Weariness in it’s current implimentation is way to penalizing in a fight. The increase for the time it takes to do something is fine for normal tasks like crafting, manual labour or sorting things out. But it doesn’t make sense that someone would slow down so much that a slow attacker like a zombie would be able to get in 5 punches, scratches and bites before you muster up the energy to stab him with a steak knife once. The urgency of such a situation would mean you wouldn’t just take it slower becease you are weary.
It would make more sense to have attacks and movement not be affected by weariness the same way normal activities are. But instead have them be indirectly effected by direct and visable penalties to speed, strength, dexterity as well as reduced max stamina and stamina regen.
Just some numbers I thought up (might not be ballenced or realistic):
Lightly weary: -5% max stamina and stamina regen. Nothing to major and not really noticable.
Moderately weary: -2% speed and a -15% max stamina and stamina regen. The reduction to speed should give a visable hint to the player to see that it is having a impact on their abilities.
Weary: -5% speed, -1 strength and -25% max stamina and stamina regen. You can still fight if you need to but will do so at a real disadventage.
Very weary: -10% speed, -2 strength, -1 dex, -30% max stamina and -40% stamina regen. This is the point where you really should be avoiding fighting or danger of any kind
Extremly weary: -20% speed, -3 strength, -3 dex, -40% max stamina and -60% stamina regen. This is the point where fighting is only a absolute last resort as these penalties combined with pain will quickly cripple you.
op: “weariness should not affect one of physical activities same way as others because X”
dev: “weariness affects all physical activities”
me: wow, who would’ve guessed
Having worked my fair share of manual labor and been in a few fights, being tired is not something you “ignore” or “push through”. Maybe if you meant tired as in sleepy. Not your muscles burning more and more until the pain is unbearable and they no longer can function.
Being in a fight is much more intensive than most would believe. There is a reason professional fighters train for cardio. You can be the biggest, strongest meanest guy out there. But if you tire out first, you’ll probably not be able to defend yourself from someone “weaker” who’s still running at 100%.
Hitting “the wall” is pretty much the end of any chance of you winning a physical fight IRL. You can push, but it won’t get you anywhere. You’ll feel it, too. You can burn your muscles as much as you want trying as hard as you can and barely feel like you’re putting any force into something at all, because you aren’t anymore. You physically cannot.
Even with a weapon, if you’re again, at the point where your muscles are failing you might be able to stab someone. But you might be surprised (again) at the force it takes to actually push through the various meaty and hard bits people are made out and do any real damage. Especially if they’re zombies taking chunks out of you while you try.
Honestly, from my own experience the only thing wrong with this system is the day after is worse, not better. When you push yourself to your absolute limit your body isn’t playing nice with you for at least two days. Sometimes I could barely lift my arms.
Agreed that there are hard walls that even a professional athlete cannot ‘push’ through. I’ve had one or two RL combat days go so long that by the end I couldn’t even close my hand around the hilt of my sword any more and simply had to walk off the field.
However, it looked to me like the OP was more concerned with the debilitating effects of the earlier tiers of weariness, rather than the final ones. In my experience these stages are in fact where factors like adrenaline rush do effectively cancel out minor effect of exhaustion, where they wouldn’t in non-combat situations like wood chopping.
Adrenaline is a real drug with real and substantial physiological effects (and side/after effects…), and IMO it’s not very well modeled in Cata. The adrenaline rush trait is amusing, but really there should be a lesser non-trait version of it that’s just standard issue - and perhaps a disad that negates it for some survivors.
It should be noted that minor physical ‘penalties’ from things like pain and weariness really can be completely negated or ignored due to adrenaline or willpower under nominal circumstances.
This is mainly because we’re designed not to push ourselves 100% during normal activities, or even combat activities for trained combatants. A fit individual is quite capable of self-injury or near immediate exhaustion if they actually push themselves to their ‘maximum’ strength or endurance. In fact its remarkably hard to force yourself to do this in real life - we have a lot of instinctive safeties to prevent it.
This means that there’s a fair bit of leeway between nominal output and maximum output, and we can lean into that as we deal with initial levels of exhaustion or pain to continue operating at a full nominal level, without penalties in game terms. In engineering terms, a healthy person’s body is significantly over-engineered and has some leeway for dealing with problems before losing real capability.
Of course, most of this extra effort does tend to exhaust us faster, so it is a slippery slope. If we start to dig into those reserves of willpower and push ourselves harder to make up for a deficit caused by minor pain or initial exhaustion, we’ll tire ourselves that much faster, and it won’t be long before you start reaching levels of pain/exhaustion you cannot push through any more and start suffering real penalties regardless of adrenaline, drugs, or willpower.
Part of being a professional athlete/fighter is knowing how to most efficiently marshal and expend these extra reserves to overcome fatigue/pain, operating with an efficiency of motion, never sprinting when jogging will suffice, pushing yourself for just that split second when it will actually make a critical difference and not a moment more. Basically a skilled fighter uses a lot less fatigue to fight than a novice, and knows how to best counteract their own injuries and fatigue as it develops so that they do not hinder their abilities.