A(dventuring) Body at Rest

"In the circles we made with our fires
We talked of the pale afternoon
The clouds were like dark riders
Flying on the face of the moon"

Sting - Something The Boy Said


In the past couple of months I finished up one final playthrough of both Tyranny and Torment: Tides of Numenera, in preparation of moving on to new RPGs. It's a wonder we have any new cRPGs these days, especially good ones, after a fifteen year dry spell punctuated mainly by the overall mediocrity of the Neverwinter Nights series and one quickly betrayed glimmer of hope in the form of Dragon Age: Origins, both lost in a sea of "action" titles and MMO gear farming.

Resource management, abandoned by computer game developers somewhere around the time of Morrowind as too complex for their new cretinous mass-market audience, was grudgingly reintegrated into these new strategic, party-based RPGs. This included resting at specific safe locations instead of just plopping your ass down wherever you want to recover all your daily spells, a mechanic which utterly invalidated the Neverwinter Nights series' feigned difficulty. The Elder Scrolls series was little better; most players probably only rested once in a blue moon to trigger specific quest steps. Dragon Age: Origins at least gave resting some functionality in curing wounds.... then immediately invalidated it by filling the player's inventory with cheap, plentiful wound cures. Tyranny went one better by instead tying wound curing to resting and tying resting to a few specific locations which required travel

... though unfortunately travel time had too little effect to lend resting its due relevance. TToN took the more usual route, charging you cold, hard cash for restoring your action pools

 

... though it, in turn, undermined its relevance by providing entirely too many action point restoring consumables and infinite free lodging as quest rewards. Plus, while the cost is greater than the mere token amount it would be in most such games, it still falls an order of magnitude or two below your accumulated wealth by the last act.

A couple of centuries ago by the time of Alexandre Dumas, rented rooms, inns and taverns were accepted intrigue-riddled set pieces in tales of swashbuckling adventure; later wild west saloon scenes followed suit and the "you all meet in a tavern" stage of role-playing campaigns was again cemented by Tolkien's Prancing Pony. While the motif is slavishly copied into every cRPG, finding a place to rest has rarely achieved its due impact on gameplay. Pillars of Eternity threw a nice wrench in the works by offering specific bonuses for sleeping in some locations, but these were still trivialized by their low cost and on-demand availability. For rest to truly become relevant to gameplay, the time spent resting must somehow affect your campaign. TToN copied the original Torment's scarcity of safe havens but still compromised on this point much like The Elder Scrolls by treating rest as a trigger for a select few quests (the most blatant being a murder spree in the first act which continues every time you rest.) The mechanic only comes into its own in games where everything functions according to a calendar / clock.

The old Dune game from '92, with its odd mix of linear adventure and light RTS (before RTS was even a genre) provides an early example. Everything took time, from your own travel to your Fremen armies' travel and battles to spice mining or the spread of vegetation or smugglers replenishing their stockpiles. While resting was not a mechanic per se, you could decide (or be forced by your script) to wait in some sietch or another while the world shifted around you.

More recently, Mount&Blade or Dead State or Pathfinder: Kingmaker all made a better show of it.

Dead State enforced a strict daily cycle, in which you had to return to your home base to rest every night or risk a hefty morale penalty. Each day you had to both ensure a profitable loot haul from your travels and allot competent workers to care for the shelter's own maintenance and production in your absence.

M&B didn't rely much on you yourself resting, but your injured troops required time to heal. Early on you might pay for their rest & recuperation at an inn. Later you might pass by one of your forts now and then to swap fresh soldiers in and your wounded out of your army. All the while, food was consumed, populations grew, taxes and expenses accumulated, bandit bands, armies and caravans traveled across the map in fitting indifference or malice as to your squandered hours.

Kingmaker being split between traditional adventuring and kingdom management emphasized getting your adventuring done in a timely manner so as to arrive back at your capital in time to deal with the various events plaguing your realm. While the initial implementation was quite aggravating, with too little control and too many triggers rewarding the player's foreknowledge and not foresight, it also added up to the most multifaceted. Not only did you need to recover spells but even the muscleheads in your party would need to clear the hefty penalty to their physical attributes through fatigue / exhaustion.

All three of these most satisfying examples share an integration of the resting mechanic with other facets of gameplay. You or your companions' skills might affect others' healing / recovery times. Kingmaker's camping especially rewarded you for bringing along multiple characters competent as lookouts, hunters, cooks, etc. and if I had to be honest, Jaethal the undead inquisitor's most pervasively useful ability was simply her immunity from fatigue letting her dive into all too frequent ambushes fresh as a rotting daisy. And, in each case such roleplaying and strategic choices mitigate the entropic drag of the game world on your own schemes and plots, the resources automatically decaying or consumed, the inexorably encroaching enemy forces.

Conclusion: a resting mechanic is nearly guaranteed a pointless waste of both developers' and players' time for a traditional plot-driven Adventure game or RPG in which the player actively moves the plot forward by his actions. In order for rest to have a meaningful impact, there must be a world outside your adventuring party which progresses while you are inactive. There must be events not_at_rest. As a prelude to death, sleep carries no threat unless the universe keeps swirling in the darkness outside our feeble fires, hounding us with every unconscious breath.