Mythras Fatigue for hard labor
Hi, everyone! Thank you in advance for your help! I am planning to use Mythras as the backbone for a Dark Sun campaign. I know other people have done this, and the more I learned about the system, the more sense it made (plus I'm most comfortable with BRP-based systems).
Survival is a big deal in this setting and players will be battling the elements more often than bandits. This first session (loosely based on the original 1991 "Freedom" adventure) will be our chance to learn the system and set the tone of the world. The adventure is basically about escaping from enslavement.
So the initial days of the adventure, their main adversary is hot weather and labor. They have a chance of dehydration, too, if they fail to get their water rations. I want them to deal with increasing exhaustion and look for ways to cheat (take breaks when no one is looking, etc.), but I don't want to just make a million boring rolls, especially since the CON-based timers make tracking everyone individually really complicated.
The "manual labor" easy Endurance roll for fatigue in Mythras seems to assume that you'll work really hard for X minutes, get winded, and then you probably take a quick break. The rules primarily seem to have in mind either combat or travel for this system. I suppose you could use them for a race, like a John Henry kind of thing. But instead, I want to more simply figure out how fatigued people get each day within a few rolls and how much they recover before the next day. Ideally, the threat isn't one day of labor, but struggling subsequent days against increasing fatigue (for most of the characters, they will not be used to this weather or work). The conflict is about the slavers forcing players to work beyond their normal capacities.
Does anyone have any suggestions for streamlining the fatigue rules in a way that makes sense without rolling every 15 minutes of the day? My goal is to use the Mythras fatigue levels, have lower CON characters fatigue more quickly than high CON characters at a reasonable rate, make it feel sufficiently realistic, and roll as few times as possible. It should be a struggle for the majority of characters, causing them to come up with clever strategies to survive while they look for escape chances. Right now, I'm playing with using Standard rolls about 3 times a day, decreasing the grade if they manage to come up with a rest strategy during those periods (then following the usual increased difficulties as fatigue levels increase). But I don't know if I can balance it well enough myself and I think someone with more experience could probably come up with better interpretations of the existing system.
I really appreciate any ideas!