Re: (TFT) Combined Offensive/Defensive Action

[raito@raito.com]

> I don't like "pay fatigue to defend better" house rules, because I don't
> believe that there are many real-life actions which would have any
> correspondence to using about 1/10th one's energy in five seconds, and
> achieve a better chance to avoid getting hurt, unless you are talking
> about throwing all your weight into a large object, such as knocking over
> a tree or mattress or large table towards your attacker. All of which
> require a specific large terrain feature to be in the right place, and
> probably require the defender to drop their weapon. "Parryin' real hard"
> or "real careful-like" or "taking an extra half-step" is not something
> that I can believe is going to cost even one point of fatigue. I CAN see
> it precluding attacking, or reducing the chances of getting an attack in,
> but not draining strength at an extreme rate.

The rate may be off, but then we don't really deal in sub-unit increments.

However, expending more energy than normal to acheive larger effect is
something I do all the time. For example, when I'm doing SCA fighting, I
can pretty much throw the standard sword blow for hours at a time.
Certainly if I'm only throwing a single blow every 5 seconds (though that
lead into a discussion of whether the singel blow is lieteral, or some
sort of stochastic process). There are other, possible more effective
blows for certain situations that I cannot throw for hours. I may only be
able to throw that blow (or others like it) effectively a couple dozen
times every few hours.

And I've had similar experiences in other sports. In particular, wrestling
normally uses a lot of energy, and uses truly insane amounts for those
techniques that aren't common. When I was wrestling, bouts were 6 minutes.
And I can tell you that after particularly draining matches, I'd certainly
used up a lot of fatigue. Killing me would have been pretty easy. That's
72 turns. Assuming I'd been expending ST constantly, 10ST would be 1ST
every 7.2 turns, or 1 every 36 seconds. And empirically, that seems about
right for how often a wrestler tries something using extra energy.

Another way to look at fatigue is not that each point is some fraction of
ST, but how long it takes to recover. 15 minutes per point means that
using 12 fatigue takes 3 hours to recover. Seems about right to me.

Everything you do uses energy. Some things cost more than others.

There were a couple reasons I experimented with it. The first was that
while Wizards used fatigue in the normal course of combat, Heroes didn't.
Iwanted tor ectify that. The second reason was that simply doing the
various reallocations didn't give quite the effects I was after. In
particular, surprise wasn't too possible when each character is allocating
out of a fixed pool. Using fatigue allowed that surprise, while also
introducing risk (in the form of reduced ST).

Eventually, I went back to vanilla rules. The others took more time and
didn't really alter the outcome of combat. I suppose I might still allow
them in for some specialized combats, but it really didn't make the game
any better, just more complex.

Neil Gilmore
raito@raito.com
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