Limiting rest areas

[Nonek]

Consequences for resting:

The acquisition of camping supplies, some of which can be re-used but other are perishable.

The portage of said gear into and out of the dungeon, this would obviously work better with a limited inventory, so that you're choosing whether to carry that extra armour or your camping equipment.

Limit rest periods in any 24 hours.

Spells, illusions and traps laid to make an area safe for resting, thus the Wizard, Cipher and thief lose a bit of their efficacy.

The chance of enemy spies being forewarned of the parties approach, and planning suitably.

The mad dreams of a slumbering god haunt this place, resting tires the party, and they awake unrestored.

Exploring (with all the dangers that brings) to find a place where the enemy has not trod in years, and that therefore appears safe, think the guard room with the well in Moria.

Maps, hints and rumours about the dungeon that the players might try to uncover, at a cost to their pocket and in faction favours.

A plague stirs in this unholy place, if the party drink of the water or eat anything other than rations they may well fall victim to the malady.

Someone has to stand guard, if the players are wise.

Interactions between characters, rough crafting and maintenance attempts undertaken, spells studied and other such class skills worked on.

The building of atmosphere, rather than room after room of combat. An evil pair of eyes are seen watching the party from the shadows, strange echoes are heard in the depths, or a heartbeat seems to be heard in the characters sleep.

Petty injuries such as those incurred in Dragon Age Origins are treated by the partys healer, at the cost of bandages, herbs and maybe a few spells of binding from the priest or wizard.

The cunning rogue takes the time to watch the coming and going of enemy patrols, if they have them, or enemy lairs if they do not, and is thus a little forewarned when conducting his scouting.

A particularly sensitive creature spots the tracks of the party, or sniffs down their location, and they must either flee if that is an option or make a stand where they were resting.

[Frenetic Pony]

Now that I think about it: There's another way to go, get rid of resting almost altogether.

 

Lift some of PE's restrictions on healing stuff and you could make the game work without resting almost altogether, bypassing the entire debate. Imagine a system where you had to apply bandages/etc. to heal. For which you needed time and etc. Obviously you'd need to spend inventory resources to heal, you'd need to be out of combat, you'd be restricted to what you could do. But you wouldn't even encounter any thematic problems of "you can't rest here, this is the middle of a dungeon!"

 

Have different levels of injury, different levels of healing items you'd need to use, maybe a "medicine" skill you could up for one of your party members. It's that "no healing medicine" thing that's really restricting this to "you have to rest!" to get your health back up. If you DIDN'T have to rest, then who cares right?

[Osvir]

What about Doctor-type merchants in Cities and Doctor-Skills for the Player? I think it could be a nice addition to a resting mechanic.

Doctor Skills on the Field:
- Cures minor injuries
- Cures minor diseases
- Minor healing (1-5 HP) 

Doctor Skills at Camp:
- Cures medium injuries
- Cures medium diseases
- Additional healing when resting

^Skill investments. Could cost resources as well and could require a certain level of [Alchemy Craft] for certain diseases~ (potions required and the like)

Doctor Skills at Merchant (costs coin):
- Cures all injuries
- Cures all diseases
- Skill trainer

Resting Outdoors, generally:
- Heals most HP+Stamina
- Some areas are safe, some areas not?
- [suggestion] Resting too much outdoors gets "Stamina Burn" or some sort of [Outdoor Fatigue]/[stamina Sickness] (depletes Stamina faster). Resting at an Inn resets "Limit" (If you have 10/10 Outdoor Rests, get to 0/10 = Stamina Sickness, go to an Inn, get 10/10 again).
- [Armchair Suggestion] Dungeon Rest Checkpoint, not safe (random encounter possibilities). Obscured (a space behind a waterfall inside a dungeon, the room in Moria etc. etc.)
- Can not rest in the middle of a hallway, corridor etc. etc. 

 

Resting Indoors, generally:
- Heals most/all HP+Stamina
- Removes any Stamina effects/sickness
- Always safe (except when [Plot Assassin] or similar)

Edited April 24, 2013 by Osvir

[Lephys]

What is needed is a cost tradefoff that makes sense lore wise. As I've stated, "injuries" debuffs that need some sort of item/a hospital/etc. are the only thing that really makes sense thematically, and that people are proven to be willing to tradeoff without cheating around it. This is a problem going back for decades in game design, and so far as I know this is the best solution proven to work, while most every other suggestion in this thread has indeed already been tried and been shown to be ineffective or too frustrating in one way or another.

Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but isn't that simply a reason TO rest (or travel even farther "out of the way" to rest/heal properly)?

 

Consequences for resting serve the purpose of discouraging and/or preventing unlimited convenient resting or resting too often.

 

Also, just for what it's worth, I don't see the problems with "you can't rest here for long enough to recover these injuries because it's understood that your party feels exposed to random dangers here and/or doesn't have any wood nearby with which to make a fire because you're in the middle of a cavern and/or lacks the time and resources needed to properly bandage and treat your injuries and/or just plain isn't tired and therefore can't sleep, etc.". Any more than I see the problem with "You can't set up an alchemy table here and brew more healing potions, in the middle of this cave. You only had a certain number of healing potions, and you'll have to travel back to town to a proper laboratory/alchemy shop in order to brew proper potions."

 

As they've made mention of wanting to have limited typical "rest spots" in the game, I think a good alternative would be something like "makeshift camp," where you could take a 1-to-2-hour breather in a not-immediately-dangerous location and treat some major wounds and rehydrate and recover your strength, resulting in an abstracted maximum of something like 30% HP replenishment (keep in mind the P:E difference between HP and Stamina) and the removal of certain status effects, but not others. Then, when you get to an actual safe place to make a proper camp, you fully recover and sleep for 8 or 10 or 12 hours or so while poultices and such do their work. And the example for healing items would be that you can only produce makeshift pastes out of ground up herbs/fungus found in the area, in order to restore a fraction of what a proper healing potion would restore (in a game with proper healing potions).

 

So, basically, you can't fully recover unless you're at certain rest spots (granted, certain entire areas would probably be safe to make full camp at, and you'd always have the option of an inn and/or hospital or something in a town or city. The specific spots would be reserved for consistently dangerous areas, with very few secluded, easily defendable areas). End of story. You can makeshift-camp a certain number of times, perhaps, or maybe use some healing items (which are also finite), but, ultimately, everything's limited. The full-rest areas could be unlimited, but they're "limited" in availability to not usually being very close by. But, you can always run back to one and use it again, maybe (I still think there should be some kind of timer worked in, representing your inability to rest again so soon or something, or at least a "you wasted too much time and now lost the opportunity to handle this quest situation before it escalated!" factor)?

 

Don't want to run all the way back to the rest spot, or don't want to wait 'til you can rest at it again, or don't want to lose the ability to get a certain outcome in your current quest because you took way too long? Well, maybe not wasting all your HP and wading into foes and randomly clicking ability buttons is starting to look pretty tantalizing, or maybe you need to tune down the difficulty a bit. THAT'S rest consequences.

 

And, to clarify, I'm not talking quest "failures," specifically, but merely time-sensitive quest factors that change when you take too long.

[Osvir]

And, to clarify, I'm not talking quest "failures," specifically, but merely time-sensitive quest factors that change when you take too long.

 

Great post Lephys! But this mostly, because this is pretty much what I mean when I said "failed quest" in an earlier post.

 

"Change" is good. "Fail" is bad. Sort of... "evolution". The quest "develops" different traits.

 

An example: The one who goes straight through Moria doesn't run out of there (perhaps sneaks out of there) with little stress. The one who stops on the way to rest gets ambushed and has to flee from a Balrog. The quest is still well underway in both scenarios, it just changed some parameters.

[Larkaloke]

Personally I prefer it when resting is not limited except by the consequences of it. Resting freely and safely I believe should be limited to inns, strongholds, and other such safe or guarded areas, but it always bothers me at least a small amount if it is simply impossible to even try to rest in a certain location. I believe that random encounters and/or a reduced rate of healing should be enough of a deterrent for resting out in the wilderness, and in such situations, I'll usually head back to the nearest town to rest unless it feels as though it would take too long with the current plot. 

 

I like Nonek's list there. I think that doing more things with resting, rather than forcing it to be less frequent, is the way to go. Yes, some people might take advantage of it and reload over and over so that there is no combat or such (although they wouldn't be able to get around many of those requirements like that), but I'd say that's their problem. Nobody's making them do it, and nobody's making the rest of the people do it either, so they're perfectly free to just take what comes. 

 

I also like the idea of not being able to fully rest in many areas. It makes sense. I'm not so sure about not being able to rest soon after just resting -- if you're injured enough, that is actually fairly likely to work, although maybe then that rest would be even less useful than the standard dangerous-area rest. 

[TrashMan]

Random encounters: "Oh no, a few monsters, lol, I'll just rest again."

 

Two problem here:

- the monsters are too easy, so it's not much a of a problem, only extra XP

- the power of save/load compels you

 

1) can be fixed by not granting XP and having stronger mosnters. So the player ends up only loosing resources and health, hence restingin dangerous areas is basicly hurting him more than it's helping.

 

2) Can be fixed by not re-rolliing the encoutner. You reloaded? Well frak you, you're getting the exact same encounter no matter how many times you reload. No cheating here! Come to think of it, if you reload I'll throw even MORE monsters at you.

 

 

 

Can't rest in this area: "I'll just backtrack till I can."

 

So?..player choice to bactrack. He can always go back to town. This is a valid approach and there's no need to limit it.

 

 

 

 

Timed Quests: Most players "DIE DIE DIE!" A hyperbole, but you pretty much never, ever see timed stuff in games, even over the course of decades, for very very good reasons. They don't work unless it's a very immediate "escape this area or you die" ala the end of Halo. It screws up all difficulty balancing, it forces all players to play in the same way when the strength of games is that you can often play them in completely different ways, and can produce some of the most frustrating portions in gaming history. They don't work.

 

That's because a lot of players are whiny, spoiled brats.

They can't accept consequences and want to have their cake and eat it too. Frak you, if you accepted a urgent quest than do it and stop fooling around.

 

I WANT to see timed quests. It doesn't screw up balancing, it screws up players who couldn't RP their way out of a paper bag.

[Somna]

Giving it some thought, it feels like people are making things more complicated than it needs to.

 

What is the main point (that has been totally lost) of resting in games? To show that your characters are human enough to need sleep. Why do you need sleep? Because you get tired. Why does that matter? Because it's difficult to function "normally" when you're tired. And as further down the rabbit hole as you need.

 

As long as the game world carries on with its own agenda while you are busy snoozing away, it really doesn't matter. Best example I can think of is in Star Control 2, where the NPCs have their own time table and it was up to you to get done with things before another NPC group finished theirs. Not everything can copy that example to that degree, of course, but time limits can be a major contributor to difficulty settings as well. For example, not completing specific goals doesn't have to mean game over, but can makes things much more difficult for you, and higher difficulty settings have a much shorter time limit allowed, creating a kind of compound effect on difficulty that isn't just "throw more things at you in the same fight."

[JFSOCC]

Gamify resting? Maybe it's cool to have "setting up camp" as a gameplay element. You would position your camp, place cantrips, alarm snares, if you want some traps. You set up a watch schedule (optional). If you feel unsafe still you may place barricades and the like.

 

This way, it takes time to set up camp, since the human race is filled with comfort loving lazybones, no-one is going to put up camp to heal a minor injury, because while setting up camp might be fun, doing it every 2 minutes for a few minutes will get tedious fast.

Edited April 24, 2013 by JFSOCC

[ShadowTiger]

Now that I think about it, I think in Neverwinter Nights they linked resting to the difficulty slider. Perhaps they just need to add a hardcore mode that limits where and how often you can rest? Hopefully they were already planning on adding a hardcore mode... I forget if they announced that yet.

Edited April 24, 2013 by ShadowTiger

[curryinahurry]

If Obsidian are going to the trouble of designing spell and stamina recovery they way have outlined, I'm not sure why it's particularly important to have resting in dungeons or other interior environs.  Maybe after clearing a level or a discrete portion of a vast area, and then hopefully with the types of potential pitfalls that Nonek described in his post.  Easy mode could possibly have different resting options, seems like a waste of time quite honestly, and could be better handled by smart level design.

[Sensuki]

I vaguely recall somewhere in the Kickstarter campaign there being talk about stuff like water and food ... possibly linked to expert mode. I'm sure a few other people remember them throwing the words around somewhere.

 

Wouldn't be surprised if they end up implementing resources to be consumed while resting such as water, food, whetstones, flints etc similar to being able to use lockpicks to pick locks and stuff.

 

That's one mechanic they haven't really spoken about yet I guess, as it's not in either of the prototypes I don't think.

[Ineth]

Personally, I hate resting, and I just played through Baldur's Gate 2 with the minimum amount of resting (pretty much only rested when my party was exhausted from traveling between zones).

 

Yeah in BG2 you didn't need to rest so often, I too often kept going until most party members were fatigued.

But in IWD1, having to back out of dungeons mid-way - in order to rest and regain hitpoints/spells - was a common phenomenon.

 

So it seems to me this has a lot to do with area design, it's not just a question of game mechanics (which were very similar in the two games).

[Lephys]

Giving it some thought, it feels like people are making things more complicated than it needs to.

 

What is the main point (that has been totally lost) of resting in games? To show that your characters are human enough to need sleep. Why do you need sleep? Because you get tired. Why does that matter? Because it's difficult to function "normally" when you're tired. And as further down the rabbit hole as you need.

I didn't think we were ignoring the mechanics almost always attached to resting:

 

1) Healing/Recovery

2) Replenishment of spells/abilities

 

And I get what you're saying, but I don't think we're making it more complicated than it needs to be. If one purpose of resting is to show that your characters are human enough to become weary/fatigued from remaining awake for too long, then the other end of that spectrum is to show that they're human enough to be incapable of sleeping for 8 hours every 3 minutes.

 

SOMEthing needs to make finite the ability to gain the benefits of resting. Just like something has to allow you to die/lose at combat (reloading and trying the combat over again isn't any fun, but the player isn't OWED the ability to never have any consequences to not stepping up your game to the challenge at hand... especially with varying difficulty settings and proper game balancing).

 

 

I think the passage of time during rest actually occurring for the rest of the world is a good start (because only certain things would be time-sensitive, anyway. I'm not talking "everything's a damned water chip quest" here or anything). A limited number of rests outside of civilization would be nice, too. You could simply represent however much food/water/bandages everyone can carry, and have those things simply restock whenever you make it back to town (the point being not that they cost oodles of money, but that they are not infinitely small/heavy). But, again, that would just be one factor, if it were used.

 

I think it's best kept simple, though. Again, while I'm not opposed at all to more suggestions/tweaks, I'm pretty fond of the "you can only rest in specific spots while out in a dungeon/cave/dangerous region, etc." approach. You can ALWAYS backtrack to a rest spot, or push on to the next one. The odds of you always running out of Health at a point dead centered between two rest areas is pretty slim. And, as long as they're decently close together, that just prevents you from resting after every single rat you step on (because resting that often is just plain silly and negates the limits on your abilities-per-day AND your health, for all practical purposes). And the time-passing thing could be made to have minor adverse affects once you pass too much time in a given area, even if your current endeavor isn't time-sensitive. OR, you could simply have some amount of gameplay time before you could rest again (like... 5 minutes? *shrug*). That way, you can always wait that amount of time if you so choose (again, if the player wants to inconvenience himself all day long, just to heal back to full every time he gets down to 90% health, then let him).

 

I don't really see any blatant problems with that, other than "I want to always have full health, always, and never want to have to worry about possibly getting really low on health because I don't give a crap about putting effort into combating anything to any standard of effectiveness."

[Somna]

 

Giving it some thought, it feels like people are making things more complicated than it needs to.

 

What is the main point (that has been totally lost) of resting in games? To show that your characters are human enough to need sleep. Why do you need sleep? Because you get tired. Why does that matter? Because it's difficult to function "normally" when you're tired. And as further down the rabbit hole as you need.

I didn't think we were ignoring the mechanics almost always attached to resting:

 

1) Healing/Recovery

2) Replenishment of spells/abilities

 

And I get what you're saying, but I don't think we're making it more complicated than it needs to be. If one purpose of resting is to show that your characters are human enough to become weary/fatigued from remaining awake for too long, then the other end of that spectrum is to show that they're human enough to be incapable of sleeping for 8 hours every 3 minutes.

 

I'm not sure you got what I'm saying. They don't need to be attached to resting so directly in the first place. For example, if priests can only regain their powers at dawn each day provided they are conscious, not fatigued, and not in the middle of spellcasting, there you have a mechanic that is intended to be daily and not tied to resting as directly.

 

 

SOMEthing needs to make finite the ability to gain the benefits of resting. Just like something has to allow you to die/lose at combat (reloading and trying the combat over again isn't any fun, but the player isn't OWED the ability to never have any consequences to not stepping up your game to the challenge at hand... especially with varying difficulty settings and proper game balancing).

 

 

I think the passage of time during rest actually occurring for the rest of the world is a good start (because only certain things would be time-sensitive, anyway. I'm not talking "everything's a damned water chip quest" here or anything). A limited number of rests outside of civilization would be nice, too. You could simply represent however much food/water/bandages everyone can carry, and have those things simply restock whenever you make it back to town (the point being not that they cost oodles of money, but that they are not infinitely small/heavy). But, again, that would just be one factor, if it were used.

 

I think it's best kept simple, though. Again, while I'm not opposed at all to more suggestions/tweaks, I'm pretty fond of the "you can only rest in specific spots while out in a dungeon/cave/dangerous region, etc." approach. You can ALWAYS backtrack to a rest spot, or push on to the next one. The odds of you always running out of Health at a point dead centered between two rest areas is pretty slim. And, as long as they're decently close together, that just prevents you from resting after every single rat you step on (because resting that often is just plain silly and negates the limits on your abilities-per-day AND your health, for all practical purposes). And the time-passing thing could be made to have minor adverse affects once you pass too much time in a given area, even if your current endeavor isn't time-sensitive. OR, you could simply have some amount of gameplay time before you could rest again (like... 5 minutes? *shrug*). That way, you can always wait that amount of time if you so choose (again, if the player wants to inconvenience himself all day long, just to heal back to full every time he gets down to 90% health, then let him).

 

I don't really see any blatant problems with that, other than "I want to always have full health, always, and never want to have to worry about possibly getting really low on health because I don't give a crap about putting effort into combating anything to any standard of effectiveness."

Going to create an example to try to illustrate what I mean in the latter half of my post.

 

Let's say the party is at a point in the campaign where an antagonist in popular standing with the city populace is arrested due to the party's actions and is standing trial in 5 days. The party's goal at that point is to locate and provide enough evidence to sway even the most diehard fan of the person that he's guilty of his/her crime. This provides several mini-situations on top of the overall situation where time is important.

 

More time spent resting is less time available accomplishing your goal of proving the person guilty.

 

More time spent resting is less time spent investigating the leads necessary to get to the evidence needed.

 

More time spent resting is less time preventing opposing parties from locating and removing or destroying the evidence the party needs for the trial.

 

And if you say screw it and let the guy go free? You find the city becomes more hostile to you very quickly -- merchants charge you double of what you would normally pay if they will even sell to you in the first place, the guard uses as many excuses as possible to detain you, and you find out that the party has a bounty on their heads. Then you find out that the antagonist is actually involved in a coup to overthrow the current ruler of the city, who is backing the party's presence in the city in the first place. So if your party doesn't stop that from taking place in, oh, 2 days, they lose their funding on top of whatever standing they have left in the city and will either be evicted from the city or dead.

 

This is more what I mean about the world going on with its own agenda.

 

Then, if this kind of situation is in the game, feats or perks that cut down on sleep time could become really valuable. If your thief takes a perk that drops his necessary rest time down to 5 hours instead of 8, for example, having him wake up early can give you the option to let him scout the area in more detail while the other party members are still guarding/snoozing. And if everyone takes such perks, the party's total required rest time goes down, so you can squeeze more in-game hours out there for whatever the current situation is.

[Lephys]

I'm not sure you got what I'm saying. They don't need to be attached to resting so directly in the first place. For example, if priests can only regain their powers at dawn each day provided they are conscious, not fatigued, and not in the middle of spellcasting, there you have a mechanic that is intended to be daily and not tied to resting as directly.

You were correct. I did not quite catch what you were throwing, 8P. But I do now, and that absolutely makes sense. Also, though, I was kinda focused on the whole resting-equals-ability-replenishment thing because that's what Obsidian seems to be rolling with right now. Of course, that could always be changed, . I do think you'd run into some problems with the whole "You actually don't get your abilities replenished for 24 hours" thing, BUT, they are not problems I'm against attempting to tackle.

 

This is more what I mean about the world going on with its own agenda.

Yeah, sorry. I believe you possibly mistook me there. I was sort of just commenting on the issue in general, rather than meaning to suggest you, personally, were who I was arguing against.

 

Then, if this kind of situation is in the game, feats or perks that cut down on sleep time could become really valuable. If your thief takes a perk that drops his necessary rest time down to 5 hours instead of 8, for example, having him wake up early can give you the option to let him scout the area in more detail while the other party members are still guarding/snoozing. And if everyone takes such perks, the party's total required rest time goes down, so you can squeeze more in-game hours out there for whatever the current situation is.

Again, actually a pretty awesome idea.

[TrashMan]

Am I the only one would would LOVE to see Jagged Alliance 2 approach to stamina/fatigue, injury/healing, resting and travel?

I consider it the best game ever made - the depth it provided was epic.

 

Injuries mattered  - there was no fast way to heal. Doctors accelerted the healing process and could stop bleeding, but didn't magicly give HP back with an injection...untill you got a regeneration booster, but it was rare, expensive, could cause addiction and was basicly like a Cure Medium Wounds. Serious injuries caused ability losses and required a good doctor and a visit to the hospital.

 

Resting mattered - doing stuff drained fatigue. Fatigued mercenaries would perform worse, would loose morale and if too low would simply refuse to go any further and would go to sleep wihout askign your permission. Sleeping also increased healing rate, but mercs would only sleep if they were tired. Not to mention that you had enemy patrols going all around the overmap, so they could run into you while resting. You also had to secure a sector before you could sleep in it (read: kill all the baddies).

 

 

Time mattered - resting wasnt a waste of time because it was important. And while some mercs rested, other could do other stuff.. like practice their skills, train local milita, mantain equipment, take care of the wounded, etc.. And things happened on the overmap while you were resting.

[Jarmo]

Word going on sounds great in principle, but in practice players are amazingly hostile to time limits and need to rush.

 

I know the Fallout 1 time limit wasn't anything like severe, but still lead to players abandoning or not even trying out the game.

I kind of liked it, but still felt anxious while the clock was ticking and liked playing a great deal better with the timer out of the way.

 

Likewise, Mask of the Betrayer, I pretty much hated the hunger/craving stuff the first time I played it.

 

I'm of opinion of timers and world moving on, fitting open world sandbox games much better and story on rails games much worse.

Guess PE will be a bit of this and a bit of that, so timed events and quests might work at times and in special instances, but not as a general rule.

[AGX-17]

That sounds completely arbitrary and unbelievable. You can't rest in this location because, what, rest is a magical ether which is depleted every time you rest, and you have permanently depleted the "rest" resource from this area?

 

How do you explain/justify cities existing in the game in this proposal? How is it that they exist if nobody can rest more than an arbitrary number of times in a given location? Everybody would have died from sleep deprivation shortly after the P:E world's creation. it would be a lifeless wasteland. How would you even have a game in this scenario? An erosion simulator with plate tectonic DLC?

 

And why does being able to rest make someone a "noob"? Aren't you a noob for sleeping when you're tired? Or are you saying you've gone for decades without sleeping and you're totally fine and not dead?

Edited April 25, 2013 by AGX-17

[TrashMan]

Word going on sounds great in principle, but in practice players are amazingly hostile to time limits and need to rush.

 

I know the Fallout 1 time limit wasn't anything like severe, but still lead to players abandoning or not even trying out the game.

 

Their loss.

 

I personally find it rediockous that poeple take on 10 quests at once, ignore them, and then complain when they fail.

Their own fault, but it's not like they'll ever admit it.

[Failion]

You need some challenging areas where resting is non existent. If you are storming a fortress filled with intelligent beings that are looking to kill you. You shouldn't be allowed to rest. You'll HAVE to use your parties resources and accept causalities. Different areas in the game have high or low risk in resting. Resting in the wilderness you will awake be swarmed by animals. If you get unlucky and get  bandits they can literally have their fighters right next to your squishiest party member and incapacitate him right at the start of the fight.. And archers and casters flanking and peppering the survivors. Rest in a cave filled with stupid critters? You should be fine. 

 

Also what I thought was goofy in rpgs where your party rests right after they kill said bandits. This should have consequences like attracting further bandits or hungry beasts.

Edited April 25, 2013 by Failion

[NWN_babaYaga]

That sleep gives you back your health is beyond me and always was. It´s ok to regain the power for casting spells because it´s no damage and just mental fatigue but healing wounds caused by a zombie horde... is bleh!

 

Please find a way to make it difficult from the start to end and let us fear the creatures and dangers in your game!

[Lephys]

That sounds completely arbitrary and unbelievable. You can't rest in this location because, what, rest is a magical ether which is depleted every time you rest, and you have permanently depleted the "rest" resource from this area?

Not arbitrary, simply abstracted. It's not that, in the lore, a person cannot lie down and relax/sleep in this area because something prevents it. It's because you, the player, are not allowed, by the game's programming, to force your characters TO rest in this specific spot, under these specific circumstances, and/or this many times in a given timeframe, etc. for a plethora of small reasons that it would be ludicrous to try and individually represent, so you abstract them into a simple "Nope" when you click rest.

 

Basically, you're just specifying the criteria under which your party WILL rest, not where in the world people are capable of resting. It's just like in certain games how you get a message that says "You cannot drink any more potions." What it means is, "If you drink another potion right now, your character is just going to vomit it back out, because his stomach is full, so we're not even putting in the time-wasting option of watching your character wastefully drink-vomit potions away." Going more extreme, it's the same reason you have no option to lop off your own foot. Sure, your character's sword is sharp enough to do it, but the game simply doesn't even entertain that option, because it's a waste of time.

 

There are other options that less-abstractly represent resting (so it doesn't reach the "insta-resting" point) that would clearly nullify the function of a rest limitation, as you would literally be limited by finite resources (time, materials, food, things that attack/prevent you from resting, etc.).

Edited April 26, 2013 by Lephys

[Sabotin]

The way the mechanics are set up I believe resting will be something you only do at designated areas (like Inns in BG), not done by pressing a "rest" button. I mean, the inventory is limitless, the abilities mostly per-encounter, stamina you can recover (regenerates out of combat I guess?)...

 

If they add health regeneration out of combat to the easy difficulty that could be a way to solve certain problems, too.

[Randomthom]

You don't get a really good rest lying on the cold ground under a tree, especially if you're used to a bed. Just finding a room to hide in sounds viable in theory, but in reality it should start to wear on you. Likewise, so does walking around in armor and carrying a big load of gear. You get tired, your alertness level drops, and you become more vulnerable to mishaps and surprises. In particular, once you're wounded, simple survival becomes problematic. Eventually you'll need to pull back to a camp site, get some warm grub in you and rest in a warm blanket on some leaves.

 

It might be possible to model this through some type of "deep fatigue" status that reflects how long you've gone without a proper rest in a safe, comfortable environment. This fatigue factor should steadily lower your health recovery rate and reduce your initiative in combat. You can then rest up all you want in a damp, uncomfortable cave, but you'll still be burdened by that deeper fatigue.

 

I've got to say that this is probably the best & most elegant solution to all this that I've seen. Maybe add some attack penatlies, spell failure & increased chance for weapon fumbling at high levels of exhaustion & you've got a proper built-in rest control system! I'd like to see druids/barbarians/rangers have reduced fatigue penalties because of their being used to 'roughing it' too. Could also be a feat* that other characters can take, call it "Sleeping Rough".

*Or whatever they're calling feats in PE.

 

There's lots of good suggestions going around in here. I'll throw my own into the mix... Watch orders...

 

When you rest while away from civilised places you set a watch order, taking it in turns etc. to take watch. 8 hour rest, 2 hour watches. Each hour the following checks are made. First, constitution/endurance check to stay awake. Second, chance of random encounter. Third, perception/wisdom check (with appropriate modifiers) for it to be noticed. Failing the first of course gives heavy penalties to the perception checks but also means that the next person doesn't get woken up for their turn so all further perception checks take this heavy penalty.