Thoughts about abusing the "rest function"

The fun one is having with one's penis is the only thing of value.

 

I rest only when a DM would let me rest. Usually only in towns or after clearing a dungeon. I am used to using spells wisely rather than blowing encounters up.

Do what you want, really. Rest spam if you like, it's part of the game or they'd have designed around it. Don't if you want an experience closer to P&P or a challenge. Consider it your difficulty slider.

 

Honestly, I don't think the designers bother to think about topics like resting. Balancing games with a lot of freedom but no DM is basically impossible, so they're probably just resigned to just making the game playable to casuals while throwing in a couple of tougher optional encounters for power gamers.

I don't think they're even thinking about balance related stuff more than that. They would be including resting only because it's what the audience expects, not because it makes their game interesting or better or because the balance requires it.

Like someone said, CRPGs need to get rid of DnD and other stupid crap. Any game that has that many character builds is already doomed in terms of balance - either that or the freedom is an illusion and you're actually expected to use a certain kind of build or party. Even in Night of the Raven, it's obvious that the game was balanced for a melee fighter (I say this after having played through the game several times, at least once with each build).

To make a game like this successful as something other than story faggotry, you need to limit freedom where it's the least important (resting, character builds, methods of healing in general, methods of travel, methods of buffing - in NotR the speed potion pretty much spoils everything once you start having access to a never ending supply).

 

^well you're going to love Pillars of Eternity.

 

I'm quite happy that the BG2 devs prefered freedom over balance. If you want to make resting challenging it's very easy. Install the indispensable SCS mod, let ToBEx advance time during rests and stop savescumming. There, solved by using two bare minimum mods. Resting in certain dungeon rooms will be almost instant death.

 

Maybe balance is the wrong term. How about "interesting gameplay"? Have you ever played a CRPG that was well-made in terms of game mechanics and level design?

 

I like the level design of most IE games. And the game mechanics just need a few fixes and tweaks to be very enjoyable. But i don't hate RTwP like many here.

 

I have no issue with RTwP. I used to like BG back in the day and I even liked combat in Might & Magic 6 - fast paced and kind of fun for a while.

But I was like a Renaissance painter who had only seen chubby plain-looking women and thought they were the best there was, the same way kids used to think the graphix in Super Mario were awesome. I've since seen a glimpse of what CRPGs could do while playing Warhammer: Dark Omen and Gothic 2, and I'm sure isometric party-based games could be designed better as well if the designers controlled the variables more AND designed a completely new system of combat.

There's not a single Infinity Engine game that is half as interesting and cool as Dark Omen. Developers could learn a lot from that game, e.g. that real-time is more thrilling than real-time with pause. Or imagine a dynamic dungeon where groups of monsters appear and move from place to place as expertly designed as levels of Dark Omen? Finally, it would matter how much time you spend thinking about which path to take or twiddling your inventory. It would matter when you go and where you go. Scouting and spells to do with scouting would matter. You wouldn't want to be pinched by two or three groups of monsters at the same time. Dividing up your party would suddenly be a possibly good strategy - like intercept a group of wizard-killers with your warrior before they reach your wizard.

Alas, game developers aren't a learning animal.

 

Yes.
For starters "rest until healed" is retarded thing to have in an RPG, making its prevalence quite baffling.
Think about it - you have been shot, stabbed maybe bitten a few times by all sorts of things.
Then you fix all your injuries by taking a nap - just no.
If the setting has sufficiently powerful healing magic or medical technology, player should have to use those to fix their injuries instead of just sleeping bullet holes and arrows stuck into them over - this also allows controlling how much injuries player can heal. If you are malicious fun-minded enough you can restrict the use of healing supplies to resting.

But that has already been discussed:

The other implications of resting - like giving enemies opportunity to prepare - either by replacing losses and setting up defenses or by packing their stuff and moving out, attaching cost to time spent (supplies), or having timed quest consequences have been discussed as well, but I'd like to add two things:

• Cumulative fatigue mechanics - basically you need rest and the longer you go without the worse it gets (eventually it kills you).
• Enemy harassment - basically ambushes when camping, but not chance based and with attackers seeking only to inflict damage then flee effectively forcing supply attrition and/or kiting you towards proper defenses while you are weakened. Basically when the party moves from offense to defense the enemies start to attack the party using the same asshole tactics rest abusers and kiters exploit.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-recent-realization.77830/page-7#post-2382503
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ave-design-theories.68015/page-2#post-1919192
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...urage-save-scumming.64007/page-2#post-1784170
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/index.php?threads/i-had-a-dream.40538/#post-1042555
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...ocled-or-degenerate.80721/page-4#post-2511625
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-game-world-changes.52550/page-2#post-1432009
tl;dr:
No and fuck you.

Fixed.

Fixed.

 

Here's the thing, though: No matter WHAT you do, you're not playing an experience like PnP. You're going to burn through ammo at about 10x the rate because you're up against 10x or more the number of enemies. It's perfectly normal in a CRPG for the game to pit you against about a hundred enemies, literally, at level 1. They are packed into a dungeon like sardines in a can. You will receive a tenth of the XP per kill that you would in PnP, and yet you will level up about 3 times in the course of the first dungeon. That's how much killing you're going to do. There are absolutely no alternatives options you can employ to conserve your spells.

Can you honestly say this is anything like the PnP experience? Even with a hack-and-slash DM, a single such battle would take the entire gaming session to resolve, and you're going to fight your way through about a dozen rooms of this. At one or two gaming sessions a week, you're looking at a few month's worth of straight combat.

Actually, I seem to recall Ye Olde Rest Until Healed actually auto-employed said magical healing resources, the healing you'd gain without magic being basically miniscule. It was basically an automation of spamming your heals and then reloading spells until healed. If you tried to rest without any magical healing, you'd be camped out there for a hundred days healing one hitpoint a day.

 

No, it just makes you Scrubby McScrubbington. Git gud or die tryin'.

 

You're complaining about lack of realism of some minor cosmetic thing like the method of healing when everything else about these games is stupid and unrealistic? Dude is playing a DnD game, I'm sure he can handle unrealistic healing methods.

If you want to complain about unrealism that is actually functional, the first thing that should go is combat centeredness. There's no group of heroes in the history of the world that killed more than a handful of people by themselves. There's not a person who would spend time killing monsters while on a mission instead of trying to avoid them.

So, two interesting improvements already that aren't cosmetic: fewer (so more special) combat encounters, and more thrilling travel. Why do you never anywhere talk about them instead of how you can't really actually heal a bullet wound by resting? Jeez. How about the retarded DnD skill system where you can't be good at anything when you begin the game, and all that that implies in terms of being unable to skip or ace any content early on? How stupid is that in terms of realism?

Resting as a functional issue has nothing to do with realism and everything to do with these games being functionally stupid in many ways. Abuse of resting function is just the most obvious, and the one retards are able to perceive with ease so that's all they manage to talk about or inquire about.

Fuck. I fear the CRPG crowd is getting the games they deserve, not the games they need.

 

I abused the rest function to set up a fuck tonne of traps around the shadow dragon and the red dragon. So, by the time I started the fight they were already 'badly injured' and with a few more hits they were well on their way to become my new dragonscale armors. Since the game doesn't stop you from abusing the system, go for it.

 

That's awesome. A system is entirely vindicated when you can do shit like that with it.

 

But it is not cosmetic, as displayed by this thread. Aside from being unrealistic and going against common sense it also sucks from a gameplay perspective, so what reason is there to hold on to it?

True, but then again, in most games it doesn't really matter whether you spend a few hours or a hundred days healing when passage of time is a nonfactor. It's more tedious for the player, but it's still free.

I do think that using a combination of healing magic/items plus resting can result in a very good and functional system (after all, wounds need time to heal), there just needs to be some kind of a cost to it.

 

It's cosmetic because it can be restricted by the developers just as they have restricted how often you can use healing spells or how long it takes to heal a person with a spell or potion. These methods don't come with the inherent quality of "once per day" or "takes five seconds to heal" or "can be interrupted by monsters" or anything else. Each of them could have those qualities. Hence, cosmetic.

 

When I look for validation, I just look at my monthly pay check and the girls I fucked, not if I can ironman a fucking game

 

With few exceptions, Dragon's Dogma made healing items perishable or heavy compared to non-perishables that healed the same ammount. It worked to prevent the "100 stimpacks I'll never use" problem, but I imagine if rest points weren't so rare in DD anyways it would help prevent rest spam too.

 

When I play a game, I tend to only rest for when it makes sense for my characters to rest. I also tend to focus on beating the game in as few ingame days as possible, so I do not abuse the rest function. That said, I cant say I like it when dungeons are only balanced around short term resource management as opposed to long term resource management. Something that is usually a side-effect of dungeon design balanced aroudn rest abuse. At least the games with rest mechanics (and abuse) don't force me to be fully restored and replenished after each battle, something a lot of modern RPGs do.

For players who do abuse it. Well, the game is just between them and the computer, and neither of them give a fuck.

 

Same here.
Which made me think of something else that might be an incentive to not rest so much - when you win the game the score is based on how much time you spent. I usually "LARP" that my party actually must hurry to save the world, and the the big foozle will not just sit idly twisting his mustache while the party spends hundreds of days resting in his dungeon.

But the only games I can think of at the moment where score is affected by how much time you use are the Heroes of Might&Magic games.

 

I recall King's Bounty also giving a better score for the faster you beat the game.