Fatigue System

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Since the topic of adding a fatigue system has been brought up as a balance measure; I figured I may as well give my thoughts on it.

In my system, fatigue is directly tied into the movement point system. Essentially, the more action points are used within a specific amount of time; the more fatigue is generated.

A player has a stamina “battery” and a fatigue threshold. Actions that cost fewer movement points than the fatigue threshold do not drain stamina. If an action costs more than the threshold, those points are taken from the battery.

Let’s say Urist McSurvivor has a stamina battery of 750 and a fatigue threshold of 125.
Moving with no modifiers/encumbrance costs 100; thus has no affect on stamina.
Dragging a shopping cart around with no other modifiers cost 103; still under the threshold so no affect on stamina.
Swinging a fire axe with no modifiers costs 142 movement points. So every attack drains 17 stamina.
Moving while wearing a suit of unpowered basic power armor costs 140 movement points; so every movement drains 15 stamina.

To regain fatigue, simply use fewer movement points than your threshold; the difference is added to your stamina battery. So in the example above; you can regain 25 stamina by moving if you have nothing that modifies your movement cost.

Dodging is calculated as 1/2 the cost of moving a tile. So if you move and dodge twice; that’s (100 + (50 X 2)) - 125 = 75 fatigue.
Blocking is calculated as 1/4 the cost of moving a tile.
Idling ("." or “keypad 5”) is calculated as 1/2 the cost of moving a tile. (Which increases stamina recovery)
Being hit drains stamina depending on damage taken.
(If I missed anything please mention it.)

If you don’t have enough remaining stamina to perform an action; you won’t be able to do it (“You’re too exhausted to do that!”). You can still perform actions that are below your fatigue threshold.

Your stamina battery and fatigue threshold can be affected by things such as health, pain, sleepyness, mutations, martial arts styles, etc.

2

Furniture and food should help recover stamina. If your full/slaked stamina recovery should receive a bonus. Sitting down on a sofa/armchair/couch should also increase stamina regen.

Too bad there isn’t a endurance stat. Hmm endurance stat… this would affect stamina/threshold and a small amount of health.

3

This idea sounds nice, but you shouldn’t forget that you should get exhausted or have pain in the legs/feet after a long time walking standing, it is not very logical that your legs/feet don’t hurt after walking for 4+ hours with more than 40kg extra weight

4

Well, the idea was to make fatigue a hindrance, but not something too annoying; inventory management is monotonous enough as it is.

What we can do is turn the overburdened speed debuff into an encumbrance debuff like volume works.

[quote=“Omnicast, post:2, topic:5831”]Furniture and food should help recover stamina. If your full/slaked stamina recovery should receive a bonus. Sitting down on a sofa/armchair/couch should also increase stamina regen.

Too bad there isn’t a endurance stat. Hmm endurance stat… this would affect stamina/threshold and a small amount of health.[/quote]
Right, that’s what I was missing. Thirst and hunger should affect fatigue. And better quality of rest should also help restore stamina.

I’m against food restoring stamina though; drugs and stimulants at most. What they CAN do is affect your thresholds and fatigue as long as you keep yourself properly fed and watered. Eating Well-Done Meat to increase stamina is something that should stay in games like Monster Hunter.

Having things like bodybuilding was an idea I was toying with; but if we could turn the hidden “Health” stat into something more long-term instead of “Swallow 100 doses of vitamins and be immune to disease until it goes back to baseline of 0 in a day or so” it would accomplish the same thing.

5

I remember seeing something about a “stress” idea. Felt it should be mentioned here.

6

I don’t think that being exhausted should absolutely prevent you from preforming an action, but rather preform it much more slowly and less effectively.

Example:
Attacks being much weaker, slower, and more prone to missing.

‘You swing sluggishly at the zombie and miss’

Moving past obstacles would be much slower.

‘You struggle to move past the countertop’

7

I don’t think that being exhausted should absolutely prevent you from preforming an action, but rather preform it much more slowly and less effectively.

Example:
Attacks being much weaker, slower, and more prone to missing.

‘You swing sluggishly at the zombie and miss’

Moving past obstacles would be much slower.

‘You struggle to move past the countertop’[/quote]

This.

I need to say that, however, it’s a really good system. My opinion is that the threshold should change, depending on strenght, medical condition, mood, drugs, etc.

8

With zombies how they are now, I think fighting zom zoms will be moderately harder.

Which is great for us vets, but I’m not sure how the new player base will react.

9

I guess this quote belongs here.

[quote=“dovla, post:27, topic:5478”]Perhaps this could be solved with some sort of fatigue mechanic. As it is now, if you go out well rested and full/slaked, you can probably whack zombies for two whole days (with a snack and a sip here and there) before you reach Dead Tired and have to quit.

If a mass of zeds were able to overwhelm you simply because you’re too tired from bashing heads for three hours straight, that would be both more “realistic” and restore some challenge for late-game zed encounters. Currently there’s nothing forcing you to retreat when facing a mass of zeds in late-game.

Falling over from exhaustion should mean a certain death, regardless of armor.[/quote]

[quote=“dovla, post:32, topic:5478”]I’ve been thinking about this a bit and the best I came up with so far is the following idea:

Make fatigue raise at an accelerated pace while the player is engaged in combat, but keep a counter separate from the “normal” fatigue counter. Both the normal and accelerated counter are added up when calculating current player fatigue. However, once the player has stopped fighting (say, for 10 turns), the combat fatigue counter starts to degrade gradually, up to 75% of the total amount. The remaining 25% are then added to “normal” fatigue and the combat fatigue counter is reset.

Basically, you’d be reaching Dead Tired if engaged in combat for prolonged periods of time, but you could also “catch your breath” by disengaging and wouldn’t have to go straight to bed to restore your fatigue. This way you’d still be able to maintain a somewhat normal day-night cycle but couldn’t spend 12 hours straight bashing zombie heads in.

I’m not entirely happy with this yet, once I’ve refined it a bit I can post it in the Drawing Board.[/quote]

10

Butchering should be really tiring if this system is implemented. It’s far too quick and easy for my taste now. Maybe there could be an alternative “finish off” action available then that takes less energy.

11

You mean like (s)mashing a body?

I don’t believe fatigue for most non-combat actions should be modified.

12
I remember seeing something about a "stress" idea. Felt it should be mentioned here.

That might have been me if it was THIS.

I like this suggestion overall, mostly the idea of how a threshold and reserve of stamina would interact.

13

I’ve read >>Logrin:_THIS and I’m thankful, haven’t been around to check it out at the time.
The beginning of this drill is to determine if we’re discussing stamina, endurance or just the plain constitution ‘check’…
There’re heaps of things to consider, mainly due to the nature of the human body; it tends to adapt to a certain type of strain. If I was to put aside purely athletic types, there would be only semi-pros left - and they would’ve had years to improve on a certain type of stamina; compared to that, you do have that skinny-dude type that can bunnyhop the night away at a dance arena, purely due to a fact he’s well hydrated. Even if I didn’t want to mention calories here, they would’ve been in one context or another; the two examples consume fairly equal ammount per “exercise”… survival enthusiasts take great care about this fact. This would in fact coincide with the bodytemp check which is already coded in… but that’s a case of things, not the whole lot that is to come.
I get the spotlight of this issue - where to position stamina in a traumatic combat experience. As for myself, I’d be very careful around that party, because the adrenalin causes one person to improve on quick reactions and may give more pure power to another; we all know how the wounded beast is the most dangerous of all.
Regarding pure fatigue, the “pretty worn out” flag bounces up when you can barely stand on both feet. The coffeine that’s coded in CataDDA elevates this type of mood; this shows there’s been some concern over this type of mater in particular. There’s an area I can think of that could benefit from some improvement - encumberance and fatigue in general. If all of your movements are obstructed every turn, your body would get overstressed soon enough, and the mind should follow. In other words, iron boots are iron boots regardless of the wearer’s proficiency/skill. And to add where it ends - certain drugs strike heavy on one’s stress awareness, so one can quickly get very tired and even pass out.

14

There’s a pretty serious flaw here, which is that you have a limited pool of moves to act on every turn, and this adds a second limited pool of moves you can act on, with the numbers being pulled from the pools being the same. As long as X moves = Y fatigue, it’s not going to add anything except requiring the player to stop and pause occasionally. If instead actions have their own fatigue scores, you can have high exertion activities like running, dodging, and melee, and low exertion activities like ranged combat or driving, or very low exertion activities like standing still or even lying down. I think it’s a central enough concept to the game that the work of adding the fatigue scores in addition to move scores for various actions will be worthwhile.

15

The first little bit is something of a series of suggestions in itself, scroll down to the bolded line of text if you’d rather read my reply to the Great Granade

The biggest reason I think I want a fatigue system in is because if one were to be created we could have a toggled run mode.

I.E. press a button and move much faster than you normally do. Should prolly be a percent of your normal speed, that way we could have traits/mutations like:

*Bump up top speed by nudging the percentage higher.
*Reduce fatigue cost for running, should exclude the above mutation; making it a choice between running constantly or being a cheetah.

Certain weapons, martial arts or mutations could have attacks that only trigger when running, such as:

*Trampling smaller creatures as a HUGE mutant
*Charging with a spear
*A literal bullrush for the various types of horns–taking them from the tertiary attack category and plopping them down somewhere special.
*Clotheslines, flying kicks and tackles for martial arts.
*etc

There is a small problem to all this though, that being the lack of a meaningful divide between moving and everything else you can do…so running–unless the devs can figure out a way to section it off–would increase the speed at which you do most things.

I’m actually pretty cool with that though, as we could just call it something like rushing instead and make all actions taken when the mode is active more fatiguing.

All that said I believe Kevin’s post brings up several points that merit a reply. I type at length here so feel free to scroll down to the bulleted list.

Moves = Fatigue wouldn’t due much except, as stated, make you have to pass a few turns. Sure.

But I like the idea of a battery versus a threshold, so long as you never reach a point in which something doesn’t fatigue you at all. In that respect you could pair actions with associated stats to decide how big a hit you take for performing them. This way a big hulking brute with tonnes of strength would find smashing doors and dragging dressers a manageable feat but fall short of a more dexterous survivor when it comes to sprinting/dodging. You could even make installing and using bionics a matter of perception/intelligence as far as associated fatigue goes.

On the aspect of waiting though. Things like drugs, adrenaline ((Both natural from the trait who’s name escapes me at the moment and via injector.)) and the like could act as an on the spot, short-term solution to fatigue; waiting on the other hand would be ideal. From my past thread I think the best part that can be taken away would be snowballing penalties and returns. I.E. you recover more stamina the more turns you pass in a row and the penalties you accrue get worse and worse as fatigue piles on, culminating in working yourself to death ((Via variable torso damage when redlined.))

So, to sum up a sprawling mess of text I think:
*Things should fatigue you based on what stat or stats are needed for the task
*How high your stat is reduces the associated cost for an action is when checked. This should never get to the point in which something nets you zero or positive fatigue.
*Fatigue decreases on its own if you do nothing, faster if you rest and much faster for resting consecutive turns.
*You should be able to reserve a certain amount of stamina that gets expended first, like a stamina battery. Maybe have this tied into CURRENT HEALTH and the rate at which you recover stamina tied to MAX HEALTH.
*Encumbrance, healthiness, thirst, hunger and how tired you are should play a part in recovering stamina.
*Fatigue should never stop you from doing something–just penalize you to varying degrees

16

I agree with everything you’re saying in broad strokes, my only concern is how practical tying all of thos factors together is going to be in the code. To be clear, I think the threshold/battery idea is very interesting, but I’m not sure how well it meshes with the way turns work in cataclysm, especially if fatigue is tied directly to moves.
To be more concrete, you have a low-fatigue action, like firing a gun, it can get down to 25 moves or so in the right circumstances. The thing is, you won’t only fire the gun once a turn, you can fire it 4-5 times a turn, possibly more with various accelerants (drugs mostly), so in the end it would cause as much fatigue as swinging an axe. Before you say moves per action is the key, consider a combat knife, you can also get it down to 25 moves per attack, but obviously 5 slashes with a combat knife should be causing more fatigue than firing a pistol 5 times.
Logrin suggests factoring the stats used and possibly other factors in to determine fatigue per action, that’s a pretty appealing approach, so with my gun example, a very dexterous player (and possibly one with high gun skills) would find firing a gun rapidly easy, while a non-dexterous player would find it quickly tiring. Likewise strong characters would get fatigued more slowly when swinging around a weapon, but might pay a premium for dodging. I assume there’d be a way for dexterous characters to utilize their speed with light weapons as well.
If we’re digging in to the moves and actions that deeply already, I don’t think decoupling running vs other actions would be that tough.

Speaking of running, GlyphGriph and I hashed this out a long time ago (we disagree on some of the details, but this is the parts we agreed on), the way running would work is as you run in a certain direction, you build up momentum, and more movement in that direction gets cheaper in terms of moves (because you’re moving faster), but the cost of moving in other directions increases, because you have to fight the momentum in order to change direction. In the extreme case you might have to spend a turn just decelerating, and end up moving in the same direction even if you press the opposite direction.

17

I still reason with the point to the whole sleep_to_stamina interaction; if the player character was to become tired then his actions should become slower, as his senses dull. Does anyone see an improvement over the mechanism wrapped around ‘pain’ - and only to pin a fatigue ruleset that should render the play_char incapable of maintaining concentration/attention within a certain timespan? Again, I’m polling for consideration towards endurance in particular, that could become a pool for action points and wouldn’t benefit from healing agents/effects just like hitpoint/max does. It could be mostly based upon nutrition and rest (because thirst already has severe immediate penalties) and it should drop in steps as the play_char takes damage. The total ammount of points should always be in relation with stamina (percentile), so the pool could always become shallow if the player is dizzied, drowsy or has just suffered a severe concussion, for example. The endpoint here is to disallow long actions and actions in sequence simply because your body doesn’t have enough energy reserves, or your mind needs to recover. Only then you might be able to think of the whole “relation to the fatigue” and its consequences such as (immense) penalties, action-errata and perhaps various cooldowns; the ones that don’t simply trigger flags like “hungry” or “thirsty”.

Only one more thing to address this further - I’ve noticed how a character uses his melee weapon to succesfuly block attacks from well, fairly strong, yet slow opponents. If the player character gets tired, the rule bound to this (quasi) skill should follow.