Hi masters!

Recently we faced a situation were the group stacked with fatigue and stress in a combat (in fact it's quite common), After the combat, when entering in story mode, people started performing "Asses the Situation" to recover fatigue and stress. Since it has 0 recharge tokens, does it mean it can be done as many times as required to fully recovered after a combat?

The main issue is that you can just get lots of fatigue and stress and fully recover afterwards in a "second".

Any thoughts about limiting "asses the situation" during story mode so people get fatigued and stressed after the combat ends?

Thanks in advance!

Hi,

In story mode Assess the Sit can take as much time as you see fit, its a narrative round so its your call as GM. My general feel is that it should be accompanied by appropriate roleplay choices. For eg Thom the conman just escaped a close shave after attempting to sell some fake perfume to a couple of secret cultists of Khorne, an hour spent in the local tavern drinking ale served with crusty bread and cheese, while taking stock of the latest peril would be good. As would, after seeing off the beastman ambush Elmer the Shepherd has a good long stroll round the camp, making sure none of the buggers are still lurking.

After one of my players tried the 'rinse and repeat' assess during what was supposed to be a fast paced high stress part of an adventure, I've taken quite a hard stance on repeating Assess.

Hope that helps

I too take a hard stance on all actions/recharge in narrative time.

In the 3 Act structure, you get rally step and then round by round recharge.

I use Acts for social, investigative events too at times, as in "this Act is all afternoon, each hour is a round".

Players know that generically outside that structure you get to use something once only (it's all one round in effect) unless I've declared "we're doing a round this afternoon, a round this evening, a round night to 2 pm, etc". This is narrative/story logic. It's boring to see repetition and seeing repeated scenes of someone walking and thinking, recovering their wits, really is "one use of that action, whatever it was".

This is very similar to the no spam healing rule.

Now if an end of Episode was called, people got a fatigue/stress recovery and then their first night's rest after that I given that again (I do not give it again for a 2nd night's rest, only wound recovery, if you had more than twice stat stress or fatigue you carry the effects unless your interlude action is to rest and recovery).

I do think this is a serious weakness in the WFRP3 system - it's very hard to suspend disbelief when the GM is putting up ropey "narrative" arguments why something that took 5 seconds in the middle of a fight takes 30 minutes when everyone is chilling out (i.e. fatigue recovers quickly when you're running around!)

I've been thinking about this a lot, and here's my solution. And it also works for healing miracles and anything of that sort. However, it requires a bit of extra book keeping and having never tested it, I'm not 100% sure it works!

1) Keep track of Wounds, Fatigue and Stress picked up in encounter mode as usual.

2) Any cards that heal or remove only do so temporarily. So, when you get an effect that says "heal", simply take the counters / wound cards and put them somewhere else for safe keeping.

3) When encounter mode ends, the adrenalin fades, and those wounds, fatigue and stress come flooding back. You then have the option of using the very same talents, miracles and actions once more for a permanent effect, but because you're in story mode you're back to "once every so often".

There's still a fair amount of narrativium involved in thise, but at least the contrast isn't so stark. And I'll confess, I originally came up with this concept for Healing miracles (Healing prayers in combat are temporary, Healing rituals in story mode are permanent), and hadn't thought of applying it to Fatigue or Stress. But it should still work, in theory.

Downside, players might immediately pass out from accumulated fatigue at the end of a fight. But do you know what, maybe that's actually realistic (thinking of people fainting moments after crossing the finishing line of a marathon for example)

In as a whole assess the situation is a Base, Defense trait card, so I don't allow it to be used unless the player is in a situation that requires him to defend himself as this is why the trait is there, a reminder of who, how and when it can be used. Hence once the combat is over, the card can no longer be used for anything.

I do however generally allow a Rally step between every fight rather than every act and I often allow an "extended" rally step rather than the limited one the book offers between acts. In the extended rally step players recover an amount of fatigue equal to their toughness and an amount of stress equal to their willpower. This generally means that between major acts they fully or close to it recover stess and fatigue.

I do this simply because I find that otherwise the players will often take less heroic and less interesting story routes because of the reality of their "mechanical" situation, another words, they look at their characters wounded, full of fatigue and stress and they start meta gaming… "yeah Im not chasing that guy in the alley"… so they return to the tavern to sleep for the night.

Not that I don't like realism on some levels, but I don't find that the game feels anymore more realistic with this type of meta gaming going on and in as a whole it feels considerably less like a fantasy adventure game and more like my life, dull and safe.

BigKahuna said:

Unless I'm misreading you, this is the very opposite of metagaming. If a character is tired, wounded and stressed, they might very well avoid getting involved in a chase, so they're acting consistently with the real condition of their PCs. This is roleplaying.

Metagaming would be if they were wounded, fatigued and stressed and purposefully picked a fight with a paraplegic barman just so they could use the various healing actions available to them in encounter mode.

phild said:

True but I also quantify meta gaming in regards to the concepts of realism vs. "fantasy realism" which aren't the same. I don't want the players thinking in realism terms because frankly that's not what role-playing games are about at all, in fact, they are the exactly designed to ensure people do not think in realistic terms. We want the players thinking in terms of hero's and the story like an exciting movie. So when the players are exhausted and injured, I don't want them suddenly to go into "lets analyze this realistically mode" because this sort of thinking which I consider meta game thinking brings the story to a halt and players start thinking in terms of mechanics (lets heal up) rather than where there heads should be at "how awsome would it be if we chased him right now".

So yeah your right, realistically speaking it makes sense for them not to chase the villian and the wise "realistic" think to do is to rest, but than again, isnt it also wise and realistic not to get involved in chasing demons, beastmen and other monsters into dark alleys?

We aren't trying to create reality here, we live reality. I don't want my players thinking like they do in their real life "oh this is dangerous, better go home".. I want them to be thinking like Bruce Willis in Die Hard…. "**** yeah we are doing that!"

I have taken to further abstracting the time requirement tied to action cards. When a player uses the Assess the Situation, he is quite likely to receive a narration of events he is witnessing or rethinking that imply immediate action is better than the next player also assessing with long increments of time passing over the course of each Assess, in turn.

BigKahuna said:

Well, this isn't metagaming, this is players roleplaying in a different style to the way you want them to! That's a different matter altogether. Given that WFRP is a bit like D&D-meets-Call of Cthulhu, personally I find this sort of behaviour entirely rational and in-genre! Savage Worlds, Feng Shui and Torg are Bruce Willis in Die Hard. I think if you want WFRP to be like that too, you might want to upgrade Fortune points both in terms of number and what they can do. John McClane has the advantage that he is the star of the narrative and is virtually guaranteed not to die - that aint so with WFRP!

BigKahuna said:

I use the 1 hour rule as well but it goes other ways , any action that last for x round will last for x hours as well, so if a pries uses a blessing on the party, every morning the blessing will remain in play for the x number of hours etc.

I would treat it like Healing, if necessary.