Feature Specification: Resting

[Fionn]

Fionn, if someone is resting in an area with an active monster population, they should expect a possible attack (handled by the encounter/population system). If we have it interrupt their rest and maybe give them a small timer to rest again, I don't think any sort of farming would be an issue.

Yes, as long as it's the same rest timer as elsewhere.

The proposal was resting outdoors *at will*. If I am a Mage10 (likely with a Ftr10 to keep them out of my campsite) I can buff infinitely outdoors. Worse, if I am a Ftr6, I can summon infinite mobs to kill one area away from town.

I am all for spells/abilities 1/24 hours. You will never sell that to ALFA. If you do, we will have perma-buff gear in second hand stores.

[ç i p h é r]

Alright, I'm revising the spec to require a flat 8 hours and applying a tiered heal bonus for exteriors:

* campfire only = minimum (1 hp) heal bonus
* bedroll = 1 + (con mod / 2) heal bonus
* tent or wilderness class = full bonus (1 + con mod)

Negative con modifiers don't apply. Campfires, bedrolls, and tents are entirely optional. Seem fair and balanced? Random encounters will be applied by an ancillary system.

Just one question: How would tents work? As placeables like the bedroll or as areas you can enter? If the latter, would there be any limits to how many players fit per tent? Blackwill, how did this work on Haze?

[Ronan]

I say we wait, implement the normal D&D rules for resting, and see what sort of placables and things NWN2 gives us. I'm not exactly sure what the motivation was for requiring bedrolls, tents, etc in the first place were? There are places outdoors where a bedroll would be redundant, and elves and half-elves don't even lay down to sleep. Overall I just don't see what it adds to the game, since players typically RP that sort of thing on their own anyways.

Expanding a bit on PNP rules, I think we could say tents ensure restfull sleeps in rain or snow, though. But I don't think that should be high-priority.

[Blackwill]

Just one question: How would tents work? As placeables like the bedroll or as areas you can enter? If the latter, would there be any limits to how many players fit per tent? Blackwill, how did this work on Haze?

Like persistant portable placables (PPPs for teh w1n), the same as a bedroll.

BTW, this campfire, will multiple PCs be able to use it?
Will it work with a proximity perimiter, or will PCs need to click the campfire and access a rest function?

[fluffmonster]

I've not followed this conversation enough to know all the details, but I have followed it enough to know this is not just a tech matter...you guys seem to be discussing basic policy on resting. Maybe I'm just being anal, but having this discussion tucked away in a tech thread as if it was just the coding being discussed doesn't seem entirely appropriate. It would be prudent to discuss the policy with the wider community before tucking it away in the tech nether regions.

[ç i p h é r]

I'm not sure of the reasoning behind it, but it was certainly a legacy requirement. Blackwill's suggestion is obviously a house rule but it makes a fair bit of sense and also attributes real adventuring value to these items.

As for PnP rules, there isn't any sort of detail relating healing rates to "comfort" that I can find, but if the real world serves as any basis, comfort very much does influence healing rates. This is all the more emphasized by the inclusion of weather into the formula, which btw I do agree is sensible. You just can't rest in rain or snow (or extreme conditions) without some shelter.

Blackwill, unlike bedrolls and tents, the campfire is proximity based. As long as players are within 15 ft of it, the bonus applies to all of them. That's in the original requirements.

[ç i p h é r]

Fluff, I agree with you in principle. That's one reason why this is an open forum accessible by the entire community and why we have these feature specific threads. It's squarely aimed at formulating a specification based on feedback from the entire community (as opposed to collaborating with a select few to formulate a proposal to present to a larger audience). This is certainly not a technical discussion, as the thread title implies.

Nevertheless, I trust Ronan is capable of taking the issue to a vote if he deems it important enough to require it once a specification is in fact finalized. At the end of the day, the ACR will reflect the wants and needs of those who have chosen to weigh in on the subjects up for discussion in this forum in the same way it is on every other subject posted in every other forum.

[Fionn]

Alright, I'm revising the spec to require a flat 8 hours and applying a tiered heal bonus for exteriors:

* campfire only = minimum (1 hp) heal bonus
* bedroll = 1 + (con mod / 2) heal bonus
* tent or wilderness class = full bonus (1 + con mod)

Negative con modifiers don't apply. Campfires, bedrolls, and tents are entirely optional. Seem fair and balanced? Random encounters will be applied by an ancillary system.

Just one question: How would tents work? As placeables like the bedroll or as areas you can enter? If the latter, would there be any limits to how many players fit per tent? Blackwill, how did this work on Haze?

An inn/house bed would be full bonus too then?

I would advocate against tents being enterable. If we are going to try for random encounters based upon the area, it seems silly to take the PCs out of the area.

NWN2 will provide us with grouped placeables, so a 'camp' will be easy to set up. We can even tie in the max heal rate to the Survival skill of the person that sets up the camp (or even highest in the Party).

I would propose just tent <> camp options. Tents(or nothing) would be 1 HP, while camps could go up to 5? Bare in mind, we're talking about an 8 hour rest in the woods, not the PnP "24 hours of full bed rest". If we make it easy for CON tanks to get 6/lvl 3/day that's a lot of tanking.

[ç i p h é r]

Yes, inns/homes get the full bonus. It might be a stretch to grant the same rest bonus in tents so I'm not opposed to scaling it back. Maybe 1/3 con for bedrolls and 2/3 con for tents.

Good point about areas. I prefer they be placeables too but it might look strange if you happen across a camp with everyone sleeping OUTSIDE pitched tents. It's not important in the scheme of things though and it's easier to code around placeables than areas in this regard.

Some important things to consider here for anyone reading:

1. The most you gain from a rest per 3.5e rules is your level in HP. With complete bed rest (day and night), it's twice that amount. With long term care, that's double again, twice and quadruple the HP amount, respectively.

2. Rests in ALFA are currently implemented as 8 hour rests. Complete bed rest isn't implemented but for it to be implemented, it would have to yield more HP than the D&D rules stipulate. This is because with the 8 hour cycles, a PC can rest 3 times in a 24 hour period thus gaining 3 hp/level each day. SO, complete bed rest in ALFA would come to 6 hp/level if we adopt the same doubling convention in D&D rules. I don't think this is needed and it's probably going to be difficult to implement *precisely* anyway.

3. ALFA has added a rest bonus in addition to what one normally gets. This is a deviation from the rules and the discussion we're currently having is about revising that deviation somewhat to consider comfort and other factors. The rest bonus formula (1 + con modifier) is currently in effect in NWN1 but tied to the use of a bedroll. We can change this to fixed HP bonuses, but then everyone gets that amount regardless of their constitution. So whereas we'd only be granting 1hp bonus per rest to a PC with <= 0 con, we'd give all PCs 5 hp if resting in a camp under a fixed scheme. Generally, tanks have more HP to recover than those at the back, so flat bonuses might be a bad idea as we'd even out the distrubution of HP bonuses and be handing out more HP overall. I definitely prefer a more scaled approach as noted above, even if we ditch the bedroll. I can see people opting for the tents b/c of the heal bonus so the only deciding factors are weight and carrying capacity.

[Fionn]

This CON bonus was implemented IIRC, because tanks in NWN are at a disadvantage compated to casters at mid-upper levels. It also kept Ftr1 out of the Rat-kill range after every fight.

If we keep it with the nerfed 3.5 buffs in NWN2, I'm highly wanting to see people actually work for it. Seedy inns and lumpy bedrolls are not 'Full bedrest', so should not even be granting 2*HP, let alone 3*(HP+CON).

My preference would be HP > 1/3 > 2/3 > Full

ground
cheap bed / tent / ranger on ground
good bed / Camp / ranger tent
hospital / ranger Camp

We can tie resting to the person that implements the tent/camp, so merely having a ranger in the party helps everyone. By 'Ranger' I mean somebody passing a Survival check setting up the camp (or resting on the ground). This puts in-town healing a step above wilderness, unless you have a professional. DC 10, 15, 20 for the ranger checks, and we should be good IMO.

I'm still not clear how 5 peeps taking 15 second rests can invoke a wandering monster if it's not cueued off the onRest.

[ç i p h é r]

I agree, Long Term Care benefits should be restricted to indoors in reasonably sanitary conditions (no disease risk) where one can actually get bed rest. The multiplier warrants that much at least.

We can convert the "campfire" to a "camp" and make the setup based on the survival skill. I don't think it should be restricted to rangers though since the survival skill can be used untrained (though rangers have a big advantage having it as a class skill obviously). So anyone can try to create a "camp" where rest bonuses are greater.

So to summarize:

Rest Zone.......................................................Rest Bonus
ground............................................................0
cheap bed or tent or wilderness class............1 + 1/3 con
good bed or camp or wilderness class+tent...1 + 2/3 con
hospital or wilderness class+camp.................1 + con

Base bonus is always 1hp so everyone gets at least something. Wilderness classes always get at least 1hp when resting outdoors (equivalent to PCs resting on a cheap bed or in a tent) and can actually fully heal in a camp where a PC would require a hospital. Setting up a tent is DC 5 (easy). Setting up a camp is DC 15 (tough). Bedrolls are essentially RP aids and nothing more. They don't require a survival check to use (just plop it down).

Rest time is 2 minutes, so unless you don't think there's a decent chance for wandering monsters in the area to interrupt the party during that time, we'll have to tie it to the OnPlayerRest event.

Comments?

[Ronan]

Currently we don't apply any con bonus to resting, and I can't remember a time we did, though I haven't been in ALFA that long. We just use the HCR scripts for resting healing (hc_on_play_rest.nss in the 2da hak).

My largest concern over these additions from 3.5's rules is that they aren't wanted enough to spend the developement time on them. My personal view is that tents and fires should offer advantages in hazardous weather (rain and snow, respectively), but otherwise be optional.

I think some boost is needed for long-term (not in-combat) healing of non-divine classes. ALFA is more solo-oriented than PnP was ever ment to be, and strictly using PnP healing rates is a bit limiting for classes who can't heal themselves, IMO. I'm fine with potions being really expensive for short-term healing (between or during battles). People bitch about their prices, but we can't at tech really ever control a DM's expected consumable consumption rate. But I think some other options should be available to prevent people from consuming extremely expensive potions for the purposes of long-term healing (which they currently do). Auto-rest on logout will help this, but it doesn't aid the player who doesn't plan on logging out and needs to heal without being able to tell his PnP DM "I rest for a tenday". I'm not sure what the best solution to this is, and honestly I wasn't expecting it to be offered by the resting scripts. I was thinking something more along the lines of an herb system, and if we could find a reference to something similar in canon, all the better.

Your guess on the best choice of rules is probably as good as mine, but I don't think we should be spending dev time on it until we are more sure. And builder time as well, if we define different bed types, we'll have to give builders an interface to define them for their inns (and hope they actually do it).

I'm still not clear how 5 peeps taking 15 second rests can invoke a wandering monster if it's not cueued off the onRest.

The encounter system would be responsible for computing the chances of a random encounter during rest, and generating one if needed. This would, as you said, be triggered OnRest.

EDIT: I'd leave out any DCs of 5. A PC can simply take 10 on it and succeed unless his WIS stat is 0, in which case he's KO'd anyways.

[ç i p h é r]

I'll leave out everything not 3.5e based for the time being then. We can still discuss this of course up until we have NWN2 in our hands.

BTW, taking 10 means taking 10 minutes. It's not a freebie, or at least, not meant to be, particularly if time is meaningful. But yes, unless the PC has a negative wis modifier (base score, cursed, ability drained, etc), it's almost a given (75% chance) they'll succeed.

[Fionn]

*IF* we go with this (and yes, the solo-focus warrants IMO), I'd use Survival DCs vs 'Wilderness Class'. Wilderness classes are far more likely to pass a DC10/15/20 Survival check, but they could still blow it and a bookish Wiz could still make one occasionally.

I'd rather see a single placable 'camp' and then the healing rate based upon the Survival roll. This way you won't know until you rest. 'Bedroll' is silly, and all classes should have at least a fire and a lean-to before they sleep.

I haven't looked at HCR, but I doubt it'll be hard to add a check for the LocalINT on the Camp/Trigger/Area(for beds) into it.

[Inaubryn]

I like where this discussion is goin' and agree with the last few post by Ronan, Fionn and Cipher, who seem to be the only people postin' here. Ronan mentioned an herb solution as somethin' to return a few hitpoints. I'm assumin' herbs will be a given. But, might I add somethin' that's way off-topic here? How about food? Food would be optional for PCs not a must have. But, food would cost few gold pieces (6) and offer one hitpoint of healing. A CLW by comparison offers a minimum of 4hp and a max of 11hp of recovery for 50gp. Whereas, food at 6gp a pop would offer 4hp of healing for 24gp and 11hp for healing for 77gp. So, you're better off buyin' the 50gp potion, even though you may heal as little as 4hp. By the same token, you may heal as much as 11hp.

But, if you're low level or just low on cash and can' t afford that, you can spend half that and heal 4 points or you can spend up to 66gp to heal 11hp. Most people wouldn't likely spend the 16 extra gold until they had enough money to do so. But, by that time they're tryin' to heal hp losses of 20+ hp which would run them 120gp and up to heal. Kinda silly to do that. Just an idea. Again' probably off topic.

Hmm. That comes in a might cheaper than CMWs don't it? Hmm. Maybe you can eat only 5 times per day.

Dammit. Foiled myself.