Stamina is a resource I bolted onto both the RUNE engine and the NULL/CIPHER healthless idea for Valiant Horizon Tactics. It’s a very major change to how a RUNE-like does things.

Notably it’s also not really a Valiant Horizon idea, it’s kind of something that came off of neither game. So what’s up with that? One prior that bears notice is that Stamina was in the earliest Total//Effect prototype version I made: it was going to be like 13th Age recoveries/4E healing surges but also usable for restoring used abilities to form a kind of generic “dungeon attrition” resource. It also made it into VH briefly but I cut it early (like, a month into active development/testing) because it was kind of useless there, as it was only for recovering (which people don’t do enough for it to be worth tracking). So it’s been on my mind for awhile in relation to Valiant Horizon. (It might return in a future Total//Effect game. Who knows, stay tuned.)¹

_{(This is a companion piece to Gila RPGs/Spencer Campbell’s recent stream about healthless TTRPGs, which is well worth your time if you have an hour to spend and goes into VH tactics a little itself, because the original impetus was based on his idea of healthless TTRPGs prior to this video. It would probably also be good to be a little familiar with RUNE! But I think everything makes enough sense if you aren’t.)}