Frayed Knights: Resting, Sleeping, Fatigue, and Exhaustion
It's time for another of those updates on Frayed Knights, the upcoming indie role-playing game that refuses to take itself too seriously. This week we're gonna talk nuts & bolts of the game some more. If the topic sounds tiring, it's because that's what it's about --- getting tired.

Adventurers lead strenuous lives. When they are slinging spells and swinging swords in life-or-death conflicts, or traversing treacherous trap-filled, uh, territories.... they are traveling great distances, hunting quest threads, and performing conversational acrobatics. All while lugging around more equipment and loot than any human could really be expected to carry. It's an exhausting career choice!

So unlike certain other, newer RPGs, the heroes of Frayed Knights are not going to be able to go all day without taking a breather or getting some well-deserved shut-eye. Well, probably not. Unless you blow all your silver on Liquid Nap potions. But that's another story.


So here we have a screenshot of a situation you'll find yourself in frequently in Frayed Knights - turning in for the evening. In this instance, it's at an inn, and you'll have to pay to rent the bed for the night. Or day. Or ... well, generic sleep-period. Whatever.

Those who have played the pilot episode (man, is that thing still around?) will note that there's a little campfire icon in both the standard and combat control amulet in the lower right. That's to "Rest" ("R") - which is something pretty different. Ah, now I should probably explain the difference. I'll have Chloe demonstrate.

Here's Chloe. Above her icon, she's got two colored bars. The top, red bar is her health. Running out of health is bad. It doesn't kill the character in Frayed Knights (or we'd run into all kinds of problems with characters having conversations with dead people). But it does incapacitate them. Which means they can still talk, but are not really good for anything else until they are restored. That takes a good night's sleep. So there's one reason for spending your hard-earned silver in the local inn.

But wait, that's not all!

The blue bar below that is the character's endurance bar. Endurance is what allows the character to act. There's no "mana" or other spell-casting limits in Frayed Knights... it's all endurance. It's used to swing swords, cast spells, whatever. When the endurance drops to zero, a lot of things happen, depending upon whether or not the party is in combat. But the basic problem is that the character immediately gets a penalty to pretty much anything he is doing that caused endurance to drop to nothing. On top of that, any roll the character is forced to make - like defending against an attack - is going to be made at a fairly steep penalty. While not exactly a sitting duck, a fatigued character just lacks the energy to dodge well. Finally, if the party is in combat, the fatigued character automatically takes a "rest" action as their next move, to get the endurance bar back into positive territory. This means a character running on low endurance is going to be a lot slower on all of their actions - because they will have to waste precious combat cycles resting.

What exactly does resting do? In combat, rest restores a certain number of points of endurance - reducing temporary fatigue. And it takes up time - time where the monsters may use to do horrible things to your health bar. But it should really be thought of as "taking a breather" or pausing to catch one's breath. The player may voluntarily choose to have the character rest at any time as the character's action - mainly to avoid having endurance drop to zero and taking those penalties.

Outside of combat, resting is always voluntary and effects the entire party at once. The entire party rests however long it takes for everyone's temporary fatigue to be eliminated. Probably. It's almost instantaneous for the player, but time passes in the game exactly as if it were combat - a number of turns pass for everyone to rest up to maximum endurance. This means spell effects can expire, and there are multiple chances for monsters to show up and ruin everyone's break-time.

So that's how resting works.

While catching quick breathers and short rests may be enough to take you over the next hump, there's only so far it can sustain you. A marathon runner is going to need more than a five minute break after one race to be ready to run competitively in another. Sooner or later, characters will become exhausted and a quick breather won't carry them very far anymore.

You'll note that Chloe has a little gold marker - a ring - around her endurance bar. This represents long-term exhaustion. As the character builds up temporary fatigue, they also build up long-term exhaustion (at a much slower rate). Exhaustion acts to limit the character's maximum stamina. The little gold ring starts all the way to the right - the character can tap their entire reservoir of endurance - and then very slowly slides over to the left.

It eventually stops, so the maximum endurance will never be completely reduced to nothing. But at max exhaustion, characters only have about a third of their maximum stamina to work with. That means that "zero stamina" danger level comes much, much faster.

Exhaustion can only be cured by sleeping. That means finding a place to sleep. Or, alternately, pumping down a potion of Liquid Nap, which isn't quite as good (and won't restore an incapacitated character), but works better than Red Bull.

So the overall gameplay effect is that there is some level of long-term resource management that you will need to pay attention to in Frayed Knights, but you never have to worry about completely "running out" of spells or whatnot.

A side-effect of the way I did this - with endurance being the limiting factor to spell-casting - is that I must be very careful about providing any spells that restore endurance. If that's even possible (and I'm still uncommitted either way), I have to make certain that the laws of thermodynamics apply to magic. Specifically, entropy must rule - casting a spell to restore endurance must always cost more than restores.

Labels: Frayed Knights, Game Design

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