So how does weariness exactly work? Becease there seem to be two massive problems with it.
The first is that it seems to affect combat a lot. And it does so in a clearly unrealistic way. If you get to very weary you slowed down to a point that any enemy can easely get multiple attacks off on you becease you take so long to attack to the point that it is nearly crippeling to your melee capability. This is completely rediculous. The only things that would be able to slow a human down like that in a fight for their life would be running completely out of breath or phisical pain and injury (both already in game) but in no way could this be soley do to weariness. This is largely becease adrenaline and the fight or flight response will make sure that you will use your body to the full extent you can even if it means risking injuring yourself in doing so.
The second problem is the fact that the effect it weariness has on combat isn’t made clear to the player in any way. You can gather from it’s discription and the messages you get that you will take longer to do certain task (a quick check of the log will conferm so) but their is no reduction to your speed their is no obvious sign that weariness can be hugely detrimental to your melee capabilities untill you are engaged in melee and you notice that something is off.
A way to remedy this would be to remove the effect of weariness on attacking. This could than be replaced by more more visible and realistic effects in the form of penalties to your stats and speed at higher levels of weariness. Ranging form a minor speed reduction (~2%) at weary to significant (but not debilitating/crippeling) penalties to stats (STR,DEX) and speed (~10%) at higher levels. Additionally there is actually a real risk of overexertion injuries if you exert your body so much while weary so there should be small chance to damage yourself every time you attack, dodge and block if you get to the very weary stage (<1%) or the extremely weary stage (1%).
One of my biggest problems with weariness is simply that it doesn’t give a proper explanation of what exactly the side effects are.
Okay, ya, I’m tired, but how much is that effecting me? Am I moving slower? Do I deal less damage? Do I attack slower? Do I craft slower? How much are each of these impacted? It’s too vague.
honestly i haven’t seen much of the side effects… like sure, if you go straight from hauling a 300 pound object to immediately fighting a zombie you’ll get hit quite a few more times as your melee attacks take a lot longer to swing, but if you’re heavily stressed all it takes is a few minutes of sitting in a chair (literally just hold down numpad 5 for a bit) and your character will stop complaining.
you cant really expect to not go from extreme activities (building things by hand, cutting down trees, hauling heavy objects) to instantly battle ready.
That isn’t the point. You slow down massively even with full stamina. The problem is that the effects of weariness are all seen in one place only (attacks take manytimes their normal time to do) eventhough a slowdown of such a degree for combat is unrealistic and extreme weariness would affect more than just your speed.
weariness shows up in a LOT of ways… it makes you slower at doing EVERYTHING, and everything you do while weary makes you more tired (as in, you have to sleep sooner), and eat more (you burn calories doing excessive work) and even have trouble sleeping (tossing and turning)
… again, all of this can be solved by STANDING STILL IN GAME FOR ABOUT 5 MINUTES. take a break when you do stuff! its not that hard.
As someone who’s practiced HEMA and tried to compete in longer events, no, combat is exhausting, and the slowdown very much is in line with my experience from events. Its also worth keeping in mind that an adrenal response is not going to trigger for every single fight you have, that’s not how it works. Once your killing zombies on the regular, finding one lone zombie in a house and stabbing it in the face will be about as reaction inducing for your character as it is for the player. But performing that stab will be just as exhausting.
Your proposed alternative doesn’t really replicate what I’ve seen and experienced either. Attack speed absolutely slows down with exertion, I’ve seen it in drills and fights, and experienced it myself. Muscles strain and people slow down getting into form and position for a strike. Reactions get sluggish and you start to overcompensate and overextend, leading to longer recovery between actions, compounded by the previous slowdown.
I do agree that it would be good for it to show in its entry on the stats page what exactly its doing, but in my experience of in game days going ham with a wood axe, and IRL days sparring and drilling, the experience holds up to an anecdotal comparison. If anything, the penalties aren’t pronounced enough in the long-term, getting groceries after a big day was an excruciating, exhausting experience in a way that should not have been possible But we can probably handwave that with the Blob healing buffs.
If your struggling to manage exhaustion, there is the pass time menu. Find a chair in a place that the enemy probably won’t find, take a swig from yer canteen, eat something if you got it, and use the wait for 30 minutes option. A good rest goes a long way. Also good for slipping in extra calories, you’ll need 'em when your running full combat speed.
Of course getting physically exausted slows you down. Get yourself so tired from all that fighting you can barely lift your arms anymore and darn right you’ll find yourself pretty helpless. Adrenaline can carry for a time but not forever. Pain I think is what affects combat too much. People in fighting competitions have had their nuts kicked literally into their bodies without noticing in the heat of a fight. kick someone in the nuts normally you’ll get quite the reaction but in fight or flight it doesn’t seem to inspire quite the same response.
Yea, but I think in the pursuit of avoiding needless randomization (Hey, I got shot and suddenly I was crippled with pain, but the last two times I was shot I was fine, what gives?) the system assumes everything hurts, all the time. In return, we aren’t really prone to a lot of the debilitating nature of pain. Sure, we move slower when we’re in pain in game, but what we don’t do is drop to the ground gripping our wound and screaming, even after a .50 practically rips our arm off.
Fair tradeoff, as far as I’m concerned. Consistency for control.
just recently i got into a bad situation where a bunch of zombies were punching me around, i was out of biotic power (but still had my monomolecular blade out), and was swinging at nearby zombies as they punched me back and forth, the pain and my weariness made it so i could only attack one or two at a time, but because my arms were fine and i had the adrenaline boost cbm active, i killed all of them (or at least downed them so i could crawl away on my two broken legs) 200+ pain.
Dragged my broken body to my battle APC and fixed myself up, but couldnt do anything without tiring myself out… i’d say thats pretty accurate.
Some people seem to confuse stamina and weariness. I’m not talking about your character having low stamina from fighting and needing a few minutes to catch their breath. I’m talking about more long-term weariness and the fact that it slows you down massivesly when fighting dispite the fact that you have full stamina.
The slowdown for my character with 120 speed was around 5 seconds per attack. I understand if he was out of breath but to slowdown that much just from weariness seems a little execive. My proposel is based on making the slowdown in melee less execive and replacing it with other penalties to simulate all the effects weariness has including a direct speed penalty. This would make so that not only melee combat is effected but other things like walking speed and ranged combat are also effected.
Then clearly you’ve never swung a sword for a few hours, or after carrying tens of kilo’s of chainmail for a few hours. Even at very high levels of physical fitness and performance, you will absolutely be slowing down.
A regular longsword is 106 moves per attack. So for a 120 speed character, that is by default, slightly more than 1 attack a second. Considering that there is no additional delays, that means your moving from the last hit/neutral and striking in one second. Frankly, that’s already very impressive, and probably never got adjusted for 1 second turns. But that 106 is a trick, because hand encumberance affects attack speed, so its probably slightly more than once a second. I’d be hard pressed to do that on a good day, but its not impossible for me to achieve.
But I couldn’t do it forever. While the actual ‘swing’ part of the attack will be more or less the same speed, that’s how the damage is dealt and all, the recovery and positioning for the next swing will be slowing down. Taking 3-4 seconds to do the above would be very much in line with what I’d expect after just a few hours of training. Muscle Fatigue is inescapable when your talking rapid bursts of exertion, and you will start to hit physical barriers where your limbs just aren’t moving as you want them to.
Now that being said, I’m sitting here thinking on the math, and unless you’ve got a 80% overall speed malus, that doesn’t add up. I’d love to see a screenshot of yer stats n gear next time you feel your running super slow, just so we can see where its all coming from. Pain, exhaustion, and thirst/hunger/tired all combined could get up to that point, but at that point your basically dead on your feet, literally and figuratively.
At least for swinging a sword, that feels about right to me. If I’m remembering the weary levels right (Light, moderate, very, extremely, exhausted), then that means at Very Weary, roughly a couple hours of intense shenanigans, that sword is taking 2.5s to swing, plus any other malus. Raising a sword at all at exhausted is probably optimistic
But we can probably handwave that with the Blob healing buffs.