Frayed Knights Development Update

Frayed Knights developer Jay Barnson has penned another progress report for the indie RPG, and this time he covers the importance of resting and the ill effects exhaustion can have on your party.

The blue bar below that is the character’s endurance bar. Endurance is what allows the character to act. There’s no “mana” or other spell-casting limits in Frayed Knights… it’s all endurance. It’s used to swing swords, cast spells, whatever. When the endurance drops to zero, a lot of things happen, depending upon whether or not the party is in combat. But the basic problem is that the character immediately gets a penalty to pretty much anything he is doing that caused endurance to drop to nothing. On top of that, any roll the character is forced to make – like defending against an attack – is going to be made at a fairly steep penalty. While not exactly a sitting duck, a fatigued character just lacks the energy to dodge well. Finally, if the party is in combat, the fatigued character automatically takes a “rest” action as their next move, to get the endurance bar back into positive territory. This means a character running on low endurance is going to be a lot slower on all of their actions – because they will have to waste precious combat cycles resting.

What exactly does resting do? In combat, rest restores a certain number of points of endurance – reducing temporary fatigue. And it takes up time – time where the monsters may use to do horrible things to your health bar. But it should really be thought of as “taking a breather” or pausing to catch one’s breath. The player may voluntarily choose to have the character rest at any time as the character’s action – mainly to avoid having endurance drop to zero and taking those penalties.

Outside of combat, resting is always voluntary and effects the entire party at once. The entire party rests however long it takes for everyone’s temporary fatigue to be eliminated. Probably. It’s almost instantaneous for the player, but time passes in the game exactly as if it were combat – a number of turns pass for everyone to rest up to maximum endurance. This means spell effects can expire, and there are multiple chances for monsters to show up and ruin everyone’s break-time.