Weird dice and other toys. Photo: gruntzooki/Flickr

Over at Gaming Ballistic recently, Douglas Cole wrote about modeling short term combat fatigue in GURPS. He did this by assigning point costs to actions, and allowing characters to recover points by taking a quick breather. This would achieve his goal of duplicating the lulls in combat as the opponents catch their breaths. This instantly made me consider how we could achieve the same effect with Charlie’s cascading dice mechanic.

Rules

Everybody gets a stamina die, maybe d4 for less fit characters like casters, d6 for more fit characters, and maybe even a d8 for those guys who just never quit. The player rolls their die along with any strenuous action: fighting, defending, running, climbing, etc. Following the usual cascading dice method, you fall down a die size whenever you roll a one.

With each die below your normal level, you take a cumulative -1 penalty to physical actions. If you fall below a d4, you’re Stunned, Shaken, or whatever condition in your system du jour represents the inability to act.

Resting

At any time, you can take your turn to rest. This restores one die level, up to your character’s maximum. You can combine this with things like drinking a potion, aiming a weapon, or other non-strenuous actions.  Also, spending a turn Stunned (or whatever) counts as a rest for recovery purposes.

Example

Fi Tor the warrior swings his mighty battle ax, rolling his d6 stamina die along with his to-hit die/dice. He hits, and rolls a six for stamina. All is good.

The foul enemy returns the attack, and our hero parries the succession of blows. Fi Tor, however, rolls his stamina die for his defense, and rolls a one. His stamina die drops to a d4, and he’s now taking a -1 penalty to his attacks (maybe his defenses too?)

Instead of attacking on his turn, Fi Tor hunkers down behind his shield to catch his breath, thus returning to his usual d6 stamina die, and removing his penalty.

Closing Thoughts

I haven’t tried this out yet, but it sounds workable. Applying the fatigue penalty to defenses seems realistic, though potentially brutal. Interestingly, this mechanic also opens up the strategy of ganging up on a powerful opponent not to damage them initially, but rather to force repeated fatigue rolls to tire them out. Thoughts?