But if on each round I had a different, fresh opponent going for the k.o. against me... well, that's a completely different story.
I think that a LOTR battle would be more like this: your character always gets new, fresh Orcs eager to kill him, and he has to be equally efficient against all of them. So it's all about skill and fatigue control, rather than sheer endurance training. And soon or late (and by "late" I mean quite soon
), they HAVE to get prolonged rest, otherwise they'll go down, end of story. Heck, I would reduce the Endurance of the characters by, let's say, 1 point every 5 combat rounds even if they don't get hit at all!Fighting is hard indeed.
EDIT: my comments in another thread regarding armor and fatigue:
In terms of game balance, heavy armor becomes less useful as the game advances to higher challenges: the adversaries deal more and more damage, while their chance to score a Penetrating Strike remains almost (if not exactly) the same. So the characters get hammered to WEARY conditions faster and heavy armors only worsen this. The only way to counteract this is by raising characters' Endurance, but still, adversaries' damage outputs tend to grow faster than the character's ability to "toughen up".
But it also depends on the threat: if you're facing a horde of Orcs, you'll receive a lot of blows, and your chance to get WOUNDED gets higher. Hence, a heavy armor would be more advantageous. But if the Company is facing a single powerful Mountain Troll, I would recommend them to throw away their armors, since a single opponent won't score many Penetrating Strikes, while it will deal tons of Endurance damage. But would YOU, real-life people, throw away your armor when facing a 10 feet tall monster? I guess not!
Ruling armors has never been an easy task in rpgs...