The Tavern

I'd like to see a system implemented which creates a numeric "Fatigue" percentage. I feel that it would balance AC/melee with spellcasting and stealth builds. Currently, there are some bizzare combinations which work well, particularly with the removal of strength weighting on items (a poor choice in my opinion.) I feel that defense, AC in particular is often more important than offense. While a strong offense may allow you to survive by removing threats more quickly, it's a larger gamble to stay alive in times where there is a lot of danger. For example, with high AC you can potentially chip away longer with a weak offense, all the while more safely assessing the amount of danger you are in. Splattering everything quickly until the time you don't, then being in hot water isn't as valuable overall towards completing the game as living to fight another day. A combination I'm thinking of is for example, a melee character that wears super heavy armor without enhanced STR and very little skill, but swings a venom dagger over and over and over. Melee's effective "infinite mana" makes it quite a bit more effective for a large amount of the game than spellcasting. I'm glossing over the reasons why here, there are a lot of factors, but this is my conclusion. Fatigue would even the playing field some, without being a solution which boosts other techniques, but instead makes heavy armor/melee more challenging to play.

Each time you swing your weapon, it creates some fatigue, based on how heavy the armor you are wearing is.
Each time you take another action besides melee, it reduces your fatigue (you catch your breath)

Fatigue would modify the accuracy and damage of the melee attack. At 0% fatigue, you strike with no penalty, at 100% fatigue, you would have horrible accuracy and damage, and possibly you might not be able to perform a melee attack at all, or even worse, you stand the chance of passing out.

I realize my statements about AC and melee being overpowered as compared with casting/stealth (except in extreme or late game circumstances) may be met with skepticism, but I feel like defending that position would take quite a bit of explanation, so rather I am presenting this idea instead for anyone who already "gets it."

Fatigue was implemented in circus animals fork. It worked there but only after reducing speed of all PC, otherwise there was too much running away with adjacent monsters to restore energy. Of course also there was a consumble to instantly restore some energy

Interesting. That sounds suspiciously what spell casting and stabbers have to do, run away when mana runs out or stealth is broken else die because you can't deal much damage. So, if this was implemented again, it would be fair. It just exposes the issue. The supposed counter to this type of behavior is running away, stirring up more of the dungeon and eventually getting caught in a corner somewhere then dying.

The parallel would be, if spell casting were free of costing any mana at all. I assume the idea is that it is then more effective than melee at delivering it's payload.

Perhaps if spell casting is to remain a limited resource, it ought to do significantly more damage and be quite a bit safer than the melee tactics. I'm not seeing that currently. It can do more damage, but only after a painful curve and with so many awkward situations concerning MR, resists, etc, all the while it's much harder to maintain defenses due to the fact that STR mitigates armor penalties, and delivers damage, yet INT alone is more difficult to translate into AC and damage at once.

I'd expect a successful "introduce fatigue" campaign would be followed by a successful "remove fatigue" campaign.

Spell casting does damage at a range higher than 1 (well, except for a few spells like sticky flame/freeze). That makes it quite a lot safer than melee.

I'll support fatigue if melee attacks become range 4 or 5. Or 7. Man if I could hit things with unarmed at range 7, nothing would ever be left standing in LOS. Let's do this.

Think about stabs with 7 range...

I agree with the OP about the feeling that defence (AC) is more important than offence. However, I disagree about making melee similar to spells, which is what fatigue would do, with the difference that it would also screw low strength casters with some armour and a dagger of elec and rob them of plan B (bash).

A better way would imho be causing heavier armour to actually slow you. It would require a lot of playtesting, and who knows what kind of edge cases it would create.

Aside from forms, you're describing Throwing. And yeah, it's pretty good.

The original proposal seems misguided as it nerfs melee, which is already the weakest form of combat.

To balance the various combat methods the most straightforward way would be to get rid of luring being super powerful - either via removing upstairs or making all monsters faster than the player (player could get a swiftness-like ability to allow for tactical retreats in a limited fashion).

This way melee would actually be a choice from an optimal play perspective as it would have the easiest time to not run low on relevant resources (in this case only HP). Pure casters would be nerfed a bit as safe MP regeneration would become more tricky. I guess in the end it would force all characters to adapt more to the actual dungeon.

Unfortunately missile combat would still be overpowered. But there the issue is rather that it is sort of a special form of "magic missile" with a limited instead of a replenishing resource, which could be fine, if the resource would actually be limited in practice. If missile combat has to stay I would propose to strongly limit the ammo amount and buff its power a bit to compensate to actually differentiate it from blaster mages. That way they could provide the highest single target damage of all combat methods, but be resource limited.

Well, Dith's Shadow Step is almost there...