Spending Fatigue and Resting

By Mr11, in Descent: Journeys in the Dark

From the rules:

Move: The hero moves his hero figure up to a number of spaces equal to the hero’s Speed. The hero may interrupt his movement with another action and then complete his movement after the other action is resolved.

Rest: The hero will recover all fatigue at the end of this turn.

ADDITIONAL MOVEMENT
A hero may suffer fatigue to receive additional movement points during his turn. For each fatigue suffered, the hero receives one movement point. If the hero already has fatigue equal to his Stamina, he may not suffer any more fatigue to receive additional movement points

My question is whether the rest option was intended to function as it does. Given these rules if you have a hero with movement < stamina and that hero has no need for stamina after his turn (i.e. during the overlord's turn) then it would never make sense to perform 2 move actions if you wanted to cover a lot of ground, it would always be more beneficial to do a move + rest and spend all of your fatigue (since you will get it all back after the overlords turn). Is this intended and am I understanding it correctly?

It seemed that at most the delta between movement and stamina was 1 but I am just making sure that this is correct.

This would also work for performing a skill and resting. If you had a hero with a large stamina pool (say 5) then they could declare use a skill and rest and if the skill costs 1 point of stamina then they could move 4 spaces use a skill and be at full stamina the next turn. Correct?

I am having my first play test tomorrow night so I wanted to make sure these were correct interpretations of the rules.

You are correct on all points. That was how the Fatigue was meant to be used, at least at the start. As your character grows through the campaign, you'll be using Fatigue with your skills to do stuff.

Great, thanks. I just wanted to make sure because it seemed odd to me that you would have a better option that 2 movements for moving far distances happy.gif

You can't spend the fatigue you recover with a rest action on the same turn that you rest, so if you need to move a long way RIGHT NOW it is sometimes more beneficial to double-move and spend all your fatigue, which lets you move farther on the current turn (2x speed + stamina) but leaves you with no fatigue on the next turn.

But long-term, yes, if your stamina is higher than your speed, resting is more efficient than move actions.

This assumes you are free of fatigue at the time. With nigh on every skill costing fatigue now, I'd suggest that was pretty unlikely.

Sausageman said:

This assumes you are free of fatigue at the time.

No it doesn't. Taking 2 move actions and spending all of your available fatigue for extra movement always takes you farther and leaves you more fatigued than performing 1 movement action and a rest action, even if your available fatigue is currently zero (because 2 move actions still goes further than 1).

There are several rules that were not well thought out. Spending fatigue for move was one. If the idea is to get somewhere on the map first, the Heroes pretty much have that covered. Rest is another, that should have been a full turn action or roll the die for how much you get back. It's almost like they didn't put these rules through extensive testing.

Antistone said:

Sausageman said:

This assumes you are free of fatigue at the time.

No it doesn't. Taking 2 move actions and spending all of your available fatigue for extra movement always takes you farther and leaves you more fatigued than performing 1 movement action and a rest action, even if your available fatigue is currently zero (because 2 move actions still goes further than 1).

Granted - but you can't spend 'all your fatigue' (assuming your stamina is greater than your speed, as was the initial post) for additional movement if you've already spent some/all of it.

Also note that you recover all fatigue from a rest action at the end of your turn, not the end of the OL turn. As a reminder of taking the rest action you put one of your tokens on your activation card, then discard it and all fatigue at the end of your turn when you flip your activation card.

wootersl said:

There are several rules that were not well thought out. Spending fatigue for move was one. If the idea is to get somewhere on the map first, the Heroes pretty much have that covered. Rest is another, that should have been a full turn action or roll the die for how much you get back. It's almost like they didn't put these rules through extensive testing.

I disagree. There are plenty of things that just don't seem well balanced (Shadow Dragons) or don't play out well (inconsistent scaling for number of players), but fatigue is just fine as it is. Actions are in very short supply, so spending an action to recover fatigue every turn is just unrealistic since you're basically limiting yourself to a move-attack every turn.

Keep in mind that the levels are much smaller in D2.0, so there is rarely a need to move with careful marathon-like efficiency. Much more commonly, the fatigue is spent to get somewhere deseprately needed before the OL, or to squeeze out one extra movement or two to get your attack or search or whatever. That's how it should be.

Sometimes it is 1 movement point more efficient to use fatigue instead of movement to move for some characters, but I don't see anything mechanically wrong with this, and its rare enough that it has minimal thematic impact as well.