Stamina Action Economy

One bar governs offence and defence alike. Each action deducts a cost, regeneration pauses while acting and often while guarding, and an empty bar leaves the character standing still through whatever happens next. Weight, armour and equipment adjust costs and recovery, so build decisions are really decisions about how many actions per second a character can afford against a particular enemy.

FromSoftware built the economy into Demon's Souls in 2009 to make combat deliberate while action games were accelerating around it. Stamina meters long predate the game, in sports titles and earlier action games, so the innovation was not the bar but its scope. Making every verb draw from a single pool converts panic into a punishable state and forces players to decide, before swinging, whether they can afford to be wrong.

Deliberateness became a genre. Since the bar is visible and enemy attack rhythms are legible, fights turn into questions of spacing and patience rather than reflex, and difficulty can be raised without inflating damage numbers. Costs include a certain sameness of pace and real frustration when the bar denies an escape the player could clearly see coming. Several later designs restrict stamina to sprinting and leave combat free.