The bit that I find a bit strange is that how often players can rest is something completely determined by the player?
So if you want to make the game harder on yourself? Don't rest as often?
If you want an easier run of it? Rest often?
It's like a built in difficulty meter that the player controls.
I don't see any advantage to placing limits on how often players can rest.
What I *do* think is interesting is baking in consequence to resting too often.
e.g.
If you're in a dangerous area, you can't take a long rest until you find a secure area (checkpoint style "camps" you can rest at).
You can attempt to rest in a dangerous area, but if you do so, you have to roll on an encounter table for every hour you rest (this was in BG).
You have some time sensitive events that progress for every day you rest. This makes the world feel more alive and that certain events are time sensitive.
But stuff involving supplies or hard limits on how often you can rest are just annoying and frustrating for the player.
You've already got classes that lose 90% of their power as their resources deplete.
Agreed with this. There are a lot of pushes for more restrictions in games lately. I would hope if there are limitations imposed to resting it would be tied to difficulty. I think the main problems I see with limiting long resting universally are:
- There's no telling how badly a fight will go. If the rng completely betrays you what should be a simple fight will leave you depleted and in need of a rest.
- If you are depleted but can't rest due to time or location constraints if rests are limited you have to either
- Wait until the timer is up, which is anti-gameplay as you are just staring at a screen
- Spend time backtracking to accomplish the same thing, which also adds to time that you aren't playing.
I do understand the thoughts of immersion being added by limiting resting, and having safe areas (such as ones with bedrolls) is a good solution as long as they are frequent enough, but being stuck because of a string of badluck and having to reload doesn't scream exciting gameplay to me at least.
Random encounters would be potentially fun, but the problem then becomes if you are still completely depleted from your last fight it's just going to wipe your party and result in a reload anyways. Still, I can see potential fun to be had with that so I wouldn't necessarily be opposed.
