I was playing Tekken the other day, and I got this thought.

Basically, we all know that, even when not the game is button-mash friendly, there will be some characters that are, and some players will use that, unless we deal with masterpieces like SF2/3. The thing is, when you play against them, it becomes an irritating process, which is not their fault of course. Even if you can stop them with well-timed defense and offense moves, they see that button-mash still works, and they have no initiative to learn to play "better" if they still can get wins this way. That limits the options on who you can play against and still have a good time.

So, I was thinking, what if the game assigns a "stamina cost" to every move? Or even an extra penalty for moves that get repeated too often? That means you have to exercise economy on the moves no matter what. And when it goes below a certain threshold, the damage you infict lessens, you lose agility, etc etc. I think it could end up bringing a more balanced play.

Thoughts?

This was implemented in Super Smash Brothers Brawl and Melee, it was called Attack Decay. In Melee, the penalty was so low it didn't matter, but in brawl it was important.

A queue of the last 10 moves was stored and if every time a move is played, it loses it's effectiveness. The only catch is that some characters only have one or two good moves, like Sonic, and the decay made those the characters mostly unplayable.

It's an interesting thought. In a simple sense, I don't believe it yield the game play that typical fighter-players like. Some games do use variations of it, such as the Dragonball games.

Take an example like "Street Fighter" and let's talk about the skills needed to be good at it. First, here's what someone can 'learn' and eventually get no better at (fixed goal):
- Memorization of key presses for combos and moves
- Memorization of all players moves and their counters

Beyond this, a player must gain skill through their reactionary time to use the skills they've learned above. The less limiters on this, the more variance of skill between players can exist. That means that the more viable moves that could occur means more logic paths to juggle. The deeper that is, the greater the upper-bound of skill can be.
Will the opponent do a...
- High light kick?
- High heavy kick?
- Low light punch?
- Low heavy punch?
- Throw?
(So on.)

Now put a resource pool or combo-limiter on this, and the game play changes more from a reactionary-fighting game and into a tactics game. And depending on the degree or type of limiter, the upper-bound of skill gets reduced. The memorization components already play out like rock-paper-scissors game, adding in preferred or limited combat impose more of that style. Here are combo-limiter (like Smash Brothers noted above) and stamina example:

Combo-Limiter, opponent has done 3 kicks in a row.
- High light kick? - Unlikely (or impossible) due to degredation
- High heavy kick? - Unlikely (or impossible) due to degredation
- Low light punch?
- Low heavy punch?
- Throw?

Stamina, opponent has low stamina from the fight so far.
- High light kick?
- High heavy kick? - Impossible, not enough stamina
- Low light punch?
- Low heavy punch? - Impossible, not enough stamina
- Throw? - Impossible, not enough stamina

As you can see, there are less possible paths that can be taken during the heat of the battle, simplifying the complexity of any given second.

Resource management in a game generally only works well when the restoration/obtainable of it is a meaningful part of the gameplay. First person shooters have ammo, but collecting powerful ammo before assaulting is a tactic. RPG's have mana or focus or whatever, with potions or buff management as a strategy to restore it.

In Street Fighter 3, it has resources known as the power bar at the bottom. The bar has to be gained though combat events however and plays into the combat strategy. Stamina would logically either be a fixed resource pool or slowly regained. There are games that do use it though, look at the Dragonball games. The "Power" meters function in sort of a hybrid manner.

tldr version;
It's used today already in ways that make sense for the games they are used it.

Stamina is just another thing that has to be balanced. It's just as easy to have an unbalanced character with stamina as without. Except now you have to balance damage, speed, and stamina instead of just damage and speed.

A lot of realistic fighters (fight night, MMA, UFC, etc) use stamina systems because it's realistic.