General RPGs' Shelter Items

You know those items in RPGs like Shelters, Tents, Cottages, etc.?  The ones that fully restore your entire party so long as you’re at a save point?  When you get down to it, they’re kind of a dumb waste of time.

Oh, sure, your knee-jerk reaction is that I’m being an idiot.  The utility of these items seems obvious!  After you’ve been slogging through a dungeon full of random encounters, wearing down your characters’ health and magic, you absolutely want to be able to restore your weary adventurers to their peak fighting capacity before the next boss, or even just a new branch of the dungeon.  And who the heck wants to take the time to use a dozen or more curative potions to achieve that?  Not to mention that those things can be needed in difficult battles, so you may not want to waste them.  A save point restorative seems the perfect tool for extended, thorough, and safe dungeon exploration.

And sure, that all makes sense.  While some RPGs are designed without such options, presumably either with the intent of creating an economy of careful resource budgeting or just because they were created before the feature had even been invented (or, in a few cases like Live-A-Live and the Loathing and Romancing SaGa series, because the party’s HP is fully restored after combat anyway), generally speaking, the capacity to fully heal up at significant intermissions and turning points in a dungeon is a pretty important feature.  Knowing you’ll be able to do so at a certain point during your exploration means that you feel comfortable with using at least some of your special abilities during regular battles, which makes combat substantially less boring than it has to be, you don’t have to grind money to afford an ocean of jarred elixir before you feel comfortable about your chances of making it through the next combat zone alive, and having your fighters at full capacity means you can go all-out against bosses.  Without the ability to heal up at save points, you’re looking at an RPG where 90% of your battles may just be using Attack over and over, and you’re either starving for every coin to fill your inventory with mana potions, or your crew can only ever give a fraction of their all to boss encounters, lowering what dramatic weight the conflicts have.  Save point healing is definitely a positive and important function of the average RPG.

But ever since I first played Grandia 1 and enjoyed the benefits of those delightful little rainbow cone save points, I’ve wondered: what is the damn point of Shelter items when you can just have the save point itself heal the heroes?

I mean, think about it.  If the developers wanted the option to fully restore the party while in a dungeon to be on the table at all, then why add the extra steps of having to purchase a Tent, and then open up the item menu and use it?  Sure, it’s not some great inconvenience, but it’s still a step that’s entirely unnecessary when games like Grandia, Undertale, and Final Fantasy 10 prove that the save point can just do the healing itself.  Hell, Ys, 1 of the oldest RPG series in existence, proved this before Shelter-type items even existed!  You’re just adding the extra steps of purchasing and then using an item to do what could just be included in the save point’s function.  It may only be a very tiny inconvenience, but it IS a tiny inconvenience that doesn’t have to be there at all.

I suppose you could try to make the point that budgeting for healing is a part of the overall economy of RPG gameplay, and thus having to purchase/find Shelter-type items contributes to that.  But that argument doesn’t really hold much water--it’s pretty rare that such items have a high enough price tag at a merchant that they affect the economy of playing the game at all.  About the only time in an RPG where your buying choices might be affected by the cost of having a Tent or 2 on hand would be right at the beginning, when you have the smallest capital flow, and that, ironically, is the time in the game where you usually will need such an item the least, since you don’t have much HP and MP to restore to begin with (making basic potions an easy option), and have fewer MP-draining skills and spells to utilize in combat anyway.  By the point at which you’ve got enough HP, MP, and battle options that the Shelter family is indispensable, you’ll also have enough money that keeping a tidy 10 of the things in your inventory at all times won’t have any noticeable effect on your wallet.  If the developers’ aim was to make 1 of money’s uses in their game the capacity for save point healing, then a system like what you often find in Shin Megami Tensei would be a better method, in which the cost of the healing increases according to just how much HP and MP need to be recovered.  This kind of system is still generally outpaced pretty easily by adventuring income even as the costs get more substantial, but it’s at least a way better attempt at creating a heals-for-cash economy than just charging 150G for a Shelter in a game where you can be making more than that in a single battle less than a quarter of the way through the adventure.

And I know that these items ain’t there for the sake of immersion.  Exactly how realistic is it that in the middle of a military facility within the enemy capitol, one filled with enemy soldiers, hostile robots, guard dogs, and violent mutants, the heroes can just pitch a tent in the middle of a random room, crawl inside, and every single foe will politely tiptoe around them so they can get a healthy, recommended 8 undisturbed hours of rest?  Are you going to make the case that it’s believable for an other-dimensional horror of teeth and claws and teeth with claws floating in the midst of a temple built to worship a god of torment and destruction to happen across the 4 heroes trying to kill its boss as they’ve snuggled up for a nap, and choose to let them be simply because it’s too shy to unzip the tent flap?  Lemme tell you, the giant, hulking, vicious razor-horned Behemoths of Final Fantasy became a hell of a lot less intimidating when I realized that they were powerless before a Do Not Disturb sign!

Not to mention cases where the overnight stay that a Tent item implies should actually just outright kill the heroes in and of itself.  I’m pretty sure that if you decided to conk out for the night in the heart of an active volcano next to a pool of magma, snoring in 1 lungful of volcanic aerosols and ash after another, you’d be waking considerably less healthy than when you went to sleep.

Also, exactly how realistic is it that these things are consumable, single-use items?  Look, I don’t know which Dick’s Sporting Goods the developers of Cris Tales have been shopping at, but tents are not tissue papers; you’re supposed to be able to pitch it up more than once before you pitch it out.  Who is the absolute madman in the party of Final Fantasy 4 who is purchasing and then throwing entire COTTAGES in the trash after a single nap!?

If these games wanted to realistically employ the idea of a Shelter item, they’d do it like Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous.  In those games, you can bunker down for the night in an active danger zone with the camping equipment that your party carries and doesn’t throw out, so long as you have the space to set it up, and there’s an entire game mechanic devoted to determining whether the sentries you post to watch over the camp will be able to keep the rest of the party safe from the enemies in the area as they sleep.  It still requires a good bit of suspension of disbelief to accept that’d be enough to allow for a decent night’s sleep in the middle of the war zone of a demon invasion, but they’re at least trying a hell of a lot harder than the developer who thought it’d be totally reasonable for a Shelter to guarantee complete, unbroken safety for over half a dozen hours in the middle of Magus’s Lair.

So these items don’t provide any real effect on the ebb and flow of money in the game, and they sure as hell don’t add to the immersion.  Well, if Shelters have no secondary meta-function, and their primary function can be accomplished exactly as well by simply programming save points with the ability to heal your party,* then what purpose is served by these items besides just wasting the cumulative time it takes to acquire them and navigate menus to use them?   Save point restoration items are dumb.












* Hell, this actually provides the creators better potential control over how the game is played.  Some RPGs have 2 different kinds of save points, ones that just save your game and others that can both save AND heal you, allowing the developers better options for balancing their dungeons and bosses the way they want to, since they have the option to provide or deny the player full restoration, and thus create situations and dungeons of MP-budgeting and adoption of endurance tactics.