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As we all know, the 4Ms of Wargame Design are Movement, Melee, Missiles, and Morale. However, those broad categories cover a wide range of areas. My recent look into Logistics and RPG-Lite spawned some great discussion on various places online, and those types of discussions help energize my thoughts. The topic of exhaustion and fatigue came naturally came up in these discussion and I felt like that was an area I needed to spend some time thinking about. Fatigue and Exhaustion probably fit into the Morale part of the 4Ms, but I wanted to take a deeper dive into modeling exhaustion in miniature wargaming.

A short discussion about Fatigue and Exhaustion on the blog:
https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2023/12/wargame-design-sometimes-i-just-get-so.html



The summary is that Fatigue is a great way to add Chrome to a game. It allows you to add in some great gameplay elements such as:

- Resource Management
- Unit Management
- Add a Tactical Layer
- Morale Elements
- Victory Conditions

Designers should think about how to represent Fatigue in their games' design goals, and how they want to represent fatigue on the tabletop.

So, what games have you run across that handle Fatigue and Exhaustion really well? How did they do it? Was it integrated into other rules or stand-alone rules? How do you feel about exhaustion and Fatigue in a rules system?

I'm a big fan of status effect in all their forms. If you ain't got fatigued, stunned, poisoned, and burning at the very least, don't even talk to me.

Likewise I am a fan of status effects, where they make sense for use. That being said I generally prefer to bundle fatigue, fear, psychology, pinning, motivation, morale, etc. together into a generic "friction" system rather than trying to account for an track all the different of the psyche as separate resources or what-have-you.

Doesn't mean you can't have specific "fear" or "fatigue" status effects that trigger under specific circumstances or give certain penalties or result in specific consequential rules, etc. but in terms of a more general overarching Morale system (thats a capital M because I'm speaking in terms of 1 of the 4+ Ms that form the core of a games mechanical systems, as opposed to status effects as a sort of additional USR type layer of rules) sticking to a single consolidated stat is more streamlined and allows you to account for various effects in a reasonably abstract manner without overloading your player with multiple tables of overlapping penalties and bonuses. A single-stat can feed in Morale "damage" from multiple sources to trigger whatever the desired consequences or penalties are, and then you can add in appropriate status effect tokens off of very specific and limited triggers.

I.E. - "The nazi occultist warband fires a machine gun at you so you take 2 friction tokens to represent the pinning effects of the withering fire, etc. Because you suffered casualties from the atrack you take an additional -1 friction due to trauma of watching your buddy die. Your attacks suffer a penalty equal to the number of friction tokens you have and if the unit has more friction tokens than its morale score it must make a morale test to avoid falling back. Then the nazi occultists summon a lovecraftian horror which causes fear to all units with line of sight to it - take a fear status effect token on the same unit to represent this, as a result you must reroll any successful morale checks the unit makes. If the unit falls back, it does so at double speed. If you want to attack the unit you must take an additional friction token to represent the stress of fighting your worst nightmares made flesh and blood."

chaos0xomega wrote:
Likewise I am a fan of status effects, where they make sense for use. That being said I generally prefer to bundle fatigue, fear, psychology, pinning, motivation, morale, etc. together into a generic "friction" system rather than trying to account for an track all the different of the psyche as separate resources or what-have-you.

It really comes down to the scale of the game. At the strategic level fatigue blends in to logistics and command so that players can't simply move everything its full movement at will (unlike the old Avalon Hill games).

As we get into the operational level, you can start splitting the two, and in pre-motorized systems, you can have rules for forced marches, allowing your troops to be supplied but exhausted.

At the tactical level, it's mostly lumped into morale or simplified to moved/haven't moved.

In all cases, the focus of the game should drive the level of detail for friction, including only the mechanics necessary to affect the core decisions. I've notice a lot of games seem to focus on mastering processes rather than specific strategy. They're basically resource allocation divorced from anything else, with players running cards, pieces and often sideboard tokens to keep them busy. I hate that.

I like the Brigade series (which is a essentially miniatures compacted onto a hex sheet) because unit movement requires orders and units degrade over time due to stragglers. In multi-day battles (like Gettysburg), wrecked formations can recover somewhat if they are allowed to rest in the rear, giving an incentive for commanders not to fight them to the death.

At the operational/strategic level, the "block games" made by Columbia Games use command points to push units around and these are finite and quick to burn, slow to regenerate. One neat feature is that it accurately re-creates the strengths and weaknesses of the various armies. The Germans simply don't have enough command points to sprint to Moscow on a broad front in 1941. The Soviets have massive armies, but initially lack the command to move them.

The Western Allies have much smaller forces, but can keep them at full strength and move them with far greater rapidity due to their lavish supply capabilities.

Though I haven't yet played it, I like the "pinning" mechanic in Bolt Action. That basically sold me on the game because it's such a simple way of doing suppressive fire without excessive dice rolling or markers.

Hey, E!

Just dropped the new edition of Horizon Wars and Fatigue is a big feature of the new game.

Damage causes an element to suffer fatigue, of course. But so do other factors. A big one is "command fatigue" - if a player generates more orders than they can allocate to elements, it represents officers getting too ambitious and pushing elements beyond what they can reasonably achieve, and surplus orders get converted into fatigue.

If an element's fatigue gets higher than the total value of their primary stats, they are Exhausted and have the number of orders they can follow reduced and can no longer hold objectives (among other things). Note that, as with the original game, an element's primary stats are reduced by damage, so if you take too much damage, fatigue will quickly overtake your elements.

Note that there's no "morale" component in the game, as such. Elements in the ultramodern battlefield don't generally flee in the traditional sense, as danger is omnipresent. Instead, exhausted elements simply become irrelevant to the battle unless they can recover themselves to get back in the fight.

This can be done by passing tests, of course. But my favourite way is by having a hero attached to the element. Heroes can perform "heroic sacrifices" to immediately reduce fatigue and keep their unit fighting.