I really don’t know how much I have to say about this, but its an idea that come to mind while playing Dragon Quest 3 HD2D Remake, and since today I’m pretty worn out and just finished a big writing project (go read it, its yesterday’s post!) I could take on this eminently smaller project for today. When I first started playing DQ3HD2DR (lol) I was asked what difficulty I wished to play on. I’m not super experienced with Dragon Quest games - I played 11 on Draconian (although I never beat the end game) and the DS remake of 4 on normal (or at least I do not remember selecting a difficulty) and aside from that I played the original and most recent Dragon Quest Monsters (but none of them in between) - so I was initially unsure if I could handle Draconian, so searched to get a sense of “how hard is this?” The general vibe I got was it was not super hard, and I also so a lot of people complaining about how the remake nerfed the difficulty because 1) attacks are now automatically redirected if an enemy group dies, rather than being wasted and 2) you now full heal HP and MP on level ups, thus allowing you to more easily make it through dungeons by supplying some passive healing if you can survive long enough to level up. Ultimately I decided to go with Draconian, and overall its been fine - basically smooth sailing until the Pyramid, where I was forced to accept a loss against the boss and lose half my carried money in order to get the equipment necessary to be immune to his status effects.
Its perhaps notable that that is the only penalty for death in the remake, and if I am not mistaken always has been in every version of Dragon Quest - fairly generous from an era when most games would cause you to lose all progress since your last save. People replying to the first of those complaints basically said, that’s dumb, that’s a quality of life feature, not a nerf, there’s no good reason to roll back time and force people to carefully micromanage who they target so as to not waste attacks - especially because what enemy group you choose to attack still matters a lot, especially if you make use of weapons like whips that can attack entire groups at once. I think you can argue against that, that there is in fact some skill involved in avoiding wasting attacks, even if it is primarily about memorizing how much damage you deal to certain enemies and how much HP they have, and for those old school who enjoy that kind of challenge, they should be allowed to keep it - and indeed I do kinda think it should be a menu option, separate from standard difficulty settings. Actually I think it might be, but that’s super beside my point.
Getting back to it, I did not see the same said of healing on level up - no one claimed THAT was just a quality of life feature. But it did make me think - when I was in high school playing Dungeons and Dragons 3rd edition, and middle school playing 2nd ed, and college playing 3.5, healing in DnD did not come easy. You had limited spells per day, only clerics and druids could heal with them, in 2nd edition you even had to decide how many spells slots to devote to healing (and still do as a Druid in later editions), and when you were out of them you had no choice but to rest and recover - which provided very little healing in of itself, but it did restore your spells allowing you to heal up with them (and recover any offensive spells you burned as well which were probably necessary to proceed in the dungeon.) The books seemed to be written around the assumption that a party was intended to clear a dungeon in a single run, and DMs pretty uniformly tried to punish resting in dungeons by having monsters attack you during the night, and leaving and resting outside of dungeons by having the monsters beef up their defenses or somehow harm the party’s cause by destroying whatever they were seeking, fleeing the dungeon, retaliating against nearby villagers, etc, etc. I myself as a DM once killed a party member by having all the kobolds in a kobold den ambush the party after they tried to rest inside - a move I immediately regretted, even though it is entirely realistic. Eventually my parties discovered the joy of Wands of Cure Light Wounds, which allowed for effectively infinite healing, as well as spells like Rope Trick which seemingly (but perhaps unintentionally?) prevented night time ambush, and the need to rest in dungeon became less frequent, although still somewhat common, just usually from running out of offensive spells rather than healing.
Now arguably this actually was probably the fault of the DMs to begin with. As noted, the games seem to assume that you wouldn’t rest in a dungeon - that’s an absurd thing to do. But if a DM presents players with a dungeon impossible to beat in one rest - or, as was usually the case in campaigns I was in and campaigns I ran, ones impossible to beat without several rests - what other option do they have? Even if they leave, rest outside, and come back, the enemies now have warning, thus possibly making future encounters even harder, and if there is any pressure to complete whatever task the players are on, they are making that even worse wasting time traveling instead of resting inside the dungeon (which can also prevent some forms of monster sabotage, like escape, if you block the exit). Parties who faced this problem regularly without making major mistakes really just had DMs who were overtuning their encounters and dungeons - something I was definitely guilty of, as I had a talent for designing nasty encounters. Nevertheless, it definitely was a ubiquitous issue - I don’t know that I had a single campaign that didn’t regularly involve resting in dungeon, except ones that failed to last beyond a single session.
Game design in both PnP RPGs and video game RPGs seems to have moved past this. Pathfinder 2E had generous skill based healing, I believe 5th edition has long and short rests to allow for easier in dungeon healing, and most games have some combination of healing on level up, healing over time, saving anywhere, generous checkpoint systems, or Souls-style bonfires which are actually more generous save points in disguise. No longer must parties sleep in dungeons in PnP, at least very rarely, and games generally are tuned so that you can clear dungeons in one go if you are appropriately leveled rather than clearing out portions, leaving to rest, and then returning as was a common practice in older JRPGs. But is this a good change?
I mean, yeah, I think it is, for the most part. Leaving and coming back is generally miserable in games, and resting in dungeons definitely always to me felt like you were somehow playing the game wrong - it made no sense in character to do it, oftentimes we’d spend fifteen minutes fighting, burn all our resources, rest for twenty four hours, and then fight for another fifteen minutes before needing to rest again - it was ridiculous. But the complainers that things are getting nerfed are not without any points at all. It was a problem that needed to be overcome and players choices in overcoming it were meaningful and added challenge. Just, that challenge tended not to be very fun, and games are supposed to be fun, right? But at the same time the idea of dungeons as deadly challenges that require days of effort, careful and methodical clearing, leaving, and returning for further clearing does create a different picture of them than the infinite grind more common in modern designs. Although I do not think I’d want to return to those days of game design I do have some nostalgia for it and wonder about if there is a way to bring it back in a more interesting, player friendly way, to keep the vibe but lose some of the edge. But, at the end of the day, I’m glad I heal on level ups in Dragon Quest 3 HD2D Remake, previously referred to as DQ3HD2DR. lol
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