Pathfinder Barbarians: Fatigue, Exhaustion, and their exceptions

So, I've been building a vital strike based druid/barb. He's built to rage cycle using the flawed scarlet and green cabochon (ioun stone that turns exhausted and fatigued into sickened and nauseated) and internal fortitude, which makes me immune to both sickened and exhausted.

Then I started looking at some of the feats and rage powers that are available to me. Roused Anger lets you rage even when fatigued, but afterwards you are exhausted. However, if I were to take the Furious Finish feat, the wording states that it would end the rage and make me fatigued "even if you would not normally be."

I could read that one of two ways:

1) Free rage cycling since one allows raging while fatigued and the other overrides the "exhausted" clause since it supersedes normal circumstances.

2) Since exhausted and fatigued are kinda the same condition, only one is less severe, you would automatically take the more severe of the two since if anything the intent of Furious Finish is to circumvent things that prevent fatigue rather than to keep you from becoming MORE fatigued.

Thoughts?

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Originally Posted by TomeGnome

Then I started looking at some of the feats and rage powers that are available to me. Roused Anger lets you rage even when fatigued, but afterwards you are exhausted. However, if I were to take the Furious Finish feat, the wording states that it would end the rage and make me fatigued "even if you would not normally be."

I could read that one of two ways:

1) Free rage cycling since one allows raging while fatigued and the other overrides the "exhausted" clause since it supersedes normal circumstances.

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After using Furious Finish you WILL be Fatigued, no Immunity, no "convert Fatigue into....". You are Fatigued.
Thankfully Roused Anger doesn't care 'how' you got Fatigued. After your Roused Anger ends you would normally be Exhausted, but your items/abilities make you immune to that, so nothing much happens.

The only concern is if Roused Anger 'removes' Fatigued, or 'ignores' Fatigued, as you may still be Fatigued when combat ends or you run out of Rage.
The follow up question to that, is whether Furious Focus rounds 'stack' or not.
Example: If I Rage Cycle 3 rounds in a row, am I Fatigued for only 2? or for 4? (2 rounds spent during combat while Raging), or Fatigued for 6 rounds? (assuming it applies when it 'can' apply).

The Roused Anger/Furious Finish combo was a proposed alternate method of rage cycling. I'm very short on feats and rage powers and was thinking this was a way that I might be able to free a couple of them up and still be able to cycle, so I wouldn't already have the ioun stone and Internal Fortitude.

Your opinion on the fatigue from Furious Finish isn't a popular one, though I think it's what the designers intended. Pretty much everyone I've spoken to on here is of the opinion that immunity is immunity and can't be bypassed by a feat.

As far as your concern, Roused Anger doesn't remove fatigue, it just ignores it for the time that you're raging. I would think that wouldn't be much of an issue though. I don't expect to run out of rages often. Between a decent Con score and being half-orc (favored class bonus: +1 rounds of rage/level), I should be pretty well set. If it's really a concern, there's also a subdomain of druid that adds rounds of rage that stack with my barbarian rounds, but that's a last resort. The only time I should really feel the effects of fatigue are after the battle ends.

Edit: as far as whether the rounds of fatigue "stack" or not, I think it'd be safe to assume they stack for each round spent raging. Seeing as a round is 6 seconds, I don't think that really matters much outside of combat, so I'm cool with having a short sit-down. :p

Just me thinking today but...

You can actually become Fatigued while Fatigued! (and possibly even Fatigued while Exhausted, although that ones much much trickier...)

Fatigued:

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Doing anything that would normally cause fatigue causes the fatigued character to become exhausted.

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So if I am Fatigued, and would again become Fatigued, I become Exhausted instead...normally.

BUT! What if we use Furious Finish/Roused Anger combo!
Roused Anger lets us Rage while Fatigued, and afterwards we become Exhausted. Now, normally, Exhausted would override the normal Barbarian Fatigue, but Furious Finish says:

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If you do, your rage immediately ends, and you are fatigued (even if you would not normally be).

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So after a Roused Anger Rage, you become Exhausted AND Fatigued, because the Furious Finish feat works BOTH ways!

The "even if you would not normally be" doesn't mean you avoid exhaustion, it just means you become fatigued. So if you started fatigued, you would be both fatigued and exhausted. (Unless there's a rule somewhere that says you can't ever be both.)

The core rulebook under the Conditions section states, "If more than one condition affects a character, apply them all. If certain effects can’t combine, apply the most severe effect."

Later, under fatigue, it says, "Doing anything that would normally cause fatigue causes the fatigued character to become exhausted." Under exhaustion, it says, "After 1 hour of complete rest, an exhausted character becomes fatigued."

The effects of fatigue and exhaustion are almost the same except for the severity of the penalties and the duration of the effects. The rules point to the two conditions being mutually exclusive. You can't be both exhausted and fatigued at the same time.

The question then is, if I would normally be exhausted, but the new effect makes me fatigued, which wins out? The source material says you go with the more severe effect, but when rules disagree, Pathfinder says you go with specific over general, so we would have to go with the wording of the feat.

The final question we're left with is how do we think of fatigue and exhaustion? Is each an absolute value that is applied, or are we supposed to think of it of a scale between 0 and 2 (where 0 is no condition, 1 is fatigued, 2 is exhausted)? In other words, is the feat saying that no matter what, a person's status is set to fatigued, or is this meant to say that someone advances in their level of fatigue so that if they are already at 1, they instead go to 2, or if they're already at 2, they stay at 2?

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Originally Posted by TomeGnome

The rules point to the two conditions being mutually exclusive.

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Your quotes say the opposite to me. I see nothing that says becoming exhausted removes the fatigued condition, nor that they cannot exist in tandem.

I mean, if slavish RAW can be interpreted with stupid results, it can be stupid in both ways.

Although it doesn't specifically state that you can't be both, it's pretty heavily implied. To be both fatigued and exhausted would be redundant in almost all senses, both the literal (as in describing to someone that you were both fatigued and exhausted) and mechanically, since exhausted basically does the same thing as fatigued only to a greater scale and with the added speed penalty.

Look at frightened, shaken, and panicked. It doesn't specifically say that you can't be all 3 at once, but it's heavily implied when it says that one is a more or less severe form of the other. We take for granted that someone can't be both frightened and panicked, cuz each effect does the same thing in lesser or greater degrees, occurs in the same situations, etc., etc.

Situations that cause someone to become fatigued, frightened, etc., are frequently going to beget more fear/fatigue, either as the effect of a spell or supernatural ability that an enemy really likes using or as a result of your class' abilities. To make it so you have to apply multiple conditional modifiers that are essentially the same effects is sloppy game design, and it seems very out-of-line with Pathfinder's general style of design, which is to streamline and prune back when appropriate to make battles flow more fluidly.

The better design in that case would be to create a 3rd condition where the penalties of both fatigue and exhaustion stack. Obviously the conditions are related, or one would not lead to the other, and losing one would not regress to the other. With a 3rd condition, you don't have to double your math.

You're assuming a little too little. I mean, under exhausted, it says "After 1 hour of complete rest, an exhausted character becomes fatigued." It never says you stop being exhausted, but it'd be really silly if suddenly you had more penalties for resting when you're exhausted. In the same sense, I think we have to apply the reverse. Just because it doesn't say that we stop being fatigued when we become exhausted, it's reasonable to assume so.

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Originally Posted by TomeGnome

Although it doesn't specifically state that you can't be both, it's pretty heavily implied.

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You could also say it's "heavily implied" that Furious Finish would not make you less tired after expending the energy to maximize your damage die than not expending that energy would. But we're apparently talking slavish RAW here, not common sense, so invoking it for one and not the other is inconsistent. Ergo, nothing in strict RAW says that exhaustion removes fatigue.

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Originally Posted by TomeGnome

Look at frightened, shaken, and panicked. It doesn't specifically say that you can't be all 3 at once, but it's heavily implied when it says that one is a more or less severe form of the other.

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And if it said the same thing for exhausted and fatigued you'd have a point; but exhaustion does not actually say "Exhausted is a more extreme state of tiredness than fatigued."

Again, you can either going to invoke common sense for both, or ignore it for both.

I AM invoking common sense for both. I never said that I thought Furious Finish should make one fatigued and overrule exhaustion. Other people have said so. All I've done is ask questions. Personally, I think it makes more sense to NOT have it get rid of exhaustion, as much as I would like it to.

You never responded to the reverse, where after resting while exhausted you become fatigued. It never says you stop being exhausted. That's why I'm saying that you have to make an assumption, because according to the straight rules without any assumptions, no amount of rest will cure exhaustion, and will only add fatigue on top of the mix. That doesn't make any sense.

I feel like we have to assume that fatigue and exhaustion are two points on a scale, and that it's impossible to occupy both points at once.

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Originally Posted by TomeGnome

I AM invoking common sense for both. I never said that I thought Furious Finish should make one fatigued and overrule exhaustion.

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That's exactly what your first scenario is saying here:

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1) Free rage cycling since one allows raging while fatigued and the other overrides the "exhausted" clause since it supersedes normal circumstances.

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Hence the dichotomy between applying and ignoring common sense.

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Originally Posted by TomeGnome

You never responded to the reverse, where after resting while exhausted you become fatigued. It never says you stop being exhausted.

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Indeed it does not, which is one more consequence of applying strict RAW without regard to common sense.

That was me stating two possible interpretations to open up discussion. I know what I said. The possibility of Furious Finish ignoring exhaustion was how a friend of mine interpreted the rule. I wasn't taking a stance in the discussion at that point because I wanted to gather general thoughts before bogging things down with my side of the argument.

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Originally Posted by grarrrg

After using Furious Finish you WILL be Fatigued, no Immunity, no "convert Fatigue into....". You are Fatigued.

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I disagree. Well, sort of. If you are immune to fatigue, and you use Furious Finish, you are hit with fatigue. Which you are immune to and thus don't care.

Do you think a Vampire with Furious Finish would become fatigued?

I didn't mean to imply you were supporting that POV, and if I came across that way I apologize.

But I do think it's ambiguous. And whenever RAW is ambiguous, it's up to the DM to decide - hence my support for the common sense ruling, which I would choose as a DM in this scenario.

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Originally Posted by StreamOfTheSky

I disagree. Well, sort of. If you are immune to fatigue, and you use Furious Finish, you are hit with fatigue. Which you are immune to and thus don't care.

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I was kinda trying to explore what it'd be like without the equipment and rage power that make me immune to fatigue. I was thinking straight-up just Furious Finish and Roused Anger. I don't think those would qualify me for immunity.

Wow....I was just trying to make a stupid joke about how due to the wording Furious Finish worked both ways and...wow...


Either way, I'm in the "Specific trumps General" camp, and says that Furious Finish WILL make you Fatigued, regardless of whatever else you have going on.

As for how long Furious-Fatigue (can) lasts, if it can be removed, if the 'effects' are ignored but the 'status' stays if you are Immune, just how it works with previous Fatigue and or Exhaustion, etc...

There's a fair amount of uncertain Rules going on here.

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Originally Posted by grarrrg

There's a fair amount of uncertain Rules going on here.

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Yep, there's no satisfying furious finish. I always assumed the text was to cancel out "tireless rage." In any case, RAW is seriously broken when it comes to this.

Here's my proposal. If you have immunity to fatigue from some source (class ability like lame Oracle, racial ability like warforged) and you use furious finish then you still become fatigued but are immune to the effects. Sort of like how if you're immune to poison and someone shoots a poison dart at you, the poison is still inside but you aren't affected by it.