Thoughts on the "resting" mechanic.

[Lephys]

^ It's not really about realism. It's about reason. Many realistic things follow reason, because reality is subject to reason. So, if your goal with a rest mechanic is to limit spell use, say, and you allow resting every 10 seconds, say, then you're not really achieving that goal. It's silly, in that example, to say "Pssh, we should be able to rest every 10 seconds, because it doesn't need to be realistic!" Because, really, what you want then, is a lack of limitation on spell use. You don't really care how often you can rest, which is why you don't care about it being realistic. You only care that any amount of realism worsens the perceived detriment to your gameplay experience by compounding the spell usage limitations.

 

Realism (or believability) and fun are not mutually exclusive things.

 

No, but the question needs to be on the correct framework. In this case it's exactly as you say unlimited resting destroys the limits placed on certain abilities. But the simplest "realistic" solution is no good, by limiting rests to every 16 hours or so players can just wait past them. It's poor design to make the most boring solution the most effective one. A better solution is to have preset resting points, that way the intended limits are retained and there is no way to work around them by playing in a boring fashion. Alternatively have a time limit associated with every quest or even some simple mechanic such as food that limits the amount of times a party can rest between each safe area.

 

I was only pointing out that disregarding realism completely would be just as silly as disregarding any other factor completely. I like the idea of food working into the limit somehow, but you couldn't base it only on food quantity, or people'd just stock up on food and rest every 10 seconds. But, some sort of cooldown might work, when you're in un-safe areas. Although, then the slow people (ignoring the people who intentionally wait for the duration of the cooldown after every single battle, just to rest as often as possible) would get access to rest again before the faster people. So, really, set rest locations is probably the best way to go. If you get through the next 6 battles in 10 minutes, or 30 minutes, you still get to rest again after the same interval of combat encounters.

 

You might could have each rest location use a cooldown, so that people couldn't just go fight through the next encounter, then run 10 feet back to rest, then progress onward to the NEXT group of enemies, then go 40 feet back and rest, etc, as that kind of defeats the purpose of the resting limit in the first place. Either that or make them one-use places. The ones outside of dungeons and such could be infini-use. But the "checkpoint" kind inside of dungeons would need some form of use-limitation, or the maximum distance to a rest point would be halved, and the minimum distance would be point-blank.

[Rubarack]

 

I was only pointing out that disregarding realism completely would be just as silly as disregarding any other factor completely. I like the idea of food working into the limit somehow, but you couldn't base it only on food quantity, or people'd just stock up on food and rest every 10 seconds. But, some sort of cooldown might work, when you're in un-safe areas. Although, then the slow people (ignoring the people who intentionally wait for the duration of the cooldown after every single battle, just to rest as often as possible) would get access to rest again before the faster people. So, really, set rest locations is probably the best way to go. If you get through the next 6 battles in 10 minutes, or 30 minutes, you still get to rest again after the same interval of combat encounters.

 

You might could have each rest location use a cooldown, so that people couldn't just go fight through the next encounter, then run 10 feet back to rest, then progress onward to the NEXT group of enemies, then go 40 feet back and rest, etc, as that kind of defeats the purpose of the resting limit in the first place. Either that or make them one-use places. The ones outside of dungeons and such could be infini-use. But the "checkpoint" kind inside of dungeons would need some form of use-limitation, or the maximum distance to a rest point would be halved, and the minimum distance would be point-blank.

 

I think that's fair, though I would quickly disregard realism if it were getting in the way of reinforcing the mechanics in an interesting way. I think you could limit people stocking up on food if you limited the food packs storage capacity to, say 7 days worth. If a player tried to buy more, or multiple packs there could be a quick explanation saying there'd be little point, the food would spoil before they got a chance to eat it. As long as you prevented players returning to and from town ad infinitum you'd have a pretty effective limitation on resting.

[rjshae]

I'd like it if, over the course of the game, we could spend money to build up your baggage train/camp infrastructure. For example, hiring henchmen as guards, laborers to take care of the pack animals and gear, a cook, camp followers, and so forth; all giving minor rest and transport benefits. The hirelings may even be workers at your stronghold that travel with you. As the personnel improves, so to could the journey time back to camp be reduced. After all, those extra guards allow you to camp closer to your area of activity.

[Lephys]

I'd like it if, over the course of the game, we could spend money to build up your baggage train/camp infrastructure. For example, hiring henchmen as guards, laborers to take care of the pack animals and gear, a cook, camp followers, and so forth; all giving minor rest and transport benefits. The hirelings may even be workers at your stronghold that travel with you. As the personnel improves, so to could the journey time back to camp be reduced. After all, those extra guards allow you to camp closer to your area of activity.

 

I advocate some form of improvement/progression that affects your resting.

 

 

I think that's fair, though I would quickly disregard realism if it were getting in the way of reinforcing the mechanics in an interesting way. I think you could limit people stocking up on food if you limited the food packs storage capacity to, say 7 days worth. If a player tried to buy more, or multiple packs there could be a quick explanation saying there'd be little point, the food would spoil before they got a chance to eat it. As long as you prevented players returning to and from town ad infinitum you'd have a pretty effective limitation on resting.

 

Well, the only problem I had with the "you can only rest if you have food, and you can only have (insert number here) foods" scenario is that people are still just gonna rest after every battle, however many times they can until they run out of foods. Then, they're going to complain that they either had to return to town for more food (if you let them, or its cost, etc.) or that they were unable to rest for the remainder of the dungeony/unsafe area (if you limit returning to town to buy more food). Either way, the only purpose of the resting limitation is lost.

 

Take the spells. If you ONLY regain 90% of your spell casts when you rest, then it doesn't make much sense to say "You can ONLY get these spells back after every single battle!" If that's what you actually wanted, then it'd be much less convoluted to just have the spells return every time combat ends. If the design intention of the game is to balance the potency of the spell repertoire against the limited use of them, then the best way to do that is with a time limit (cooldown, pretty much). OR, even better yet, the specific resting areas. If you require the player to make it to the other side of a field filled with enemies before his party can rest again, then you require him to, however he does it (and on whatever difficulty) preserve his party's resources and employ some degree of strategy and efficiency to make it through that field. Some people won't like that, but, it's either that (or some other type of enforcement of that limitation), or no limitation at all.

 

So, yeah, a food quantity just wouldn't really reinforce the limitation very well. You could easily argue that, since you can only get 7 foods, and you can only return to town at certain intervals, the player would be required to conserve those 7 foods. But, not really. People who embrace reason would say "Oh, then I hafta make these 7 rests count until I can go back to town." People who don't would say "OMG! THOSE 7 FOODS ONLY LASTED LIKE 7 BATTLES, AND THERE ARE LIKE 10 MORE BATTLES!" Do we need to make sure unreasonable people are accomodated? No. But, using the set rest points doesn't even give them the possibility of being ABLE to use their rests inefficiently, then complain about it.

 

Disliking limitations in general doesn't really make any sense, since they serve quantifiable purposes, so I'm honestly not worried about the people who don't think there should even be anything tied to resting, or any resting limitations. Just like I'm not worried about the people who want infinite hitpoints, or to deal 1,000,000 damage. That's what cheat codes and mods are for. And if you're having trouble with the current degree of limitation, that's what difficulty settings are for.