The Trauma Inn... alternate ideas?

[Manofdusk]

The last post I was in mentioned something regarding the cheap recovery of mp at any inn.... and I got to thinking about it.

In every RPG I've ever played (with one exception) gave you a full party heal (hp and mp) at a ridiculously cheap cost... but what if they didn't?

What if Inns didn't full-recover the party? Or, perhaps the cost to recover was related to how wounded the party was (the one exception I mentioned earlier did this)?

What if an Inn only recovered 30% of the party's hp and mp and gave the party a debuff where they couldn't sleep again for so many steps (maybe 500?) but food is available that lets hp and mp be recovered naturally while walking. If you combined that with debuffs for being KOed (which Inns DO remove), how do you guys forsee that turning out? Perhaps the effect of Inns could be amplified by eating before sleeping.

What prompted this idea was a conversation about magical vs item-based healing wherein the magical healer was superior simply due to the fact that MP could be so easily recovered... so that begged the question of "What if MP was NOT easily recovered?"

This does remove the possibility of a full heal before a boss battle... but what boss with half a brain puts a full heal station where the party must pass through to reach them?

 

[Tai_MT]

If we're talking "default" type RPGs... meaning anything that isn't specifically designed with specific goals in mind... Then you've just relegated Inns to worthlessness and made the optimal healing path to be stocking up some cheap MP healing items and spamming those instead. Or, those "Tent" items that did the same thing as an Inn, except at a save point or out in the field.

I might be from a weird side of game development, but I've always thought you simply incentivized specific forms of play instead of punishing specific kinds of play. My basic instinct on a system that essentially punishes a player for types of gameplay is to say that such systems or mechanics are bad game design.

Here's the way the actual gameplay cycle in a standard RPG works, with everything functioning normally: Inns only exist in towns, so their use is limited, despite being cheap enough to be warranted. This makes towns excellent locations to grind, build up MP reserves, recover quickly and easily. You obviously aren't going to have these Inns everywhere they need to exist to be perfectly exploitable. But, the problem is that MP reserves are usually pretty robust (meaning, most mages have a metric crap-ton of MP to get them through at least 30-45 minutes of content using only their heals). This means, your Inns are going to be used a lot more than restorative items, because your restorative items are expensive and generally heal only one person at a time and the healing rate is much lower than just casting "Cure 2" on someone for about 20 MP. In short, it's fairly rare to run out of MP before hitting the next town and the next Inn. The obvious exception to this rule is simply being a low level without a very large MP pool to start with. In any case, to even get consumables to heal, you'd have to visit the next town anyway and buy them. You can fiddle in a menu for a bit and then another to heal your party... Or just hit up the Inn and get your recovery instantly.

However, even if you eliminated the Inn as a viable method of MP recovery, the MP restorative items are going to be far more valuable than the HP restorative items are. Here's why: Cure 2 costs 20 MP, okay? An item that restores 100 MP costs 200 gold. Expensive early in the game, cheap just before middle of the game... plentiful through most of the game. For the cost of 200 gold, I can heal 5 times... and it's a "full party" heal or a "single target" heal. I can toggle it. Okay, now let's look at the middle tier HP recovery item. We'll say it heals 100 HP for 200 gold. With just basic math, I'm getting 5 heals for the price of one, using my MP. Magical means of healing are still far more efficient in terms of resource spending than picking up Potions or Tonics or whatever the game calls your HP restoratives.

Really, instead of punishing a player for using an Inn, I think it can be tackled in another way. Limit MP reserves, limit the effectiveness of Magical Healing, or just make Magical healing more resource intensive (costs more MP). Doing it this way adds stakes to a game and to the standard resource management that takes place in dungeons. Whereas, punishing a player for using an Inn doesn't really solve the problem of "cheap and easy ways to heal".

When a player is punished for doing an action in a game (as in, they realize it's not very efficient or very fun to do something because it's designed to not be efficient or be fun), they simply don't engage in it. If an Inn only healed me 30% of my HP/MP, I'd never use it. I'd have cheaper and less punishing methods at my disposal to get the same or a better effect than at an Inn. Namely, just keeping my White Mage stocked with cheap MP recovery items and spamming Cure 2 on my party.

MP Recovery is cheap, with or without an Inn, in most RPGs. MP spending to get heals is also one of the cheapest ways to do it, since MP restoring items are usually more efficient uses of resources than buying individual healing items. Even if you're only getting 3 heals for the price of a single MP restoring item, that's more than you'd get for the price of a single HP restoring item.

 

[gstv87]

W I P, but I guess you can get the idea....

Spoiler: Guild, level 0

Spoiler: Guild, level 1

Spoiler: Guild, level 2

I've yet to integrate that guild into the game, but here's how it works:
At first, it's empty.... you have to complete quests to upgrade it.
At level 1, you get partial recovery facilities, and partial party management: you can take a nap on a bunk, which removes low-level ailments and partially recovers your HP/MP.
At level 2, you get beds, and a resident staff (brewers, blacksmiths, caterers, etc).
Beds let you sleep the night (which triggers quests and different NPCs), and completely recovers the party.

Also, there's surgeons and regular inns around, where you can go if you're wounded.
Surgeons can help you revive fallen characters (there's perma-death!), or recover you as a rest at a guild would.

Spoiler: Medic!!

The catch is, the surgeon can try to revive the characters but it can fail, and the character can die.
Inns won't revive fallen characters, but you can take as much rest as you want (since they're cheap) and slowly nurse yourself back to health. (This takes in-game hours, so if you're waiting for a specific NPC to spawn, you can miss it or fail a quest if you delay too much)
So, you can try to push your luck in battle and get tired, or sacrifice one character (and try to revive them in battle, as long as the battle doesn't end), or run away and try again another time.
Either way, you're always going to a recovery facility.

 

[The Stranger]

@gstv87 I really like your guild idea. I used a similar mechanic in a game I made ages ago, only it was about upgrading and investing in shops so they stocked better gear.

You also had to pay a Grim Reaper each time you died - you could even do side-quests for them to lower the amount you needed to pay their organisation.

 

[Frozen_Phoenix]

Just an idea I had now... You can get a tiered hooker system in inns/pubs. The best hookers will heal more hp and mp, but cost more. You can also separate hp healing, mp healing and state removal on the different services you pay the hooker for, then add an "everything" option.

 

[bgillisp]

If your game has a time limit, or it would make sense to have a time limit, you could make it that healing at an inn costs the party a day. Could make the party have to make some tough decisions if the game has a time limit of 100 days or something like that.

However, in most standard RPG's, I will admit putting in a time limit is usually not fun, even if it is more realistic. So make sure you balance fun vs realism here.

 

[Harosata]

For me, I went the FFXV route:

Your bed heals HP and MP, but Inns will also remove most states and add a party buff. Granted, my inns would have little scenes, so I figured the buff would make people not reset the game after "paying" for it.

 

[Oddball]

This MAY be possible with a middle of the road option
maybe sleeping in an INN restores 60% to both HP and MP and costs 50G
but you have an option to also have a meal for just 20G extra. and you can chose to eat the full meal for an extra 40% or eat half, for just 20% extra and bring the leftovers along, which heals the party by a small amount when used. Also, If you heal up to 40% with magic/items. you can pay for the meal, chose to bring leftovers, be fully healed AND have a recovery item for the road.

 

[kirbwarrior]

I disliked Final Fantasy 2 for it's strange increased cost for inns based on HP and MP lost, especially because it was abusable (MP was more expensive than HP, but you can heal a lot of HP with tiny MP).

Rather, some rpgs just don't have the inn altogether. I thought those were neat, but they had other ways of 'recharging'; some still had tents (which were effectively inns, but controlled tightly), some had healing on level up, and others dropped the 'resource management' altogether and healed you after battle.

For making inns 'less effective', I'd want there to be a reason, and 'time' is a good enough one. Minecraft doesn't even have sleep help in anyway other than passing time, and western rpgs like Skyrim let you regen over time, so fully healing was just a matter of waiting.

 

[Wavelength]

Inns (that fully heal your party's HP and MP) act as a "reset mechanism" between objectives or quests. In real life if you complete a mission but get wounded, you have to spend a lot of time healing and rehabilitating. That's not fun, exciting, or engaging - so in video games after earning a success (or any non-death result) we fully restore the player to their maximum possible status and we quickly send them on their way for the next objective or quest.

Players are going to have more fun (plus the game will be easier to balance) if they can take on the new objective with all the tools at their disposal, rather than starting at 60% (or down a lot of items) because they got injured during the last objective. (And in many RPGs, especially ones where MP can be used to full-heal in a dungeon, MP is the "tools at your disposal"! Not fully restoring MP at the Inn is like finding out your Swiss Army knife is missing the blade, the screwdriver, and the... um... twisty thing... yeah I'm not much of a survivalist.)

I don't think there's anything bad, mechanically or otherwise, about a full restore at the Inn. In fact, I think trying to find a "better Inn" might be gilding the lily - most of the time if we don't offer some sort of full reset mechanism, the play experience will suffer.

Removing the Inns entirely and forcing the player to buy/use items to heal is interesting, but this creates a constant "treadmill" that the player fights against (must win enough battles with few enough injuries to buy the items required to heal, and so on). Treadmilling is a desirable dynamic in a game like The Sims or Don't Starve, and might even be good in something like an arcadey space shooter or a hardcore roguelike - but RPGs, which tend to be more about relaxed progression than intense survival, usually don't lend well to this kind of mechanic.

 

[kirbwarrior]

"reset mechanism"

This is very important to traditional rpgs. It doesn't have to be an inn. It doesn't even have to be under player control; Fire Emblem combines exploration and combat into the same thing, healing you between chapters. You have to use your own resources to heal otherwise. It's no different than old school Dragon Quests before save points, where you only get resets in towns. And some games go a step further; money is (technically) limited in Pokemon, so they make inns free.

If your game doesn't have the reset mechanism, the game will be made differently. Four Heroes of Light could actually get away without inns because of how the 'MP' system works (not that I think it should...). Dungeon Crawlers don't have reset mechanisms, you just have to go by on inventory you find.

Once again, making inns cost time can completely change things. If they 'worked' like real life, then going to inns or hospitals could add months to game time. And some games work like that.

 

[Manofdusk]

I guess there's a good reason why the "Trauma Inn" is a staple trope of fantasy rpgs. That said, I just tend to wonder about alternative ways to do it. I Actually do like the concept of multiple choices at an Inn that Oddball mentioned. Just a Room, Nap and Snack, Bed and Breakfast, and Full Spread where each one is (MUCH) more expensive than the previous one but does more to recover you.

... but that's essentially scaling cost to effectiveness.

 

[Oddball]

I didn't say much more expensive. While as developers we want to make things interesting and difficult to the players, we need to also think about things from the players perspective. I suggested a 40% increase in price because its not punishing to the player. While punishing mechanics can rarely work, there has to be a significant enough reason

example. In the stealth game I'm planning to make, I initially decided on a system where you also have to forge for food because its about a mother trying to cross a war torn country with her children. Not finding enough food for everyone limits AP recovery (was initially a reduction in max AP, but i thought that was too inhumane), you can also make up for lost AP recovery by consuming a few of the plants you find, however, if you do this too much, you might not find enough food for the charecters childeren, and so may end up losing them
This mechanic adds a lot of depth to the story and makes the struggle all too real. However, if you were to use this mechanic in a traditional RPG, not many players would play your game, and find it too punishing

These videos should help

Spoiler

The second one isn't exactly on topic, but its general knowledge that can be applied to a variety of design situations. not just choice

Anyway, bad mechanic choices can ruin games

 

[Saboera]

You should ask yourself if you need this to start with. Why not just replenish the party to full after every fights and make those fights more interesting and difficult by allowing the party to go all out with their skills?

If you want to feature attrition as a game mechanic, it make sense to go ahead and think about an interesting way to incorporate recovery, otherwise it's kinda pointless to even have the player bother with it.

It's one of those things that was sort of badly implemented in most older RPGs. You would usually open the menu after every few battles, spam cheap items that you had 99x of or skills to replenish everyone to full, or you would wait until a save point and use another type of item for full recovery. It didn't bring anything interesting up and was more of chore than anything.

Alternatively, if you want inns to do something interesting, you could set it up so they give buffs either for a period of time or until the next time you rest. Different rooms give different buffs or more expensive rooms give better buffs.

 

[kirbwarrior]

Alternatively, if you want inns to do something interesting, you could set it up so they give buffs either for a period of time or until the next time you rest. Different rooms give different buffs or more expensive rooms give better buffs.

Skyrim did something like this. You learn skills faster up to eight hours after having a good night's sleep with your significant other.

It would be pretty cool to have a buff after sleeping. In a traditional rpg, maybe it lasts a number of battles or just the first one.

 

[Frogboy]

One of the most annoying things about the old Gold Box D&D games was that it stayed true to rules and made you sleep 1 day for every HP you needed healed. It just seemed dumb to have to rest for almost a month to heal back up. Realistic isn't always fun.

 

[gstv87]

One of the most annoying things about the old Gold Box D&D games was that it stayed true to rules and made you sleep 1 day for every HP you needed healed.

they probably figured that "hey, nobody is gonna play this for long enough to get past level 2"
being that lvl 1 characters are always around 10 hit points.

 

[Titris Thrawns]

I like @Oddball 's idea of adding food/player choice to the Inn decision. As others have said, punishing the player with an 'inferior' Inn will push them to find the most optimal recovery path or just complain that their Inn is broken. My experience with the way FFXV's sleep mechanic maybe a good example of allowing player priorities choose the optimal path. You can sleep in a campsite, having Ignus put together a meal for a buff the next day, or sleep in an "inn" to gain an exp multiplier. The more expensive the Inn, the bigger the multiplier. So far, as much as I like Ignus, he has yet to raise his cooking skill as I have prioritized exp.

 

[kirbwarrior]

Realistic isn't always fun.

There's a reason there are no bathrooms in rpgs. The only rpg I played that cared about it was a huge parody about things (all sorts of random bars to think about like bathroom, protagonist hating someone for jumping inside of him and hating the developer more, etc.)

I like @Oddball 's idea of adding food/player choice to the Inn decision. As others have said, punishing the player with an 'inferior' Inn will push them to find the most optimal recovery path or just complain that their Inn is broken. My experience with the way FFXV's sleep mechanic maybe a good example of allowing player priorities choose the optimal path. You can sleep in a campsite, having Ignus put together a meal for a buff the next day, or sleep in an "inn" to gain an exp multiplier. The more expensive the Inn, the bigger the multiplier. So far, as much as I like Ignus, he has yet to raise his cooking skill as I have prioritized exp.

I love this idea and see a bunch of potential in it.
A friend of mine suggested a simple fix to the 'realism' of trauma inns; make the church do it instead. The increasing cost makes sense since they are spending more MP to heal you. You are effectively paying for a service you could already do. And the cost stays well below actual items because the church doesn't have to deal with merchantry prices.

 

[LaFlibuste]

Sorry, haven't read everything.

You say inns are cheap because you only consider their price in gold. The actual price of inns is exiting that dungeon and possibly starting it over. As others have said, it's a reset mechanism. In traditional RPGs, dungeons are mostly about resource management and attrition. You want to make inns less affordable? Make the dungeon longer/the enemies stronger.

Moreover, nerfing inns will also mean your game will be more RNG dependant, will induce more save-loading and frustration. You will have to be lucky enough to be not too beaten up after each quest because inns will not mean a clean slate anymore. An enemy getting one or two lucky crits in would mean you being screwed over for a while, thus possibly having to reload the last save. Which is very not fun.