I read the update, but I’m not sure how their mechanics will work. I think the spirit of what they’re trying to accomplish wholly fits with the feeling of tabletop A/D&D and Pathfinder, but randomized rest encounter mechanics are difficult to translate into a single-player game with unlimited save/load.

I actually really enjoy mechanics like this in a tabletop context, even when the stakes are dramatically higher. In the Ars Magica campaign I played in, I had two characters die of old age due to unlucky die rolls (well… and being old), had my magus blow up his lab (and get severely injured for three seasons) through a bad experimentation roll, and similar mishaps. When you’re rolling in an open setting with your peers where you can’t take back the results, it can be exciting and rewarding even when the die goes against you. As with rolling to pick locks, make Diplomacy checks, or scribe scrolls, the risk/reward scenarios that players face with a live DM/GM and irrevocable die rolls doesn’t have the same impact if you can just reload from an isolated bad RNG.

osvir asked a related question about injuries, so hopefully this post will address both questions. There are two primary elements that promote resting in Deadfire: injuries and Empowers.

Characters can receive injuries from being knocked out in combat (as in the 3.0 patch of Pillars 1), from scripted interactions, and from traps. In fact, all traps now inflict injuries and a modest amount of damage. This is a change from Pillars 1, where traps inflicted enormous amounts of damage but wouldn’t inflict injuries unless the character was knocked out (post-3.0). The range of injuries is similar to Pillars 1, but each injury also lowers your maximum health cap by 25%, and a fourth injury always results in death.

We currently do not inflict injuries in combat (outside of KOs or tripping a trap). In Battle Brothers, the pace of combat and the clarity of the character icons makes it easier to see when characters receive injuries (usually). I’m concerned that inflicting injuries outside of those discrete events would make them hard to notice/confusing for players.

Empowers are the only per-rest resources that characters have. They can be applied either to an individual activated ability/spell (e.g. boosting the number of missiles that Minoletta’s Minor Missiles generates) or they can be used directly on the character to replenish lost per-encounter resources (e.g. restoring some of a rogue’s Guile pool or some of a wizard’s spells per spell level). Empowers are very useful but each character can only use Empower 1/encounter and a limited number of times per rest.

When characters receive injuries or run low on/out of Empowers, they can be replenished by consuming food while resting. Food is no longer consumed directly from the inventory or quick item slots in Deadfire. When the party rests, there is a resting interface where the player can specify which food items they want each character to consume (it remembers the last choice). Food items always grant bonuses, but common/cheap food grants modest bonuses. The party is not restricted in how much food they can carry, but if they rest frequently, they’ll be operating on those “lesser” bonuses or burning through their really good food/better bonuses.

We’re going to continue experimenting with these mechanics through alpha and, of course, based on enduser feedback (as opposed to dev feedback) once players can start messing around with it. Both Bobby and I are open to changing the mechanics if they don’t feel like they’re working.