Should fatigue work better on an encounter basis or daily basis?

[Li Shenron]

Just a thought based on (limited) first-hand experience and thoughts...

Do you think fatigue is best represented by encounter-based abilities or daily abilities?
Or turning the question upside down, do you think encounter-based abilities can be explained in terms of fatigue? How about daily abilities?

I am starting to think that physical fatigue and mental fatigue should be addressed separately.

If you do a fighting sport, or anyway a sport that requires bursts of energy, you've probably noticed that you can't continue for long, you have to take a break. For example, in boxing they have rounds separated by a pause. Of course you also get more tired progressively after each round, but taking that break does give you indeed some sort of "recharge".

And fighting sports are maybe the closest RL thing to D&D combat (unlike war battles, since D&D has always been primarily a game of encounters rather than large and long battles), so it actually makes sense for martial classes to have encounter-based abilities explained in terms of fatigue: maybe your Fighter can do 1-2 "bursts" in an encounter, but has to rest shortly before doing them again.

What makes much less sense to me, is having separate encounter abilities, each of which can be used 1/encounter. If the explanation is fatigue, all the encounter abilities should use the same "pool", which probably needs to be very very small otherwise it may effectively become "at-will".

There are however other types of physical fatigue that make more sense on a daily basis. Forced march, running a marathon, hard labor, extended swimming or climbing... basically out-of-combat stuff. However since these are long-time activities, it's probably not so interesting trying to design single-use daily special abilities but rather bonuses or other permanent benefits. Still it remains the fact that typically when you run out of energy here, you really need to rest long, at least if we stop at the simplest approximation (we don't want to get into simulationism here, just trying to figure out an in-game explanation for encounter and daily abilities).

Then there are mental types of fatigue. Now when it comes to this, my RL experience is pretty much limited to e.g. studying hard for a school exam, or working hard until late at night. Once again a matter of endurance, short breaks help but the biggest obstacle is running out at the end of the day, because the effort is more continuous.

So how about spells then? Traditionally we explain their effort in terms of mental fatigue. Each casting of spells is a short-term activity, but if we see them as a whole, it still makes sense to me that the "pool" of all your spell slots is daily-based and not encounter-based. There is room for at-wills, if you explain them as "stuff it's so easy for you, that it is not tiring at all", but I have a hard time believing encounter-based spells.

There are also some hybrid cases... what about Rage? Is this physical or mental? As a matter of fact, I don't know

Based on these considerations on burst vs continous, I find myself quite positive about martial at-wills, martial encounter-based, at-will spells and daily spells, but still unlikely to accept martial dailies and encounter-based spellcasting.

What's your take?

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

When I had thoughts along these lines, I used the terms focus and fatigue. What I'm not sure of is if these should be a resource that starts at full and then drains when abilities are used, or a condition that starts at zero and builds up over time.

Another thing to consider, if you're using these as the basis for powers, is that a power doesn't have to just be an encounter or daily resource. An individual power can require different amounts of each.

 

[Ainamacar]

The usage that seems most natural to me is a resource that refreshes every encounter, but the degree to which it refreshes can be indicative of "daily" abilities. In the context of the OP, after one runs a marathon one's burstiness in a later encounter is reduced compared to the start of the day, but still present. When resources are spent from a pool of fixed size essentially the size of the pool decreases from longer-term stresses. When resources are accumulated in an open-ended fashion it instead refreshes to some minimum size besides 0. I've explored this idea for hit points as well, where essentially "max hp" changes during the day, but after each encounter hp is restored to whatever the new max is.

Of course, I'm a fan of requiring tradeoffs when elements are closely related, and I know some people dislike that very much. There are also implications for going nova, 15 minute adventuring day, etc. That's a whole different discussion, though.

I'm neutral on whether physical and mental fatigue should be the same. I think it depends not only on what is being tracked, but also on the tenor of the game. My own experience is that thinking deeply is pretty much always difficult when physically tired, but one can be mentally fatigued yet feel recharged by light exercise. (Although that may be "daily" fatigue in the former case and "encounter" fatigue in the latter, in which case the example may not be valid for a strict mental vs. physical comparison.) That apparent lack of symmetry suggests neither the unified or independent abstractions do that great a job, in which case the simpler abstraction may be the better one unless splitting them supports some compelling possibilities, for various values of "compelling."