Fatigue Recovery from Last Gasp and Magic

[Blind Mapmaker]

Originally Posted by Icelander

I'm guessing that this spell is meant for a campaign where magical healing is either non-existent or at least much, much more difficult to do than in vanilla GURPS Magic?

I mean, it feels really odd if broken bones or life-threatening wounds can be cured in a matter of seconds with a spell that costs under 10 FP to cast, but physical trauma from exhaustion is somehow orders of magnitude harder to cure.

Ah, yes. That's what I get when just copy-and-pasting spells from my campaign grimoire. The important thing however, is to balance it so that "curing" more than an extra point of deep fatigue is going to be quite tricky. Keep in mind that recovering from deep fatigue is actually a bit harder than recovering HP (or at least Douglas Cole put in more stringent conditions and high HT doesn't help). So, the important bit is to make it once per day and set the limits so that with maximum Magery the characters may restore 2 deep fatigue tops. Otherwise, you might as well trash the Long-Term Fatigue rolls, because however much energy you use it will recover much faster.

For an in-game perspective you might argue that a lot of cuts and bruises are quite simple when you have magic that can knit tissues together, but fatigue is a much more distributed and multi-layered thing, especially when you take things like starvation and temperature into account. Not perfect, I know, but at least it's not completely off-kilter.

For a game where standard healing magic works with 1 energy : 2 HP I'd use this version:

Deep Breath
Regular
Restores the target’s fatigue points lost to physical exertion (including Extra Effort). This costs 2 energy per FP restored, but can be regenerated through Recover Energy. If using the Rules from The Last Gasp (PY3/44), the cost is 2 energy to restore 1 mild fatigue, 3 energy to restore 1 severe fatigue and 4 energy to restore 1 deep fatigue.
In any case each target can only benefit from one casting of Deep Breath per day and the caster is limited to Magery x 3 energy. The target needs to rest during the casting, but a caster can cast the spell on themselves.

Time to Cast: 15 s per energy invested
Duration: instantaneous
Cost: see above
Prerequisites: Lend Energy

This gives a standard mage the option to restore 4 mild, 3 severe or 2 deep fatigue, meaning they can skip half a night's sleep without ill effect or the help of a Vigil spell, which seems about right.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

Ah, yes. That's what I get when just copy-and-pasting spells from my campaign grimoire. The important thing however, is to balance it so that "curing" more than an extra point of deep fatigue is going to be quite tricky. Keep in mind that recovering from deep fatigue is actually a bit harder than recovering HP (or at least Douglas Cole put in more stringent conditions and high HT doesn't help). So, the important bit is to make it once per day and set the limits so that with maximum Magery the characters may restore 2 deep fatigue tops. Otherwise, you might as well trash the Long-Term Fatigue rolls, because however much energy you use it will recover much faster.

Well, my point in using realistic fatigue rules is that without magic or superpowers, people in the campaign world are supposed to work like real people. Being one of the few ultra powerful characters who can circumvent normal biology is meant to be awesome by comparison to a benchmark of ordinary people being affected like someone in our world would be.

The PCs spent years of playing time without access to powerful magic. By now they are movers and shakers of the world, but there are a lot of adventurers without such easy access to magical solutions.

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

For an in-game perspective you might argue that a lot of cuts and bruises are quite simple when you have magic that can knit tissues together, but fatigue is a much more distributed and multi-layered thing, especially when you take things like starvation and temperature into account. Not perfect, I know, but at least it's not completely off-kilter.

Well, sure, but HP damage can be pretty complex too. For instance, it can result from extensive bleeding, which would require rebuilding plasma and red blood cells to fix, or it could even be the result of extreme exhaustion, as going below 0 FP results in HP injury for every FP lost.

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

Deep Breath
Regular
Restores the target’s fatigue points lost to physical exertion (including Extra Effort). This costs 2 energy per FP restored, but can be regenerated through Recover Energy. If using the Rules from The Last Gasp (PY3/44), the cost is 2 energy to restore 1 mild fatigue, 3 energy to restore 1 severe fatigue and 4 energy to restore 1 deep fatigue.
In any case each target can only benefit from one casting of Deep Breath per day and the caster is limited to Magery x 3 energy. The target needs to rest during the casting, but a caster can cast the spell on themselves.

Time to Cast: 15 s per energy invested
Duration: instantaneous
Cost: see above
Prerequisites: Lend Energy

This gives a standard mage the option to restore 4 mild, 3 severe or 2 deep fatigue, meaning they can skip half a night's sleep without ill effect or the help of a Vigil spell, which seems about right.

Doesn't sound entirely off base.

For my purposes, I might work up something that offers a very restful night and speeds up fatigue recovery over that eight hour sleep. A single restful night counting as the equivalent of five to ten days of rest doesn't seem out of line when single healing spells can equal weeks or months of healing.

From a world-building perspective, I don't mind exertion putting superheroes out of action for the rest of the day, but given that magic exist to fix paraplegics from broken spines or death itself, I think it would feel weird to require ten days of recovery from exertion for superheroes who have access to the kind of magic most people only know about from legends.

[Blind Mapmaker]

I absolutely agree that it's very setting- and style-dependent. Personally, I would probably forego the Long-Term Fatigue rules altogether, when you reached the superhero mages level, since I don't like a huge amount of book-keeping. Depending on your GMing style it might not matter much.

I think your good night's rest spell is probably the way to go if you want to restore a sizeable portion of deep fatigue at once. The problem that runs in for me and my campaign-styles is that this basically makes mild and severe fatigue irrelevant if you can reliably cast it before resting. You can make it more dicey by throwing in the occasional night-time attack and specifying that waking up for threats is either not happening or that the spell was useless due to the interruption, but for me that's still too easy.

Ultimately, it all boils down to what your focus is. As I outlined above I am mostly modelling kids in a magic school setting, so I'm much more interested in mild and severe fatigue. As you're going for superheroics of mythic proportions, your focus will be naturally on severe and deep fatigue.

What I'd be more interested in would be some good rules for a reworked magic FP cost system for The Last Gasp. Even with energy reserves I could see some spells being physically exhausting beyond AP expenditures and I think there would be a nice Pyramid article on using FP to power spells with TLG.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

I absolutely agree that it's very setting- and style-dependent. Personally, I would probably forego the Long-Term Fatigue rules altogether, when you reached the superhero mages level, since I don't like a huge amount of book-keeping. Depending on your GMing style it might not matter much.

Well, I don't have to track the fatigue closely unless there's a chance that the character in question won't be able to recover before he has to do something strenuous again. Which is common for a couple of characters, as the greater their ability to recover from exhaustion or injury, the more heroic characters will try to accomplish in a short time.

I primarily use the Painful Recovery rules for characters without access to powerful magic and/or for situations where there is no opportunity to rest or use magical recovery between exertions.

In general, I've found that if there is any sense of urgency at all, which many adventures feature even without an attempt by the GM to introduce a strict time pressure, players will expend extremely valuable resources, take incredible risks and use any alchemical or magical method to enable the PCs to skip sleep and rest. This is despite them often not knowing about any health risks that such methods carry with them.

One PC has been taking a lot of a white crystalline substance made by a gnome alchemist, so he doesn't need to sleep as much... or at all. A couple of other PCs have also tried it to skip a night or two of sleep. Another PC recently started to drink vampire blood, which feels like the most amazing combination of liquid cocaine, crystal meth and ecstasy, and keeps him wired the entire night. And over some 150 miles of running in rough country over the course of a few days, one PC somehow kept up with generous draughts of orcish schnapps.

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

I think your good night's rest spell is probably the way to go if you want to restore a sizeable portion of deep fatigue at once. The problem that runs in for me and my campaign-styles is that this basically makes mild and severe fatigue irrelevant if you can reliably cast it before resting. You can make it more dicey by throwing in the occasional night-time attack and specifying that waking up for threats is either not happening or that the spell was useless due to the interruption, but for me that's still too easy.

Before I started using the 'Last Gasp', Healing potions healed FP if a character had full HP, as GURPS Magic suggested. Which was fine, when the PCs were struggling adventurers who couldn't buy an infinite supply of such potions. When they started to make enough money for potion costs to become irrelevant to them, I removed this ability from Healing potions.

Allowing characters to heal fatigue, however, isn't going to make fatigue irrelevant. Not in the same way. Assuming that it's no easier to heal than HP, the odds are that any spellcasters will be overextended trying to keep up, anyway, making natural recovery somewhat relevant, even though in extreme situations, it might be possible to rejuvenate an exhausted hero for the final confrontation, say if a powerful NPC prophet uses some of his more powerful magic to do so.

I'm fine with PCs not having to spend days or weeks in bed when they should be adventuring, as long as it's clear that in the absence of magic, that's what they would be doing. I don't want rules that allow just anyone to be superhuman because the rules don't reflect reality, I want rules where the rules enforce that there are gritty consequences to injury or exhaustion, but some powerful characters have access to magic that allows them to perform at higher levels than ordinary mortals.

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

Ultimately, it all boils down to what your focus is. As I outlined above I am mostly modelling kids in a magic school setting, so I'm much more interested in mild and severe fatigue. As you're going for superheroics of mythic proportions, your focus will be naturally on severe and deep fatigue.

All kinds of fatigue, actually. One PC already has the ability to heal HP and FP from any source with supernatural means (DR with Absorption), but this doesn't mean that fatigue is irrelevant to him, it just means he try to do even more and ends up fighting at low or even negative FP a lot, trying to set up a situation where he can regain FP.

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

What I'd be more interested in would be some good rules for a reworked magic FP cost system for The Last Gasp. Even with energy reserves I could see some spells being physically exhausting beyond AP expenditures and I think there would be a nice Pyramid article on using FP to power spells with TLG.

Yeah, that would be interesting.