Rich H wrote: For instance, PCs are wearied when their fatigue plus encumbrance levels outstrip their endurance and NPCs don't track fatigue and encumbrance. So, logically NPCs don't get wearied? Nope, they still do; it's when they lose all their Hate/Hope. Huh? ... That's removing something but adding the [wearied] condition to something else, and something that doesn't produce the same result if the same thing happened to a PC. No wonder we get lots of threads started asking for these kind of things to be clarified - it isn't just removing a rule, it's also adding/altering it elsewhere.
I can see why people have a tough time understanding it.
Rocmistro wrote:I'm not saying having a different ruleset for governing NPCs is better or worse, I'm just saying that's what appears to be the designers intent. (equally powerful but less fidgety)
I'm not sure that's necessarily the correct, or only, conclusion. It could just as easily be the design intent to have lower Endurance amounts for NPCs/adversaries to simply improve the PCs' chance of survival. RPGs without any equivalent wearied condition often have NPCs etc with lower health levels than PCs based on the fact that PCs are involved in every combat within the game whereas other characters general just see one combat and that's their lot. Any increase in the difficulty of the combat rules reduces the survival rate of the PCs. I'm not saying you're wrong in this respect just that there are other dynamics to designing a game which may well be at play.
Rich, an interesting point, but I still think it was
primarily their intent for NPC's to be "equal but less fidgety". Here's the difference in weariness between Endurance loss and hate loss:
The LM has more control over when the adversaries lose hate. Endurance loss will be largely dictated by PC's: they will attack and do damage. The LM must monitor that and always be checking for weariness. Hate, on the other hand, the LM has (almost) total control over. He can spend down to 1 hate and then keep that last one in reserve so that his NPCs don't become weary, or save it al for a big finish and go out in a big bang (where death will happen for the NPC probably in the same round that he would otherwise become weary). It's only when the PC's intimidate foes that the LM loses total control over the hate reserve, and thus the wearied condition. And a clever LM can still somewhat mitigate this; notice 2 of the 3 monsters that have only 1 hate point are craven, and some commander type NPC's restore hate points. So an LM can adapt to players who choose to Intimidate Foes and has a large degree of control over when his NPC's are weary and when they aren't. In this, the game does a good job of allowing the LM to gloss over NPC weariness if he finds he doesn't want to track it, thus somewhat lightening his burden.
Speaking as a somewhat experienced LM, however, managing weariness for my NPC's, just as any other "condition" (I'm looking at 3.5 with all it's various sickened, frightened, staggered, checked, blind, etc. ad nauseum) is no big deal.
Regarding your second point, Rich, about player survivability. Yes, I agree that's also part of the reason. I would add to that list that a big part of it is just player fun. Players enjoy the thrill of taking down multiple bad guys, even if the actual odds/threat/danger was no different if it's 10 bad guys at 5 endurance vs. 5 bad guys at 10 endurance (it's still 50 points of damage that must be done). Everyone wants to feel like they are doing well!
