Rules of Engagement - II - Updating Encumbrance, Stamina and Exhaustion

Introduction

Encumbrance, Stamina & Exhaustion. For every character, three systems. What could be simpler, right?

One can only learn to love that curdled smell of emergent complexity brought forth by penalty dispensers being frantically milked for diminishing returns. What’s more, concerning oneself with this kind of thing in a game that traditionally allows its characters to perform at peak shape until they’re down seems almost contrarian. Feels like I bought the right ticket, is what I’m saying.

Cavalierly skewering all of these systems simultaneously wasn’t on the program when the word document got opened but these structures just come daisy-chained in a way that going for the one necessarily begs questions about the others, their interactions feedbacking into each other, oftentimes to the point of near-redundance.

A look at the books starts off our tour of dismay: AD&D’s tag on Encumbrance oscillates between minimalist “tournament rules” and byzantine “fully optional” and it doesn’t fare any better elsewhere, despite being a system that I take as a cornerstone of effective hexcrawl play. Exhaustion in turn is appendix-material on 5th edition, and both it and Stamina are referenced in AD&D only obliquely, being inserted into the movement rules in a very piecemeal fashion, relying on fluctuating attribute point loss and recovery and a lot of checks made at ever-shifting penalties. At one point, as an instructive example, the rules candidly refer the possibility of levying a -17 ( … ) attack penalty upon a character.

Perusing more recent efforts, the indiscriminate usage of Disadvantage strikes as fine and dandy when a lightning-quick adjudication is needed but there’s quite a lot to dislike about it when attached to systems of this nature, namely that when it drops, it drops like a hammer, essentially exacerbating all of the problems of lack of granularity that are usually levelled at encumbrance systems. It has no place here and it needs to go.

Exhaustion is likewise a decent idea with a poor implementation, as it is guilty of the same high-swinging penalties, many of them redundant with those of encumbrance. Once upon a time, my 5th Ed. gut reaction would have been to say that if you get disadvantage from two different sources to the same roll the action simply becomes impossible. Now, a different approach beckons.

Reinventing the Breaking Wheel

Starting with obvious, there’s the fact that Encumbrance and Exhaustion are two nominally different systems that conspire to do the exact same thing: drag a character’s effectiveness down in response to play events or decisions. The path of simplicity would point towards simply merging the two. Ultimately though, they do represent different things and so I compromised to keep them separate and try to streamline both as much as possible, as they need to be gained and shed fluidly during the course of play, especially considering the implementation of Stamina, our third man, as it were, in this little gathering of subsystems.

Making sure the three systems connect is an ongoing concern and gradualism is to be the name of the game, as I tried to make the penalties mount less abruptly and in a sensical progression. Shutting out all the gripes about modifier complexity afforded a much greater design freedom (while still managing to steer clear of the 1/3 and 2/3 modifiers apparently so dear to AD&D) to achieve this goal.

Curiously, the most direct unifying line between exhaustion and encumbrance ends up being the character’s movement rate, a finite resource which aptly acts as a kind of shared currency: the more fatigued a character is, the less objects he is able to carry without being reduced to immobility and encumbrance likewise coming to bear in determining how fatiguing in turn a given task is ruled to be.

Stamina

Many activities are deemed tiresome and cannot be engaged in indefinitely, being necessary to record the time spent in their pursuit and confronting it with each character’s endurance. Fatigue should be a carefully considered factor, as particularly harrowing experiences may find a character risk collapse from overexertion.

·         The type of task dictates the time intervals at which stamina is checked: the greater the momentary exertion involved, the shorter the time segments

·         Whenever characters exceed their stamina, they must either:

 

o   Stop and rest the prescribed length of time

or, if persisting in exertion:

o   Make a Constitution check to avoid increasing their level of Exhaustion

o   Halve the characters’ stamina for the remainder of the activity

o   Double the length of time needed to recover afterwards

o   Repeat the procedure once stamina runs out anew, with the Constitution check, if any, made at increased difficulty (second part of this post explains what I mean by "difficulty")

 

·         A character who hasn’t rested is not fit to attempt further fatiguing actions (or must face an outright increase of exhaustion if he does)

·         Resting after (or during) a given activity will replenish the character’s stamina for renewed effort; any levels of exhaustion can only be recovered at a rate of 1 level per day of rest

·         A day in which a character acquires any levels of exhaustion from exertion will require that food and drink intake be doubled

·         Depending on the circumstance, a character who reaches the sixth stage of exhaustion may collapse from overexertion, faint from dehidration, hypothermia or overheating, starve to death, slide off the rock face during a climb or simply drown

·        Days spent in the Wilderness is a special entry, conceived to represent the harshness of life beyond the confines of civilization. Any points of exhaustion imposed by it cannot be recovered through normal rest but instead require downtime away from the wilderness (they also don’t interfere with food intake).

Stamina Table

Exhaustion Table

Encumbrance Table

Character’s Carrying Capacity (Inventory Slots)

Standard stuff, mostly unchanged from my previous post on the subject, save for the adjustments to the encumbrance levels above and the simplified armour penalties, to follow below.

As a quick recap:

·         Medium-sized characters have 20 inventory slots, Small-sized characters have 15, including left and right hands in each case

·         Worn clothing is disregarded unless specified

·         Slots represent the maximum practical number of significant items that the character can strap to himself. Beyond this, further objects need to be carried by hand in containers

·         Minor items can be bundled in multiples to a single slot

·         Heavy weapons take up two slots

·         Bulky objects take up a variable number of slots

Armour Penalties

·         Worn armour shifts encumbrance up by one category if the character does not conform to its minimum Strength requirements

·         Wearing any heavy armour will increase a character’s level of encumbrance

·         Some finer actions, such as spellcasting and thief abilities, are further impaired by the use of any armour beyond encumbrance, the action’s description details penalties, if any exist

Press-Lifting

Particularly large objects not meant to be carried or worn are not adequately representable in slots but rather by their gross weight. If a character wants to move a thick lid off a tombstone or drag a heavy chest out of the dungeon no dice need be rolled, rather enough help or mechanical advantage needs to be gathered to surpass the inertial threshold. This is represented by the special Overburdened category of encumbrance. A character cannot lift more than twice his own weight, regardless of Strength. 

Closing Thoughts

The guiding principles remain the same as before: to sap the idea, promoted by incipient rules, that characters are universally endowed with superhuman resilience, to affirm the less obvious undercurrents of challenge faced when braving the wild, to juke the player out of the comfort zone.

These are the kind of rules that, if you’ll pardon my saying it, separate the men from the boys, as they open a world of nuance and lend the game a more human touch. They force planning to center stage, they are more than a bit hard to keep track of, they don’t forgive much. Above all, they attempt to provide a fair systematization for modelling that tremendously disagreable thing known to us as the setback or the everyday inconvenience, being of utmost importance that the player be faced with transparent, sensical and adequate in-game repercussions for things befalling the character during the course of play. These are the kind of rules that don’t win any popularity contests and are frequently loathed by players but they’re of unmatched importance in striking a tone. If a player pans them out of hand without offering up anything better, that’s a player best done without.