I’ve posted this elsewhere, so you may have seen it. I figured this would be a good place to ask, too.
I was reading through Chainmail again last night and the rules for fatigue jumped out at me. I now wonder how many people who used the Chainmail rules for fights in OD&D used the fatigue rules, and also if anybody used them with the alternate system. Anybody import them into later edition play?
I’ve thought about incorporating some sort of fatigue rules now and again over the rules, yet never actually tried to has something out. I’d love to hear how those who’ve played with fatigure rules of some sort implemented it.
In my home game I use exhaustion in tandem with the overloaded encounter die/hazard die as defined by Necropraxis. It works as follows. Characters have a certain amount of exhaustion points, typically equal to their Constitution divided by 6, rounded up. Depending on the roll, players tick an exhaustion point. After exceeding your allotted points, you start taking penalties to rolls equal to the amount exceeded until you’ve had time to rest and recover.
I like this structure because it gives me some flexibility with the types of time pressure exerted on players, so it isn’t limited to light sources depleting, and since a fair amount of adventures I run might happen in environments that aren’t typical dungeons, it isn’t always appropriate to have light source depletion as the sole source of time pressure.
I’m a fan of accumulation-with-threshold type gauges – I use them for quite a bit. My bespoke system runs all damage on such a system.
I’m curious about the penalty per point exceeded part of this. Is the penalty only on d20 rolls or do you use a different resolution roll where each point is a bigger deal?
It’s penalties to saves, ability checks, and damage (I use ItO no to-hit rolls, so the damage penalty reflects that they are worse at fighting as exhaustion sets in).