Thoughts about abusing the "rest function"

[darthaegis]

Hello, I'm a fairly new member to the Codex. I have only played a few games that I could sorta consider "cRPGs" (D: OS, DA: O, KotOR 1 and 2, PS: T) and I'm currently playing BG2. I've gotten used to, after a (substantial) fight, resting unitl I get healed, and so everytime I get in a fight, spending about 12-24 in-game hours resting, and it sometimes feels kinda ridiculous. Thoughts?

 

[Athelas]

All's fair in love and war.

I also mention love because frequent resting helps progress the romances.

Spoiler

Serious answer: What kind of party setup do you have? Have you tried going on until you run low on HP/memorized spells?

 

[Ivan]

Ugh, give it a rest already.

 

[nikolokolus]

My thoughts are that unless a game designer accounts for rest spamming with some sort of mechanic (with random encounters or consumable resources) then rest as much as you like. If you feel like you want to impose some restriction on yourself to make it harder or more of a challenge, then do that. It's not "cheating" if that's what you're worried about.

 

[Somberlain]

Infinite resting is silly both in terms of realism and difficulty. Random encounters are a bad solution, since they encourage savescumming aka degenerate gameplay

Best solution is supplies like in M&M games.

 

[octavius]

There's no cheating in a single player game. Play it whatever way you enjoy most.
Personally I prefer to make my characters only rest once a day, to make things more tactical and challenging.

 

[Fenris 2.0]

Supplies, timed quests and consequences.
Quest: Remove Ogre from Premises ? Ogre kills Farmers until you remove it; Supplies getting expensive.
Quest: Rescue Virgin ? She is sacrificed at full moon; Demon now roams Premises, your Reputation gets hit, but there might be a bigger reward for removing demon ^^.
Quest: Remove Orc-Leader ? If you wait long enough the Orcs will destroy mainhub.

On the Downside there is much scripting required, the game might be getting hectic and there might be a lot of content, that isn't seen by a lot of people

Edit:
In P&P we usually wouldn't have dared to rest for a long time, because the world moved on.

Yet another Edit:
I try not to rest while on some quests when it makes no sense storywise.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

If you NEED to rest after every fight to keep going, as often is the case after substantial fights, there's not much to do. It's only a problem when you're doing it "to be on the safe side" or because you get the shakes unless everyone is at 100% capability all the time (omg I'm at 19/20 HP)

 

[darthaegis]

I haven't played a lot so I still have the first party members (Yoshimo, Jaheira, Minsc) and me (wild mage). Some good suggestions, I'll try not to rest so much, because as clockwork knight said I do kinda "get the shakes unless everyone's at 100%." Resting only if there are important spells missing or my party members' health is below, like, 60%.

 

[bloodlover]

Just rest whenever you feel like it. Enjoy the game and don't make it harder on yourself for nothing especially if you play for the first time. Though if you need to rest too often, then you might be playing the game the wrong way.

 

[Ninjerk]

Pretty sure you'd be resting often if you were fighting hobgoblins and shit, too.

 

[darthaegis]

Did you just finish reading my comments about Swordflight/BG2 resting?

An extract:



Later in the post I explain how Swordflight skilfully balances severe rest restrictions with the need to heal and recover spells; then the developer himself posts a couple comments at the end of the comments section.

I did just now. Interesting. I wonder how rest will be handled in PoE (maybe their hardcore mode - can't remember the name - will have more brutal ambushes?)

 

[Tigranes]

I think some restrictions to resting can be interesting. The problem with how IE games did it was that the main punishment for resting in dangerous areas was random monster spawns. I never, ever bothered to fight them. Unless you spam rest, you're resting because you're low on spells and the like, but especially in vanilla, most spawns were not powerful enough to really threaten you, so it just became tedious. It could be interesting to have a 'rest only when you need' / ironman house rules setup with stronger spawns, I suppose.

You could try having rest only in certain locations or with certain NPCs in dungeons, but you'd need those rests to be one time only, or it'll just be tedious to backtrack. The problem with setting such global, hard limits, though, is that you'd need to balance it for all players. So you need there to be sufficiently frequent rest spots for the not-as-good players, so if you're good, or get better, then it would again become too plentiful. Same with selling rest kits - though there the issue could be the basic brokenness of RPG economies.

 

[Sykar]

Did you just finish reading my comments about Swordflight/BG2 resting?

An extract:

I also fist-pumped in reaction to rogueknight333 wisely implementing "severe rest restrictions", without which the player can simply "rest spam" - that is, throw themselves recklessly into a fight, inflict massive damage (but also take lots in return), rest afterwards to heal themselves completely, then just repeat over and over until game's end. Or in the case of spell-casters, simply empty their spellbook on the hordes, rest to replenish spell slots, then repeat again and again - which has always been a huge problem with Vancian magic, at least since Baldur's Gate II, where it really got out of hand (resting was instant in BGII, optionally healed the player fully, and rarely resulted in ambushes - a weak deterrent in IE RPGs, anyway, since ambushing enemies were walk-overs. On-rest ambushes in Swordflight are resource-draining and punishing: players will realize very quickly that resting in dungeons seething with undead is a big no-no).

Later in the post I explain how Swordflight skilfully balances severe rest restrictions with the need to heal and recover spells; then the developer himself posts a couple comments at the end of the comments section.

Resting in BG2 depended on location and level. I remember having a high level party in the Firkraag dungeon resting only to be surprised my Adamantine Golems and Iron Golems.

 

[octavius]

That must be embarrasing, being surprised by golems.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Infinite resting is silly both in terms of realism and difficulty. Random encounters are a bad solution, since they encourage savescumming aka degenerate gameplay

Best solution is supplies like in M&M games.

Only if supplies are severely limited. And even then, you're basically fucked if the party has access to Lloyd's Beacon and some way of getting back to town.

Best solution is to simply make resting in a dungeon impossible and have enemies re-fortify/recover if you leave and come back.

 

[Lilura]

Resting in BG2 depended on location and level.

I think you mean '"difficulty" of on-rest ambushes' (which spawn in limited, laughable thresholds).

I remember having a high level party in the Firkraag dungeon resting only to be surprised my Adamantine Golems and Iron Golems.

Fighting a few golems at high level, so what? Good experience! (Gauth-killin's more efficient, though. And the most efficient of all are the Flesh Golem on-rest ambushes in BG1). Far from a daunting deterrent, they're delicious incentives to rest.

 

[Athelas]

The only IE game with resting restrictions was the one where you couldn't die.

 

[felipepepe]

Personally, I think BG would be a better game if it had a way to limit rest, like requiring a tent or provisions, just like in Pillars of FINAL FANTASY. It's a simple & elegant solution. If you want to rest every 5 steps ok, but you better have the gold to pay for that.

I remember that my brother took something like 20 in-game days to leave BG2's first dungeon. It was a bit ridiculous to see Irenicus outside going "what, you escaped?".

 

[Carrion]

Best solution is to simply make resting in a dungeon impossible and have enemies re-fortify/recover if you leave and come back.

What if the game takes place in a city or an outdoor area where the border between dungeon and not-dungeon is nonexistent? What if the dungeons feature unique enemies or encounters where respawning makes zero sense (like if you clear out Firkraag's dungeon, leave, rest and then come back, will there be another Firkraag or a nameless red dragon waiting there)? I suppose you could just fill the dungeon with faceless trash mobs to replace the enemies you've killed, but eh, goodbye interesting encounter design. There are games where this kind of approach does work very well (like Dark Souls), but even then you're basically giving the player free loot and possibly XP.

I think that probably the easiest, most logical and most universally applicable way to discourage rest spamming is to make time a resource in itself, which can be done via time limits (either for the whole game or just particular quests) or some sort of an upkeep cost (like food or salary). Even very lenient time limits, like the water chip timer in Fallout, prevent completely ridiculous behavior like resting after every single encounter to heal, especially on the first playthrough since you can't be certain how much time you actually have. That already makes resting a non-trivial action and something you'd generally prefer to avoid. As for the upkeep cost, the price and availability of food might become trivial as you get more powerful, but there might still be other aspects to consider, like food taking up inventory space (see: Betrayal at Krondor) or remaining edible for only a limited amount of time before you have to resupply, meaning that in some hellishly long dungeon far away from all civilization you might have to scrape by what you happen to find there. A running upkeep cost, like your mercenaries' salaries in JA2, also helps preventing ridiculous rest spamming, even though it's hard to keep it somehow balanced throughout the full length of the game.

And of course, another smart and simple thing to do would be to remove the fucking idiotic heal-on-rest mechanic from games altogether. If you take a bullet or a sword to the gut and then go to sleep for eight hours, you should not wake up. Make healing (magic included) use up some actual resource instead of it being just a free action.

 

[CaptainCoxwaggle]

I prefer game mechanics that provide rest after you accomplish something, or reset the situation if you need to bail and rest without finishing your objective. Preferably without a save outside of safe areas. This way the player is forced to manage resources over numerous encounters and develop a risk/reward mentality as they get closer to their goal but see potentially dangerous sidequests.

Also it saves time from the need to create failure states since every munchkin is just going to reload rather then face quest failure in a game.

 

[Johannes]

Best solution is to simply make resting in a dungeon impossible and have enemies re-fortify/recover if you leave and come back.

What if the game takes place in a city or an outdoor area where the border between dungeon and not-dungeon is nonexistent? What if the dungeons feature unique enemies or encounters where respawning makes zero sense (like if you clear out Firkraag's dungeon, leave, rest and then come back, will there be another Firkraag or a nameless red dragon waiting there)? I suppose you could just fill the dungeon with faceless trash mobs to replace the enemies you've killed, but eh, goodbye interesting encounter design. There are games where this kind of approach does work very well (like Dark Souls), but even then you're basically giving the player free loot and possibly XP.

If you kill Firkraag, obviously most guys in the dungeon will start packing, or infighting, or whatever. If you don't kill him but kill his minions, he will hire new ones as he can. Doesn't fit Firkraag but in some cases the boss of the dungeon may flee the scene if you kill his minions but leave before killing him. And so on.

Setting up logical follow-ups to stuff the player does may be an amount of work but not the hardest thing.

 

[Melcar]

I usually only rest until all my spells are spend and my characters are below 5hp.

 

[Sranchammer]

If you rely on rest mechanics then you should not be playing videogames

 

[GlutenBurger]

Baldur's Gate sure isn't one of them, but there are some games where I've had to lean on the rest function with less-than-prestigious frequency. Some games seem designed around the assumption that you're going to, at least on an initial playthrough. What's the yardstick for determining whether you've used a mechanic reasonably or have exploited it as a crutch for your feeble personal failings?