RPGaDay2020 Prompt 13 – Rest
Prompt: Rest
There are two types of games- ones that descend from the D&D trope that rest heals all wounds. You go to sleep, wake up, and gain your spells, or a certain number of hit points, or even less believably skill levels and class levels. It just magically happens when you rest for a specified period of time. Others try to model the real world, where you keep up with the time that has passed since you received a wound, and healing takes place as time passes. Or you get experience for succeeding (or failing) a skill and when you get enough of whatever measure you're keeping track of, the skill increases. My initial gaming was in D&D, GURPS, Rolemaster, and Champions, which skewed towards the idea that rest was a needed thing for adventurers to recover any modicum of effectiveness. I remember when we were playing the tomb of desolation modules, and barely escaped into the desert. That trek was made worse by the fact that we'd just used all of our spells getting out of the place, and couldn't regain what we needed to survive because we couldn't really 'rest'. It felt arbitrarily punishing. I now play games that are more narratively driven, and the mechanism to recover from wounds and use of resources is more organic. It's ironic that in the simulationist vs story-game, most story games handle immersion a lot better than the games that have a rule for every little thing.