>From: "Sam Elliot" <sam.elliot1_at_...>
>
>Hunger, Thirst, Heat and Humidty all rolled into one
Oh, this is a good one to mention. Recall all of those rules for Endurance and such in other RPGs? That few people use because calculating all of the figures was a PITA, and never seemed to pay out in interesting output as often as you'd like in play? Either players had too much endurance, or too little for the action in question, and there was no tension produced from it?
I recall how in Rolemaster, for instance, spell points get piled so high that he only way that you could ever run out of them is if you were to go through a dungeon full of many, many monsters. Even more than the published materials, in fact.
I mean it's an interesting idea, and something that comes up in the source literature and stuff all the time. The character is exhausted, adding to the tension, or the like. I'm reading Eragon to my six-year old, for instance, and it comes up with great regularity.
Well, in HQ, these things are really fun again, in my experience. Either as a contest near the end of an extended contest, or even just as a simple contest any time the players seem to be pushing their characters hard.
So...what Sam said. We all know that the jungle is dangerous because of the heat and humidity, and that the drinking water might be contaminated. Represent these survival challenges with a contest at some point. Gives players a chance to show off their various survival abilities with appropriate modifiers. And failure means degraded performance in line with the level of the failure (or AP loss).
Fun stuff. One of my favorites is to watch for characters who are using magic repeatedly, or for large applications. Even if they use their abilities successfully, I may have a follow on contest to see if their magic use exhausts them - I think of using magic as an exhausting activity. This gives another reason "why people don't use magic for everything all the time." Not only might you fail with whatever bad repercussions that failing to use magic successfully has (and these are numerous themselves), but it's simply not easy.
Mike
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