Mod suggestion: More dynamic stamina

[DaveCastle]

I always thought stamina in Daggerfall behaved very unrealistically in the sense that your character can perform very tiring activities over long periods of time until they just drop. Morrowind increased the stamina loss per weapon swing or distance ran, and allowed you to stop, take a few breaths and regain your stamina completely, but this also got rid of the need for regular sleep, which is another extreme. You just waited for one in-game hour and it was as though nothing had happened - you only needed actual rest to regain hitpoints and mana.

I think a good in-betweeny solution would be something I saw in Salt & Sanctuary:

locked sta.png (29.17 KiB) Viewed 980 times

Have tiring activities like sprinting, fighting or climbing knock off a visible chunk of stamina and let it regenerate after you stop exerting yourself, but a very small percentage of your maximum stamina (proportional to the stamina loss caused by the activity, perhaps influenced by the encumbrance percentage as well) should be locked off gradually until you go to sleep or cast a Red Bull spell (although I'm not a huge fan of that either). I think this could also make fights more interesting if you couldn't just spam attacks until you or your opponent died, especially if low stamina values made you more vulnerable like in the Souls games. I think Morrowind had the right idea by temporarily decreasing your skills' effectiveness/spellcasting chance a bit depending on the energy missing if you went below 50% stamina or so.

Do you think something like this could be feasible?

[Ralzar]

Something sort of like this shouldn't be too hard to make.

Someone made a Magica regenration mod that worked somewhat similar. You would just need a value that keeps getting updated with what the lowest amount of Fatigue you have been at since last sleep. Then it sets back to 0 when sleeping/traveling etc.

The easiest way to do "effects of being tired" is to simply have your attributes be debuffed as you get more exhausted.

The forumla could be something like:

Max possible fatigue = Fatigue Max - (Max fatigue lost/2)

[Jeoshua]

In my personal modding experiments I edited the passive traits code that checks if the character has regeneration, and made it increase stamina at the same time regardless of whether or not the player has regeneration. Works great.

I do like the idea of max stamina going down over time tho. It would model getting tired in a way only a good nap could cure.

[Ralzar]

I do like the idea of max stamina going down over time tho. It would model getting tired in a way only a good nap could cure.

Yeah, and would discourage players from just standing there, waiting for all their bars to go back to full.

[DaveCastle]

Here's a video of the S&S decreasing max stamina feature in action for the sake of clarity, you can see how more and more of the player's max stamina gets progressively locked off during the bossfight (no need to watch the whole thing cos it's actually a very long and boring encounter, just skip ahead and note how the blue stamina bar changes):
https://youtu.be/JpZEXUvCXXM?t=73
Generally, a somewhat slower regeneration rate could work in Daggerfall, but Speed and Endurance could maybe impact it slightly? Encumbrance% may also work although that might lead to a degree of micromanagement I dislike. Perhaps there could be some optional setting where if you go above 70% encumbrance, the rate of regeneration could go down proportionally (so like 50% of the base rate at full encumbrance)? Just spitballing.

I was also thinking that during character creation, you may get a question about impacts of frail health where you can answer you get tired easily. That could mean like a larger percentage of stamina lockoff for each exerting action taken if the mod were used.

Finally I'm not even certain skills should be debuffed when you're just simply tired. If you overexert yourself on the other hand, that is, decrease your current stamina to zero or below, then you could get an exhaustion debuff decreasing all skills by 50% until the bar regenerates again. So instead of a passive penalty that increases proportionally with fatigue, I'd be more in favour of a more harsh but temporary punishment for careless overexertion - a 50% skill drop could be lethal while frantically trying to kill an ancient lich or something. Perhaps the mod could have optional aspects.