Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

As we all know, Dom 3 is, overall, extremely realistic (e.g. weapon length). This is how real magical armies fight.

However, it seems to me that fatigue-causing, at least, is not :( If I have a great big weapon and plonk it on a little guy, how does it make sense that he gets the same amount of fatigue with the same effects as a giant brandishing it? Why doesn't he get more tired, or have a lower tolerance than 100?

This has bothered me for a while now. Am I missing something? If we wanted to handle fatigue as realistically as so many other factors are, how should it be done?

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

It's an abstraction.
A giant swinging a 60 pound sword and a hobbit wielding a toothpick don't expend the same amount of effort and exert the same amount of force. But from each of their reference points, they do exert the same amount of fatigue.

Don't consider fatigue as a universal score, but a relative one. One point of giant fatigue is WAAAAAY more tiring than one point of human fatigue. But they're giants with WAAAAY more energy and muscle power, so it's a wash.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Errrr, OK. Sooooo, if I understand you correctly, when I put a given sword or shield or armor on someone, I need to think that the item is not "absolute" but rather scaled to the size of the recipient.

Hmm, yet it does the same damage to the enemy. I hear what you're saying, but I doesn't make sense to me.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

How is a giant standing, let alone swinging a weapon realistic? Their structure would not be able to support their mass.

A certain amount of abstraction is required in order to make a game about fantasy creatures even remotely plausible. I think illwinter has done some great work in this regard. Fatigue mechanics, are for the most part consistent, without being dissociative, even when upon deeper examination a certain amount of fluff is required to justify the effect.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

There is a matter of what genre conventions are acceptable and what aren't. The square cube law can just be entirely ignored in fantasy, scaling weapons is perhaps more questionable. Moreover, heavy armor being bad in some cases is a serious problem and is dissociative. I have no issue with the scaling weapons personally (it's an abstraction I'm entirely willing to make, particularly given the nightmarish micro there would otherwise be. Besides, if you can enchant a weapon to glow with cold fire, you can enchant it to fit the wielder.), but it makes sense for others to have that issue.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Well, that's how it works in Dungeons & Dragons anyway :) Magic items scale to fit the wielder. The alternative would be to craft a "Fire Brand, size X" where X = 1 to 6 ; and screw that. Dom3 is micro heavy, UI unfriendly enough.

But it doesn't though. Give anybody an Enchanted Sword, and it'll do 9+STR damage. So all other things being equal, the giant will still do way more damage with it than the Markata.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

But the reach of a weapon is the same, regardless of whether it's scaled for a titan or a goblin.
That implies they don't scale.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Giants have a larger mass (each increase of x in lenght gives a x^2 increase in weight iirc), so they expend more energy swinging the small weapons. Everything is simply very tiring for them.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

The way I think of it is that each 'swing' isn't really a swing, but more of a measure of what they accomplished in a set amount of time based on action points and their capabilities.

As such the swinging of the weapon is a minor part of their activity and has less effect on how quickly they tire in a fight compared to factors like how healthy they are (muscle:fat ratio and whether they are elderly), and how heavy their armor is.

For example a big hulking brute might have 1 attack with a big sword, but it takes a lot of swordplay or maneuvering to get that opportunity to swing.

A small lightly armored character wielding the same sword might tire fractionally quicker on the swing, but find it easier to get in close and take a swing.

The only thing that is slightly unrealistic is that a dagger and a huge axe are equally tiring, but the amount of fatigue the actual fatique is over the course of 1 round of swordplay can be rounded down to zero.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Lets turn to our expert on the subject of fatigue in fantasy universes,

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

In both cases, the sword contributes 9 points'-worth of damage. But if it's a giant-size sword that's just the same as if it's a midget-size sword, if that's what people say it represents. That's my point.

I don't mean be pedantic, or upset anyone! It's just something I thought about --- fatigue doesn't seem to be modelled as deep as other aspects.

I suppose I would want a "big" weapon to do more fatigue for a smaller being. Which would indeed mean they would be a disadvantage (compared to now) if given such an item. So.... smaller guys should either fatigue less or have higher-than-100%-threshold (compared to now). With no "big" weapon/encumberance, smallies can actually do more than giants who get tired, but you sacrifice that advantage if you arm them big. Now that's what I call realistic! :)

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

I understand that, but then again an actual giant-sized sword would also be much heavier proportionally speaking (square-cube law, each time you increase the size of something by factor x its volume and mass is increased by factor x^3) and thus would also have to grant less defense/offence to reflect that huge increase in momentum. And cost way more fatigue to swing, even to a giant.

Weapon scaling without stat changes is not really realistic, but abstractions like these have to be made otherwise the game would simply be too complicated and cumbersome to design, let alone play.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

No, because giants are stronger

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Realistically, Giants wouldn't be able to stand, much less swing a weapon. They should start at 100 fatigue and *slowly suffocate* as their diaphragm is insufficient to lift their ribcage while they lay about like quadrapalegics because their bones are incapable of supporting their mass and their muscles incapable of moving their limbs.

The moment you talk about the realism of fatigue, weapon length, and weapon damage, you have to deal with the some other basic facts of reality. Such as:

-Mass scales with volume (L^3)
-Bone strength scales with cross-sectional area (L^2)
-Muscle strength scales with cross-sectional area (L^2)
-Oxygen penetration/blood distribution scales with L^4/3 (Its, um, complicated and has to do with the mathematics of network distribution systems, but that's the right number).

etc...

So if a giant is a mere 2x as big as a human, he weights 8x as much but only has 4x as much muscle and bone strength. That's a serious issue. (Plus problems with blood pumping, and so on).

If we're going to abjure body scaling, why should we care about realistic fatigue or damage scaling? How would you even calculate these things without having a realistic model for body scaling?

(I mean, fatigue realistically depends on lung capacity, blood throughput (which itself depends on artery/vein size and heart strength), number of capillaries/average distance of capillaries to muscle tissue, Fe/hemoglobin concentration in the blood, muscle energy expended per motion, and so on. All of these things are intimately tied to body scaling.)

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

You're assuming that they're giant humans, which isn't the case. They'd have much stronger bones and muscles, and perhaps organs we're unfamiliar with. Indeed, Jotun giants are descendants of ice, aren't they? Who knows how their bodies work.

Although your post reminds me of the World of Tiers, by Philip Jose Farmer. He described how a Lord crafted his world according to various Earth mythologies. Thus, he included centaurs, harpies, and the like.
Farmer went into detail describing the centaurs and their cardiovascular system, and how a simple human torso just wouldn't cut it to power a horse's body. Interesting stuff.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Saying 'its magic' is the same as abjuring it, and there's no such thing as a realistic fatigue system anymore. The magic might as well work out conveniently such that relative effort for a giant and human are the same. =P

Also, I would be highly entertained if there was an engineer that could spec the necessary material for that bone and the resulting necessary muscle tissue. I'm pretty sure you end up needing unobtanium (ie, materials that do not exist) for the muscle.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Hey, elephants exist. So, in an imaginary fantasy world, how contrived are giants?

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Very.

You may have noticed things like elephants spend most of their times on 4 legs, and aren't at all proportional to humans.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Squirreloid, you just made my day with your last few posts outgeeking the OP. Well done!

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

But, clearly, if any form is a size, all things can be that size. That's why we keep seeing the thousand kilogram ants all over the place. The square cube law is obviously nonsense, as are details like "temperature regulation within the body" or "pressure exerted upon the ground by varying sized surfaces".

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

What?

Anyways, I'm sure there are materials tougher than hydroxylapatite and that fictional muscle tissue could be pound for pound stronger than what we see in real life. Giants would have to compensate by eating a lot more is all. A lot more.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

I've heard that before. It leads to entertaining stories about engineering designs which called for material-properties that no material actually has. This is a dangerous area to make assumptions in, because people's intuitions for this stuff is *really really bad*. Even trained professionals don't have very good intuitions about plausibility of material properties *after they've specced out the exact requirements* - they need to go check those against real materials. (True story btw. Or rather, many true stories - of designs which were perfectly sound works of engineering if you ignored the fact that the required material properties could not be found in reality. At least one such story relates to an aerospace design).

I'm also reminded of the Manhattan project requesting more Osmium than existed in the solar system. By over an order of magnitude.

Keep in mind that there are more constraints on muscle and bone than 'have a requisite strength', and you have to solve for all those constraints simultaneously.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

We don't know what the world of Dominions is made of. The sun is literally a floating disk,FFS.
Let's say that boron is the base of giant bones. In our world, there probably wouldn't be enough for several species of giants. But who's to say that the Dominions is the same? The reason we're short of boron here is because it's not formed by stellar nucleosis, unlike the far more common hydrogen and carbon. But in Dominions, we don't know how the world was created. Boron could be plentiful enough for it to be a part of a giant's skeletal system. It's certainly strong enough.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

As the OP, I don't get this. Is it just my paranoia, or am I upsetting some people with my perfectly normal question?

I'm not criticising the game, if that matters, I was merely observing that in, IMHO, for a game which models much stuff in greater detail, fatigue seemed to me less realistic. The 100 level limit + fixed encumberance fatigue applying across all sizes doesn't have the subtlety of some other areas. But I have also read the replies here and understand the alternatives and the compromise.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

...And what do you know about Boron chemistry?

Is boron's or boron nitride's structurally useful form thermodynamically preferred to its other states? (I highly doubt that, in much the same way that graphite is thermodynamically preferred to diamond).

Boron is a weak conductor at STP, but at higher temperatures becomes a good conductor. (Bone, otoh, does not really conduct at all). AT the very least this would suggest a vulnerability to lightning.

Is there a good chemical process by which boron could be laid down in a prescribed pattern during gestation, or permit growth? (organisms have to be viable at all points of ontogeny).

Is boron sufficiently inert to not chemically interact with surrounding tissues?

How does the giant's body isolate pure boron in the first place? Its not easy. And the thermodynamics of the process are best described as 'spectacular'.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Sarcasm is what. The elephant-giant comparison is bad enough that sarcasm was really the only option.

Re: Fatigue is not very realistic!?
 

Its not wrong that the weapon does the same damage if its the same object.
The actual damage in dominions is weapon damage + stenght
so giants do more damage due to their strenght. I do not see the point there. The same sword awards the same damage because its the same piece.
And why do the bigger units have to get different fatigue? I have issues with other things like a spear doing 3 damage and a sword 5. Why the spear does little if they stick inside people while sword cuts people.