Edit: Title should be "Thoughts on resting in RPGs". Unfortunately, I can't change the title (and I only just noticed it now).

In many RPGs and games with similar resource mechanics, often the player character and their party will need to rest to recover resources. This, then, leads to the need to rest.

There's multiple approaches to this that I've seen:
* In JRPGs, typically you rest at the inn in towns, though sometimes save points in dungeons allow you to rest (or have the same effect that resting does). Generally, this means that you can't rest after every battle, as resting would mean finding your way back to the last town (or teleporting there, if the game allows), going to the inn, then walking back to where you were.
* WRPGs, on the other hand, tend to allow you to rest in the wilderness and dungeons (often not towns, for some reason, which I find to be quite annoying). This can allow you to rest after every battle, unless there's some meaningful limiting factor (like the need to have rations, or some sort of corruption mechanic).
* There's still a few games that take the approach of making resting unnecessary (or only occasionally necessary), either by refilling your resources after every fight (see later SaGa games or The Alliance Alive), having resources regenerate (seen in later Elder Scrolls games), or simply not having resources that need to be managed (see Costume Quest).

So, how do you prefer resting to be handled, and what aspects of resting do you like/dislike? Any particular implementations that do things well or horribly?

I like the idea that inns or caverns would be the only ways to regain full stats, and other methods like tents or campfires would have a limited stamina and health regeneration ratio, which would make long explorations require more planning and supplies. I also don't think potions and food should be able to give back health or stamina quickly, especially not during battles.

If you have suggestions for games that deal with long-term stats and supplies during a journey, rather than battle to battle quick refills, I might be interested.

My thoughts on RPG:

Kill monsters to gain XP points
Improve your stats so you'll be able to kill stronger monsters and gain more XP points
Improve again so you'll able to kill even stronger monsters and therefore become even more stronger.
Repeat that process forever.

It can be fun in the beginning but that feeling doesn't last forever. I never finished Diablo 2 when I was a kid because I got bored.

Realms of Arcania had a system where simply resting did not give you much health or mana back. You could improve the amount by using healing talents or (I might be wrong here) resting at an inn.

Never heard of it, thank you for the recommendation.

The problem with making resting not restore that many resources is that it makes it tedious to fully recover, even when you are in a safe spot, like in a town.

Wizardry 6 and 7 have this issue; you can rest anywhere, but the rate of HP/SP regeneration is so slow that it takes an unreasonable amount of time to recover. It doesn't help that the only healing spells (in Wizardry 6, the only healing spell period) doesn't scale well enough for higher levels, to the point where getting a character's HP back to full is an extremely tedious task.

Pool of Radiance has a similar issue; in that game, the fastest way (in real time) to restore HP to low HP characters is to rest for literally weeks of in-game time, which is ridiculous. There's also the early Wizardry games, where resting to restore spells is almost free (1/7 chance of causing a week of aging), but resting to restore HP is expensive, but at least they eventually give you a single target full heal.

On the other hand, just resting and restoring your health/mana to full does take away a lot of the danger of living the live of an adventurer. Battles as well as other random encounters do loose a lot of their threat as do those dangerous dungeons if you can simply fill up by resting.

Some games limit this by enforcing that a certain amount of time has to pass between rests what feels like a terrible mechanic (never thought of resting to cure wounds, learn spells or refill my mana as just sleeping).

I really like kmanitou's idea of making resting dependent of the place where you do rest best combined with RoA way to improve resting by using special skills or herbs.

I dunno guys, I think taking weeks/months to heal from near death is pretty realistic. I should know, I killed a bunch of wild animals the other day and learned how to fix car engines with that experience.

This sort of thing is why I think I prefer the JRPG approach to resting, where you can only rest in specific locations (rather than just (almost) anywhere), but doing so fully restores you. Random encounters don't lose their threat, so you still have to conserve resources to get to the next rest spot, but you don't run into the situation where you have to rest for weeks of in-game time or minutes of real time just to get your resources back.

Of course, I've found that there are some WRPGs that try to force the player to rest even if they'd otherwise be fine on resources, and I would consider that to be obnoxious. Examples of this include Might & Magic 4-5 with its minor temporary weakness (though I hear this becomes much worse in the later games in the series), and the Pathfinder games with the fatigue mechanic (though at least you can use a spell to remove the condition if you really don't want to rest). Not when there's healing magic.

(An "auto cast healing on rest" option, combined with the spells being automatically re-memorized, would have mitigated this issue in Pool of Radiance, and if you notice, is exactly what you see in later D&D CRPGs. Even in table top, I hear 5th Edition fully heals you after a long rest.)

That encourages the player to:
* If the game is turn based, skip turns (or walk in circles) until the rest cooldown has ended.
* If the game is real time, go AFK until the rest cooldown has ended.

This reminds me of games that don't have rest facilities that probably should:
* In Bard's Tale 3, you can regenerate SP by being outside in the sun. There's no inn-like spot; the only way to restore SP quickly enough is to use a certain consumable, which is fortunately common (perhaps *too* common) in the versions that are worth playing. (The DOS version, and I believe also the Amiga version, makes them rare, but also has a whole bunch of other buts that makes those versions not that fun.) (Note that, in Bard's Tale 1 and 2, you can use Roscoe's to regain SP instantly for a fee, but you won't find Roscoe's in BT3, as the town has been destroyed.)
* In Wasteland, which lacks healing magic or any similar mechanic, you slowly recover health with time. Since the game is strictly turn-based, you end up having to skip turns just to recover health, which is annoying enough for some players to create a macro (supported in some versions, including the DOS version) so they don't have to press the key as many times, but it can still take a while. (I believe Wasteland Remastered added a rest option that basically just skips a bunch of turns.)
* Perhaps I could mention Ultima 3; the healing situation is screwed up to the point where, at higher levels, the fastest way to heal is to go into a dungeon and drink from a fountain there. Yes, this is seriously what it works out to be. (And this is a game with regenerating SP.)

The problem is that, when the game doesn't allow you to rest because "enemies are nearby", yet you don't see any nearby enemies, it can feel arbitrary.

The Elder Scrolls: Arena has this problem. The game tells you that resting in elevated spots is safe, but if you try to do that in the starter dungeon, the game will most likely deny the rest because it thinks that enemies are nearby. What enemies?

Dungeon Master handled this much better. You can rest anytime, even (theoretically) in the middle of combat, but the enemy AI is still active when you are resting, and if an enemy attacks you (even if the attack roll is a miss IIRC) or if you get hit by something, your party wakes up and the rest is ended. Feels much less arbitrary than "you can't rest because enemies are nearby".

Edit: Also worth noting that Dungeon Master tracks food and water, though interestingly it depletes faster if you are actually recovering resources from resting.

I've been playing Far Cry 2 lately, so maybe that can inspire more discussion. On console, you can't save anywhere, so you have to be much more cautious when danger is about, whereas on PC you can just quick save and do things differently on the same spot. The game has many safehouses strewn about that you can unlock by killing the enemies outside of them and now they are permanent spots to rest and save. Maybe more RPGs should have this approach where danger is everywhere if predictable, but there is always a safe zone somewhere that is one small trip away.

That "safe house" approach sounds like how JRPGs tend to work, though they usually aren't guarded by anything special. (Final Fantasy 5 does have a couple in the final dungeon that require beating optional bosses (though not superbosses) to unlock.)

Incidentally, classic Final Fantasy games *do* have camping supplies; actually, I believe even the earlier modern Final Fantasy games, up through 9, do as well. Basically, if you have a tent, you can use it to rest on the world map, or at any save point, to recover your HP and MP, and maybe even revive characters depending on the game. (Exceptions: In FF1, you don't recover MP unless you use a cottage (HOUSE on NES), except maybe if you're playing a version based off the GBA version; in FF3, these items don't exist.)

Final Fantasy 9 actually does something silly with Tents: You can use them during battle, and it will heal the target (though I don't remember if it restores MP), but it will also inflict blindness, even on some bosses. (Yes, you can target an enemy with this item.)

I tend to prefer the western RPG style, personally, though I think sometimes it is OP. If you're camping in the wilderness, there should be a risk of being roused by enemies. I think it'd be awesome to have a camping system that combines the live camp system of Red Dead Redemption 2 (where you set up camp and can craft, cook food, etc before sleeping) and the first two Elder Scrolls games. Maybe you CAN camp without scouting the area but if you scout the area and clear it of any possible hostiles, the chances of being roused from your sleep are significantly lower?