by Greymark » Thu Sep 24, 2009 12:46 am
This is area where I have a hard time forming a strong opinion. On one hand, I completely agree that if you can easily leave an area with no penalties to travel to another location where a fire is located that the repetitive nature can be simply a time sink and little added value. On the other hand, I also tend to abuse fires even though intellectually I know I should not. Basically, if I know I have unlimited rests I will shoot off high level spells and complete the encounter with less thought and strategy then I would if I had a more stressful situation. In fact, I think the fun in this type of game is navigating through the stress with carefully thought out next moves.
I agree with the previous poster that the single use camp fire was cool. For me, not so much because it was single use but because it was unexpected. I wonder if the answer does not lie with that variable.
Fires consume fuel, we have no idea how much fuel is available, and each use of a fire could be its last. It could be random, it could be a DM call specific to situation (although I would still add a random variable but maybe within a different range) but in the end it would make a person think twice before using fire ("maybe I should fight more conservatively just in case the next time is the last" - meaning you go over to the fire to click on it and it blows out with only charcoal left).
I have to say I was never a fan of the random encounter after "sleeping" that many games employ. I do think the idea proposed by previous poster of some sort of consequence could be cool. I would take it a step further though and (again I think random adds to the stress level) when a consequence happens it shows up as dialogue "Your delay allowed the Princess to be swept to a new location"). Otherwise you destined to get a bunch of people saying the game is broken the Princess is gone. (Or maybe a note is left behind, triggered by the use of the fire, "Sorry, left without ya ...")