That Randy Brown

Stamina as a Mechanic

In adventure tactics, player movesets are composed of a deck building submechanic. As you level up, you add new cards to your deck, and optionally remove old ones. This is a brilliant mechanic as it expands both the pool of available moves and the size of the deck in general. You can opt to remove cards from your deck to increase the odds of getting your more powerful moves, or keep the move size the same with a lower likelihood of the specifics of each move.

However, there is a missed opportunity because this trade-off is false: there's no clear advantage to having a larger deck than a smaller. This gap in the balance made me realize that most RPGs do not do stamina well; not generalized stamina, but the representation of how exhausting combat is (because for lots of reasons, combat is where these mechanics most play out). Combat in DND and even Mausritter can go on and on forever in the right ground battle of attrition, with the only thing leading to the end of combat being the death of either the whole player party or all the enemy combatants, or some other combination. In Mausritter, there are also morale waves, which is a fantastic secondary approach to ending combat.

In real life, combat, especially hand-to-hand combat, but really any combat where you are driven by adrenaline, is exhausting. It occurred to me that exhaustion could be easily represented in gameplay: when a deck is depleted, they must wait a turn to restore their deck and draw cards. Perhaps they only get half of their original deck. Playing with the deck size as a representative mechanic in game also adds lots of possibilities: do you keep your odds of moving higher than that critical skill so that you can do something, or do you act like a glass cannon when it comes to stamina: perhaps you have a deck of only 8 moves, and after the second round of combat, should it last, you are spent waiting to rejuvenate.