First off, I just wanted to say that I'm loving this forum.  I ran across it yesterday while trying to come up with ideas for a game system that I'm working on and I'm really impressed with the quality of the community here.  Ever since I began working on my game system I've been thinking about the theory behind what makes a pen and paper rpg good.  It's exciting to see that there is an entire online community of people who have been thinking about the same thing for far longer than me.

I'm posting here because I'm playing with the idea of using a stamina mechanic in my game system.  It's going to be a near-future sci-fi setting.  I'd like there to be a mix of subterfuge, exploration, head-on combat, and vehicle combat.  Hopefully I can explain this mechanic without having to go into detail about my entire game system, but this is how I want it to work: 

Characters would have a "stamina pool" based on their strength and willpower attributes, and there would be other ways of increasing that pool.  I think most starting characters would have 20-30 stamina on average.  Stamina would get used up when engaging in physical activities; the exact amount would vary by the activity.  Combat would be an obvious example: sitting back and shooting a pistol might burn 1 point of stamina per round, whereas getting up close and swinging a melee weapon or punching someone might burn 3-5 stamina.  I'm also thinking that shooting a big machine gun would burn more stamina than shooting a pistol, say maybe 3-5 stamina as well.  The exact numbers aren't set in stone, but you get the idea.  Similarly, trying to bash in a door, climb a wall, etc.  would  burn stamina. Also, running around wearing heavy body armor or carrying as much as your strength will allow would cause your stamina to decrease over time.  Once a character's stamina gets to 0, they start taking minor penalties to their actions, which increase as the character continues to pile up negative stamina.  Characters recover stamina through rest.  I'm thinking that if their characters just "hang out" for an hour they'd recover about 10 points of stamina.  I'd probably put a cap on how many times they can do that per day though, so they're not trying to hang out in the room before the Big Bad's lair to recover their stamina before The Big Fight.  Sleeping overnight would recover all or most of a character's stamina.  Maybe it would recover all or half of your maximum stamina, so if you were in the negative before sleeping, you still wouldn't be topped off when you woke up.  Again, I'm not set on the exact values, just trying to get the idea out there.  I might also implement a second wind sort of thing like in D&D 4e, so a character can get back a burst of stamina after a long fight or a long period of physical exertion.  Actually, that might be preferable to letting them rest for a few minutes because it seems less arbitrary.

The goal behind this mechanic is to discourage players from "video game" strategies like trying to bust down the same door fifty times, wearing the biggest, heaviest armor they can find, or picking up every single piece of equipment they find while on a mission so they can sell it when they get back to town.  The group of players that I regularly play with tends to do this sort of thing, and I hate it.  I realize that the easy fix is to have the GM say "you can't do that", but that seems like railroading, which I'm also not a fan of.  Another fix would be to have baddies show up unexpectedly to steal their big bad armor or rob them of their loot, but we've had trouble with one of our regular GMs having omnipotent NPCs that second guess our every move (which is, in effect, another form of railroading), so that sort of thing gets a big groan from my group.  Instead of those solutions, I'd like to try a mechanic that discourages "video game" behavior.  Plus I think it's a neat idea and I've never seen anything quite like it in a pen and paper game.

My idea seems like a good fix for this problem, but I'm concerned that it will become like spell memorization in AD&D 2e or 3/3.5, where people just hang out in the Big Bad's lair for 8 hours to rememorize spells before The Big Fight.  That sort of thing kills immersion, and I think D&D 4e's daily/encounter/at-will powers system fixed my problem with spell memorization by making the immersion problem worse.  Ideally this would encourage a more strategic approach. 

I suppose I should mention that my group enjoys complex rules systems, but those tend to encourage the type of behavior I'm talking about here, hence my desire to come up with this stamina mechanic.  On the other hand, we get bored easily with simpler game systems, so I don't think simplifying things would help much.  It probably goes without saying that we enjoy lots of combat.  Any thoughts on this mechanic?  Anyone else tried to tackle a similar problem with game mechanics?

Star Wars Galaxies online game tried something like this.  Every action cost you a stamina like attribute.  It turned out that some characters hurt themselves by attacking more than they hurt their foes.

D&D had the simple rule that if you failed at a skill you couldn't try it again until you had raised the skill

HERO systems has a 2 fold approach - skills get a +1 every doubling of the time spent, no retries. So if you try picking a lock which takes 1 minute and fail by -2, you can succeed if you spend 5 minutes working at it.  Fail by -4 and it would take 30 minutes.  For combat their attacks cost Endurance, which you recover - similar to your stamina trait.

Stamina is very realistic and can be good for balancing things, but it is bookkeeping intensive.  If you and your players are happy with tracking stamina for every action, go with it.  If not, you might try to find other ways around it.

I agree - the book keeping is going to be a nightmare, especially if you desire a complex system.  Could you imagine the players and GM ticking away on characters' stamina every single time they do something?  What if the group was in a large firefight?

However, a system need not be either simple and dumbed down or complex and cumbersome.  This is a false dichotomy that some RPG designers subsribe to.  On the contrary, there are ways to construct an immersive system without lagging down the flow of gameplay.  Consider a different approach: perhaps instead of continuous number tracking, characters may become tired upon meeting a certain condition.  Maybe this condition forces you to roll a die to determine if you become fatigued or not, in which characters who aren't physically fit have a greater chance of failing. 

I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to go about this.  Hopefully, my example can help you derive branching thoughts.

The goal behind this mechanic is to discourage players from "video game" strategies

I'm concerned that it will become like spell memorization in AD&D 2e or 3/3.5, where people just hang out in the Big Bad's lair for 8 hours to rememorize spells before The Big Fight.

one of the things I liked about Buffy the Vampire Slayer was that they often researched how to destroy a demon.  They didn't just charge into every fight.

Characters taking time to get ready to fight the big bad makes perfect sense.

if you don't want them to do it - putting a ticking time bomb in to make them rushed.  But don't set the mechanics up so that planning and getting ready don't work.

Honestly, if someone in one of my games tried to kick a door down 50 times waiting for the 19 or whatever he needed, I'd try another method:

1) Tell him, you can't manage to break the door down, you'll have to try something else.  Unless he's a rules lawyer, but I've always believed that the spirit of the rules trumps the letter.
2) Let him keep trying, but start charging penalties due to fatigue.  In d20 systems they have the "GM's Best Friend" rule for applying bonuses/penalties due to favorable or unfavorable circumstances.
3) When he tries to kick the door down the (say) sixth time, the enemies open it -- but they're reinforced, fully buffed, and ready to fight.

Thanks for the feedback guys.  After reading your suggestions, I'm realizing that our video game behavior is also encouraged by our DMs in the group focusing on dungeon crawl-type stuff with a Big Bad at the end.  It'd probably be a lot easier to curb our behavior if we steered our sessions away from that sort of thing.  From the DM's perspective, it's tempting to build a dungeon crawl around trapped rooms, lots of battles with minions, and arbitrarily locked doors, but is it really necessary? It exhausts the party and leaves them low on fuel when they get to the Big Bad.  I mean, dungeon crawls can be fun, and there's nothing wrong with taking some time to prepare to fight a particularly challenging foe, but when the group has to wait for 8 hours to regain spells, it feels like an unnecessary lull in the action.  On the other hand, going into a climactic battle without your good spells usually means certain death. 

Some of that won't transfer over because my game will be a sci-fi setting and it's hard to translate dungeon crawling into that sort of setting.  Not saying it's impossible, just that it's hard to do without making it feel like D&D with guns, which is definitely not what I'm going for.

I like my idea because it means the players don't have unlimited resources, but they're also not just waiting on the spellcasters before they can get back into the action.  Nor are they fully exhausted when they run out of stamina.  Dugfromthearth, I hadn't considered that some characters might just keep exhausting themselves once they ran out of stamina, without trying to be strategic.  If I do follow through with this system, I think I would make a table with a list of the stamina costs of each action. Then maybe when you ran out of stamina you would be limited to what sort of actions you could do, in addition to the penalty for being in the negative.  OR I could make it so that if you're rested, you get a small bonus to every action, then when you run out of stamina you lose the bonus, in addition to not being able to do certain stamina-intensive actions.  That sounds too lenient for the amount of bookkeeping though.  Hrm.

The system does sound bookkeeping intensive.  Hopefully I can simplify it to where it's no more complicated than keeping up with hit points.  I'd like for it to be forgiving enough so the DM isn't bogged down in a large fight with bookkeeping.  Like it would be practically impossible for even the average minion to burn through his stamina in a single fight.  So the DM would only have to keep up with it if he knew a villain might get away.  I'm definitely willing to just trash it if it I can't simplify it enough, but I'd at least like to playtest it to see if it's manageable.

Someone mentioned making actions take longer if you keep retrying them.  We don't usually play with time as a factor.  It seems like it would be hard for the DM to do that without spouting off aribitrary amounts of time for everything.  We're really averse to arbitrary DM decisions because the same DM I mentioned with the omnipotent NPCs tends to give us arbitrarily difficult rolls for things that don't even seem like they'd need a roll. One example of this would be the time he made me do a 20+ search check in 3.5 D&D to see a guy talking to me, unhidden, from 10 feet away.  Still, I think it would be fun to try.  The ticking time bomb would be a good way to do it, but it seems like it would get boring if every session played like that.  One of our DMs tried using an hourglass and ticking off rounds whenever we stood around deliberating our next action.  I'm not sure what happened with that but it does seem like a somewhat non-arbitrary way of getting the group to make decisions quickly.  Any other ways of making time important in your game?

I was thinking about your immersion conundrum.

Here’s one way of going about it:
Design mechanical objects of the same type in the game (powers, weapons, armor, stats, etc.) to have a zero-difference effect.  This means that when two objects are compared numerically, there is no difference.  Instead, values will be distributed differently amongst each aspect (such as reach or speed for a weapon).  Naturally, each aspect of an object should be relatively equal in usefulness.  Therefore, instead of having 1 strategy or repertoire for all occasions, the player will be encouraged to choose strategies and equipment that match the situation well.
I’ve learned the virtue of this method while working on my simulationist games.  For example, in my latest project, I was able to design the combat system to encourage players to use pole arms when grouped together - because a combatant with shorter reach will be forced to make multiple distance-break checks in order to get close enough and thus be exposed to free attacks - and swords in duels, as swords have a high maneuverability, increasing your chance to defend and compromise your opponent‘s defense.  As a result, an incentive was provided for characters to improve their versatility in order to command a greater strategic breadth. 
The same logic can be applied to the your armor concern as well, which would effectively encourage players to choose lighter suits for situations that require mobility (tactical, guerilla type stuff; walking ten miles into a deep jungle) and heavier suits for situations that are extremely lethal (Mogadishu?  Fuck the flak jacket - I want that Dragon Skin).  Perhaps, in relation to your own system, heavy armor can burn stamina at twice the rate.  I don’t know if your sci-fi setting uses ultra-lightweight nanomaterials, but the weight and cumbrance of worn equipment (including armor) of today’s soldier significantly exceeds that of a knight in full plate.

Player Deliberation:
The hourglass idea is a step in the right direction.  I think a more sane solution, however, would be to cause characters to hesitate on actions due to analysis paralysis.  This really does happen in fights, especially in cautious, tactical ones.  The hesitation can make you lose an action entirely, or it can be more forgiving and simply tick off -1 penalty to your action for every x amount of seconds deliberating.

Tracking every point of stamina remeneds me of the encumbrance system in D&D where each item had a weight to be tracked. The way my groups ended up doing that was ignoring it except for spot checks to make sure things did not get too out of hand or when something related to really heavy objects came up.

My take on such a system would be a 3-6 questions. Are you carrying a lot of gear? Did you just do a lot of an action? Have you been injured since the last check? And a few others. Then the GM would call for a Stamina check at some point where the player must make a die roll where the more questions they answer yes to the more likely they are to be penalized until the have a chance to rest.

My first response to the players resting at odd times, taking a long time to do things, and trying over and over again is for the DM to push the game forward and some rules to keep it moving. Only try a roll once unless you change your tactics/situations, when you try something it changes what is happening in the game succeed or fail or what my old DM would do is tell us that if we hung around there we would be attacked so make some security preparations or move on.

I used to have a system like this. There was so much bookkeeping to it that, in practice, it didn't get used because I (as GM and the guy who knew all the rules) was too busy doing other stuff in the game.

Since then, I've got smarter about this kind of thing. One thing that makes bookkeeping a lot easier is to do it with tokens instead of on paper. I bought a ton of poker chips, and I use them for something in every game I play.

I would also suggest that you eliminate the role of actions that use up only small amounts of energy. I'd drop the size of the stamina pool, and only make significant expenditures of stamina (firing huge guns, breaking things, running like hell) actually cost anything, and I'd make the penalties for bottoming out pretty severe -- not just a penalty, but you're exhausted and can't do anything unless you can make, for instance, a willpower roll. If you go that route, I'd suggest setting the stamina pool size strictly on physical traits, and leave willpower for the "push yourself through it" roll. This creates a tactical choice whereby people can go for high stamina at the cost of lower chance of coping with exhaustion, or low stamina but higher chance of coping with exhaustion -- combined with whatever roles willpower and physical stuff play in the game.

I agree that this is likely to be cumbersome in practice.  Ar Kayon and Marshall make good points in this regard.  My only further suggestion is that you could have a more persistent system by having a fairly large pool and charging one stamina per round, with extra points charged for especially energetic actions.  Alternately you could link the amount per round to the weapon used or armour worn etc.  You will have to play with the numbers to a produce a balance you like.

I am glad you have recognised that the dungeon crawl itself is part of the problem.  Quite a lot of this is easy to address; make your dungeons living spaces not just a set of fixed encounters.  The inhabitants of this dungeon can move about, go looking for the intruders that butchered their buddies, repair defences, etc.  If the dungeon is static then sure they are going to camp out, what have they got to lose?  And if they are going to camp out, you tend to build a big bad that is able to challenge them when they are fully refreshed, right?  It's a feedback system that channels you more tightly into the same pattern.

If you're going to try an SF game, I think you're going to have to get out of the dungeon anyway.  They basically don't work well with ranged and area effect weaponry.

I think your focusing on 'how it feels' a great deal, when it might feel like X. Doesn't make it fun, though.

After reading your suggestions, I'm realizing that our video game behavior is also encouraged by our DMs in the group focusing on dungeon crawl-type stuff with a Big Bad at the end.  It'd probably be a lot easier to curb our behavior if we steered our sessions away from that sort of thing.  From the DM's perspective, it's tempting to build a dungeon crawl around trapped rooms, lots of battles with minions, and arbitrarily locked doors, but is it really necessary?

the poker chip idea is good

bookkeeping with poker chips can be very easy.  If you have 30 poker chips and give them up when you spend stamina it only takes a second, no writing involved.