I had always thought it was roll to loose FT for each point of strain, not each turn. -jss
Also, to not make everyone want to buy HT instead of Talents, do we want to make people roll Durability instead of HT? -jss
Hm. A rank of Durability is 4 pts. A fatigue point is 3 pts. That leaves between 3 and 18 points of difference before it's as expensive as HT, by my math. And lets me know that I should either nonlinearize the price of Talents or linearize the price of attributes. But I'll think about that one... Durability logically should help with Strain, I guess. --bts
Proposed change for the strain mechanic, now that more people are going to be using it more frequently (I'm thinking of boston spellcasters, but the number of Tallents that take strain and the amount of disbelieveing now that we've got an illusionist will probably rack it up...) This is mostly meant to decrease the number of die rollings, and help remind people to take strain when their tallents call for it.
Whenever you take a point of strain, record it.
When the amount of strain you have is equal to min(HT, remaining fatigue) + Durability ranks, take a fatigue point and set strain to zero.
Also, things that caused a permanent point of strain in ED could cause a permanent point of strain now--when you reset, reset to your amount of perminat strain. This gives the ED-like effect of more durability resulting in more things you can take permanent strain for.
If that results in strain becoming fatigue not nearly often enough, just deduct a constant from the reset threshold. Subracting about 8 seems right...with a HT of 11, you get l3 strain before you fall over. In addition, HT/Fatigue will give you more strain capacity than durability (not much, but some), which I think is a plus. Hmm...HT 11 Dur 5 gives 39 strain and HT 13 Dur 3 gives 41.
Also, you'll never take damage from strain, unless you can strain yourself while uncontious, or your strain threshold suddenly decreases...like losing all your Durability in the no-mana zone...
SR mages might get a very spiffy advantage that lets their WL increase their strain threshold, to represent the way they always soaked drain with WL not HT.
--zebediah
Here's another wacky way of doing it: two damage tracks (or maybe one, with two possible marks on it...) one Stun, one Kill. Damage comes in as Mystic or Physical. Fatigue and Strain are replaced with Stun damage in varying amounts. --bts
Still another way of doing it: one damage track, Fatigue and Strain and all come off of it, but bring back the Wound mechanic from ED. --bts
Awww...but I couldn't wait to rack up my durability and laughingly cast lots of high-strain spells while resisting the KO effects of stunners and watching the bad guy's mouths drop in disbelief...
Although personally I think that a single trak with wounds is the proper way to mechanic damage, it's a huge departure from GURPS. How will WL, HT, and ST interact on that, I wonder?
--zebediah
Alternate strain mechanic. I mentioned this on the class, then had to run, so I don't know what people thought of it. It's based on the idea that strain should only be a problem in stressful situations.
When you take strain, record it. When the battle is done, roll (Strain Threshold) - strain. If you succeed, nothing happens. If you fail, take fatigue equal to 1/5 the fail margin, round up, and wipe your strain. Remember, excess fatigue turns into damage. (modify that to 1/3 or 1/2 for much nastier cutoffs, or 1/10 for nearly nonexistant cutoffs...if you're rolling, the randomness should matter)
When resting, the first rest period (usually 10 minutes) wipes all your strain, and the next start eliminating fatigue.
Permanent strain figures into calculating your strain threshold, maybe at a penalty of 1 for 1...in ED it does much less than Durability, but here doing about the same isn't unreasonable, though I personally like a ratio of 1:2.
In a non-combat situation, you take 1 fatigue per minute of doing something that would cause 1 strain per second (maybe futz with? Should be much less heinous than the actual accumulation)...oooh. One minute of disbelieving something means you either believe it (critfail) or it's gone (critsuc). Perhaps this rule shouldn't apply to disbelieving.
This system has the feature of "You get so much coolness per battle, and they you have to suck it up." Other things to make taking strain from battle more interesting would include everyone gets 2d6 strain at the end of the battle (about 1 fatigue if fail/5, make 1d6 if fail 1/2 or 1/3) and damage also causes strain (perhaps relieved by HPT or some advantage Warrior adepts would buy...hehee...I'll come back to this...). The amount of coolness you get per battle goes up with the Strain Threshold, so that can be noodled with to get the hoped-for amount of coolness.
OK, I'm back to it. Justin mentioned a Rush of Pain advantage, that makes shock add to your skill rolls instead of deduct. certain warrior adepts might buy an advantage that makes it so they *reduce* their amount of strain by their damage when they take damage--so they can do more cool stuff the more you hurt them...ooh. Splufty.
Things that maybe should go into the Strain Threshold calculation:
* Ranks of durability
* points of perminant strain
* HT, definitely, should be the major factor
* Fatigue, or fatige left (subly different...I'm a big fan of min(HT, fatigue left) myself).
* WL (perhaps only for SR mages, who would buy this an an advantage? They always soaked drain with WL...well, sometimes the troll mages didn't).
* ST or HP or damage (logical ors, or course)
* CH (probably not, though it might figure into soaking pure Summoning strain).
Things to keep in mind: For 50 strain, you've either critfailed or critsucceeded your disbelieve roll, so that illusion's gone down or you beleive. At 1/5 that's about 10 fatigue, so you're probably woozy. If it's 1/3, you'd better have a goodly amount of durability, or you'll be pretty out of it. If it's 1/2...riiight.
Actually...my personal suggestion is take fatigue equal to 1/3 fail margin, take a strain for every point of damage you take *in battle*, take 1d6 strain at the end of battle, Threshold is ( 2 x HT + ST + WL - 2 x fatigue - damage - permastrain)/4 + ranks of durability/2, SR mages get an advantage where they can substitue WL in for HT and/or ST in that equasion.
Ouside of combat, take fatige every (threshold)/2 minutes, or 100/threshold fatuge per hour, per point fo strain you would have been taking. (Mostly for ritual magic, I think, and long, wearing processes, like enchanting or forced march). "Sustained disbelief" either doesn't happen, doesn't get to use the reduced fatigue rules, or you only get to roll once per minute or something like that...works for long searches of illusion-protected mazeways and things like that.
Thus most SR mages have a strain threshold of WL -fatigue/2 -damage/4.
An average troll, ork, human, and dwarf have thresholds of 13, 12.25, 10, and 12 -fatige/2 -(damage + permastrain)/4 + durability/2 ranks. I think. Dwarves have a +2 to HT, right? If not, they start at 11.5.
And a starting troll could have as high as 16 on the extreme outside. A total muchkin maximised for strain would have a threshold of 23.5 + circle/2...so at 5th circle, he'd have 16 extra points of strain per combat to play with...which is 5 seconds of triple speed without breaking a sweat (mmm, cyberware). Scary, no? If it were usable outside combat, he would be taking a fatige every 20 minutes, or once every subjective hour.
(One thing I really like about this strain mechanic is you can use it to randomize fatigue with a very few die rolls, and only when it matters. No more "I can cast this spell 4 times and that spell once before passing out."--strain hits hard when it hits, and doesn't bother you otherwise.)
--zebediah
Er, might want to divide those ranks of durability by 2. Your call. --zebediah