk or fatigue work at all. Especially for something like a ranged attack. "I shoot the ogre in the back with my heavy crossbow" - ok, you did a bunch of dam... er, fatigue to it. Etc etc.

[Chris Rice]

Skarg, you make some excellent points. Thanks for your considered response.