Inn penalty: How to balance when the player returns to an inn for healing

Wavelength

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I don't have a ton to add, necessarily, to the brainstorm, but just wanted to say that Inns are overwhelmingly considered an "acceptable break from reality" (as TVTropes likes to call it) by gamers.  If the Inns cost more and more throughout the game, you're in completely unrealistic territory anyhow.

But the Inn is a nice player convenience and allows you to place a greater cost in healing within a dungeon as opposed to healing outside of it, and in a game with the right challenge dynamics, this is a very good thing for gameplay.

Anyhow, if you want Inns but you're intent on making sure they aren't overpowered (because the rest of your mechanics don't play well with the traditional Inn), I'd probably recommend having them not remove KO, and possibly not remove most other states (like Poison).  You could even script it so that the Inn will only heal a slight amount if the character is suffering from grievous wounds (a state applied when the character is below X% HP, and removed only if they reach full HP through item/magic healing).

One other approach you could take is keep track of how many battles the player has fought since their last visit to an Inn, and heal an amount proportional to that (it makes grinding above your intended level a bit harder).  Still not really realistic, but could be a fine gameplay element.

In one of the games I'm working on, resting at your home (which works like an Inn, fully restoring your health and mana) will move time forward by several hours, which can act as a bit of a penalty in itself since relationships decay over time and some events are time-limited.
 

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