| Robert Kepner |
So I'm writing my next campaign, and I have a section where the players are going to be under a lot of stress. Basically, they will complete a dungeon crawl involving 5-7 combat sessions, one of them being a boss fight. The end goal is to rescue two people of import.
Immediately after the boss fight (people of import in tow), they are going to have to make a break for it. One of the NPC's makes it clear that they are not safe here, that there are a lot of forces in the area, and one of the people from the boss fight escaped, so they're going to put together people to capture the party. This NPC tells the players about a garrison that's a day's ride away, and they have to make a run for it.
The whole point of this section of the game is the chase from the dungeon to the garrison. If the players do well, they can get to the garrison before they are captured, and they'll be rescued (well, sort of, but that's for another day).
However, there is the chance that the players will be caught and will have to fight their way free to continue riding to the garrison.
Now, as I said: the heroes at this point will have spent an entire day fighting in a dungeon, then without a chance to rest they have to make a day's ride, under pursuit, to another location. I have decided that when their ride starts, they're all fatigued. This will affect any actions they take to evade pursuit, and will also have an effect on any combats that happen.
So here is my question: When putting together the combat scenarios for if the pursuers catch up to the heroes, exactly how much do I account for fatigue? Should I increase the ECL by 1 to account for fatigue, or is fatigue not THAT much of an impact on combat?
I've searched through the forums a bit, as well as other discussion boards on other sites. Most of the threads I found are about becoming fatigued while fighting, but that's not really what I'm going for. I'm looking at the players already being fatigued and then a fight happens (possibly even multiple fights, depending on how they perform).
I'm also looking at the fact that at this point in my narrative, any limited use per day abilities are going to be running low. Spell casters will probably be relying on wands and scrolls to get them through any fights, and even martial characters will most likely be low on special abilities. This adds another dimension to the challenge; not only will they be game conditioned fatigued, but they'll also be low on resources.
Any thoughts are much appreciated!