@dtgreene & @ Time4Tea

Sorry. I tried to reply but my new post is endlessly thinking about posting.

Good brainstorm session everybody. Already thinking of good names for these little mechanics. My cut 50% HP would be "fatigue". The temporary stat bonus could be "hype" or something (Hyphy anyone?). Or maybe "adrenaline"?

Quick slightly off topic story. I'm fairly athletic and wrestled in middle school and high school. My senior year I was at a match and after round 1 (there are 3 rounds of varying length but often 2 minutes) something wasn't right. Nothing hurt but I couldn't prevent being rolled (which is like 101 learn it the first day thing). I would put my hand down but it wouldn't support my weight. I was confused that my hand didn't work properly and my coach was pulling hair out watching me make a rookie mistake. Finished the next two rounds, managed to win, shook all the other teams hands (as is customary), sat down, and holy shit my hand hurt. We watched video of the match and you can see the EXACT split second moment in the first round my hand twists and bends in a way hands are not supposed to. After X-rays it turns out I had a 2 inch spiral fracture wrapping around one of the bones in my hand. For 4 additional minutes after I broke it I wrestled and felt nothing. It was only after I rested that I my little "stat boost" wore off. I think you might be on to something with that stat boost cooldown idea.

As much as I've grown accustomed to struggling in games and feeling like I just barely scraped by not every game should be like that. Most probably shouldn't. It's too niche and while some will persevere a majority won't. If a huge chunk of your audience doesn't ever see the second half of a game due to difficulty it limits their appreciation. From a financial perspective it's also a poor way to make a product. I like hashing out design ideas even if it means setting aside my own preferences.

I just spent my mid-day shower (working from home benefit, my primary shower is during my lunch break rather than morning/evening) thinking about this. The save issue is harder to solve. There are a heck of a lot of reasons in all the directions on it.

But for resting, my brain recalled another ttRPG mechanic, which can only be described as momentum. In 13th Age (yep, I'm a broken record about my favorite games), there's a thing called the "escalation die" that starts each combat at 0, and goes up one per round. That die is added to pretty much every primary (d20) roll during combat. It represents the wind always gradually changing in favor of the adventurers, representing coordination, momentum, team work, etc.

A few super-scary monsters also get it. (The vast majority don't. Things like dragons, demons, liches, and the like do.) It also can be used to fuel certain powers. For instance, the Commander class can reduce the escalation die by 2 to give everyone a big heal. It's like everyone backs off, regroups, takes a quick breather mid-combat, but, in doing so, they lose a bit of their edge. Some other abilities lower it. A couple rare ones speed it up. (And it generally caps at 6, except for a couple fixed powers).

How could this play out in a cRPG that generally has lots of encounters over time rather than a few big ones that take effort? Well, first sRPGs [which usually reset everything to max between lengthy battles]. Fell Seal does this. Every combat everyone starts at 0 MP, and has a flat MP gain per round. (Some abilities change these around, but this is the standard.) There, solved for that subgenre. But how about others?

In an action-RPG or ARPG, this can be implemented as a pure momentum power. Your character's "speed" attributes and animations speed up as you go longer between rests. When you do rest, return to town, etc, it all resets to base. This opens up a mechanic for some enemies to counteract it, too. I doubt I'd like playing such as "speedy" game this would probably go to, but, hey, some people play POE and love it.

How about a more traditional JRPG? One could just speed up animations to "feel" momentum (and ease grind/farming!) without mechanical changes. Or one with an ATB-type/charge system could nudge the charge values a little bit each combat to speed it up. Or perhaps just small stat increases ("cumulative +1% to all base stats since last rest").

Mechanics could play into this... Resting of course would reset it. Maybe it could be a party-shared attribute that could be used to fuel certain powers (World of Final Fantasy has a global summon pip thing like this. Or DQ11 has its multi-character pepped powers). Healing could reduce it, a "rage" type power could increase it.

Wall of text. tl;dr: playing with resting intervals in RPGs could tie in to a 'momentum' system that could be a party-wide resource. It could reward going without rests without being punishing.

A big problem with time limits in RPGs is that it's not really made clear what the limit is and what the ramifications are for ignoring it. Pathfinder Kingmaker for example had some timed quests or timed appearances of characters, but then other quests that were not at all, and yet they'd be written in the same way ("need to get there soon" for example). It's definitely a mechanic that requires informing the player what's going on in clear terms.

Some day I'll get to playing Kingmaker. Which is based quite closely off a ttRPG adventure path, where the GM can easily "well, you took too long, so the opposing force solidified the giant support and has ogres in his forces now" type things.

I would argue that realism should take a back seat to gameplay. When realism makes a game less fun, the game should be non-realistic in that aspect.

Excess realism is one of the problems I had with the Ultima series, with Ultima 7's requirement to manually feed your characters (or else they'll starve) being the worst example I can think of there.

My idea for a stat boost comes from something I read about some Civilization game's development (Civ 3 I think). Originally, the game was supposed to have dark ages, where a civilization's science growth would slow down. Playtesters found that not to be a fun mechanic, so they replaced them with golden ages (science gets a boost), which were more fun.

Tactics Ogre: The Knight of Lodis does the same thing, and I hear FFTA2 (which I haven't played) does so as well.

I can mention Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song, which also does something interesting. BP, which is the primary resource used for both spells and special attacks, starts each battle at a certain percentage depending on the character (20% to 60%, but the 60% is on a temporary character who's only available for one quest (barring a Japanese version specific glitch). Then, after each round, each character gets a certain amount of BP (the range is +1 to +7 per round, with +7 being only for a main character who's completed a specific quest, and +1 on that temporary character I mentioned). Characters with higher starting BP tend to get lower BP regen, and vice versa. (There's also a trent of male characters getting more starting BP, while female characters get more BP regen; Claudia, for example, starts each fight with only 20% BP, but can eventuall regen +6 per round (without taking the sidequest into account).)

Another interesting mechanic in Romancing SaGa: Minstrel Song: If you manage to ambush the enemies, your party starts with the benefit of one round of BP regen; this is instead of the enemies not being able to act the first round. Not sure about the reverse, but I suspect enemies also have BP and BP regen.

Saving: outside of combat
Resting: at specific locations that make sense for the setting (home base, inn, campsite)

Nothing to add here. This is my view as well.

Unless you're trying to troll the player. (Mario Maker troll levels often have hidden time limits, and sometimes the consequence of taking your time is that you get to continue the level, whereas you would get stuck in an anti-softlock otherwise.)

The last army battle in SaGa Frontier 2 has a very clear reverse time limit; after 8 turns, if the battle still hasn't ended, you win the battle. Then again, the final dungeon of that game has a hidden reverse time limit; certain duels, if they last past 15 rounds, it counts as a victory, and the game doesn't make it clear ahead of time.

Another approach, which I've seen in Hollow Kinght, is where you can rest only in certain spots, and doing so makes all dead enemies respawn.

Also, it turns out that Morrowind also does something along these lines; when you rest, the entire world recovers, not just the player. (Enemies won't revive, however.)

Wizardry 7 makes it so that, if you rest too much, other NPCs will beat you to certain treasures. (That's one of the reasons I'm not really that interested in playing that game, the others being the ugly game mechanics (like base miss chance) and the fact that HP/SP recovery when resting is too slow, and there's no decent late-game healing spells.)

Aye, that's pretty common in action games or games with fixed spawns. It's bread and butter for "Soulslike" games (like Nioh) for that to be the cost of saving+resting. RPGs, especially those that do random encounters, might be harder to do that. But they could have a "you just rested, increase encounter rate for a while" thing. Then again, that could lead to potential abuse in some situations. It's certainly better be transparently mentioned as a mechanic.

Then again, at least half of my "play time" in Ni No Kuni was spent waiting for monster respawns... So I'd appreciate such there.

I'm thinking of maybe handling encounters like in Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, where encounter points are stationary, but are often not dodgeable; this keeps the player from simply avoiding every encounter, while not making it feel too random. In FFMQ, enemies respawn when you leave the dungeon, but one could easily just tie it to resting (with the drawback of having to store the data of which enemies have been killed for the entire world rather than just the current dungeon).

On the other hand, random encounters are good for maintaining tension; see Dragon Quest 2 for an example. (Or, you could try playing a Final Fantasy 10 challenge along the lines of NSGNENNE (No Sphere Grid, No Escape, No No Encounters); judging from a video I saw a long time ago, that can get pretty tense when trying to get to a save point.)

Of course, for those who don't mind some form of time limits, how about somethiing like Zelda: Majora's Mask, where the world will end if you take too long (and that's made *very* clear to the player), but you can reset time whenever you want (which resets the world, and we could also have it restore resources, or at least restore the places you can gather them).

Yeah big time pen and paper fans love it for this reason. Also those who are really anal about realism and complain about things like "my son is missing and I'm wandering around doing odd jobs?" in Fallout 4. However as someone focused on video games and good gameplay over these things, I found a lot of aspects of it annoying.

That said, I still put 120+ hours into it and beat the game, so obviously I liked it overall.

I totally agree that if a CRPG is going to use time limits, that it needs to communicate that very clearly to the player. In the same way that a tabletop DM should give the players some warning if they are wasting time and should be treating a particular quest with more urgency. I think a good rule of thumb for CRPGs in general is to just ask: "how would it be handled in a TT game?"

Yeah, I have heard/read quite a few comments about P:K, that it doesn't do a good job of communicating quest time limits to the player. One of the things that puts me off it, tbh (although I will probably try it at some point)

I think it's partly a matter of personal preference and different people have different preferences. Some players prefer things to be more streamlined, whereas others might appreciate more realism/immersion.

The thing that occurs to me with inventory management though, is that it's usually something the player is going to have to do anyway at some point in a long RPG. Otherwise, if they do none at all, their inventory is going to end up being very cluttered and they will struggle to find things 70-80% into the game. So, I partly see inventory restrictions as a way to encourage the player to show some discipline and spend a small amount of time managing it more frequently, rather than getting to 80% complete, realizing they have an inventory stuffed full of junk and getting frustrated because they have to spend 2 hours at that point sorting it all out.

It has a basic structure you can follow that will make it not too bad. Basically the opposite of most RPGs, do the main quests FIRST and then you'll get a long break to do side quests before the next main quest. There are still some minor time limited things it won't be super clear about, but at least it's not AS annoying if you follow that formula.