Re: Weariness in gameplay?
I personally don't punish characters for any short combats, but I'll go ahead and add my viewpoint to this issue.
I'm not exactly the healthiest fellow-I'm resilient, sure, but I've had bronchitis every year of the past seven or so, which I suspect has affected my stamina a bit.
About a year back, I participated in a Korean martial art. We did a fair amount of endurance training, but the system is focused on joint manipulations and things such as that. We would spar at least once a month, and practice groundfighting/wrestling about once a week. During these groundfighting classes, we would spend about half an hour actually wrestling: about two minutes, then you switch partners and start again until everyone had gone against everyone else with similar ability several times. Despite my inadequacies, after a half-hour of groundfighting I would be fatigued in only a very minor way; a few minutes of light exercise would have me back to normal and ready for more. In this style, as mentioned, we also had sparring. Normal sparring matches would last about the same amount of time, close to two minutes. After this, we would be getting fairly winded and be slowing down a little bit.
However!-I wasn't one of the top students. Three guys in my class would spar with some of the more advanced fellows in the adult class. The instructor would simply pit them against each other and tell them to go at it for fifteen, thirty, or fourty-five minutes. To say the least, they didn't -begin- at 45 minutes, but they got there. And this endurance training is something we would work at for perhaps 2 hours a week: far, far fewer hours than someone travelling and adventuring constantly.