Resting: why it deserves better (Part 1 of 3)

In Fantasy Grounds there was a nice little long rest panel. The GM opened it, managed the rest, players waited. Simple, functional. When the rest happened, it happened because the GM pressed a button to 'officiate'.

Foundry does it differently. The GM tells the party "you can take a long rest," and then each player clicks their own long rest button. It works. But it always felt wrong to me. Not in sequence, not authoritative. Five players clicking a button on their own sheets at slightly different times. The GM sets up a meaningful camp, narrates the scene, and then... everyone clicks a button out of sequence, behind five separate sheets.

Rests were always significant in my games. I spend real attention setting them up. Making sure the party earned the rest. Making sure the location mattered, the resource state mattered. A rest isn't a reset button. It's a beat in the story.

The Baldur's Gate problem

Baldur's Gate got this right. Rest is a whole scene. The camp loads, the characters are there, you walk around and attend duties. Talk to companions. Cook something. Check in on the state of the group. It's not a menu. It's a place.

That's evocative of what a rest should feel like at a tabletop. Not "click the button, numbers go up." You're there, in the camp, and the camp has things happening in it. The rest itself is part of the game, not a pause from it.

I've been chasing that feeling in Foundry for a while now.

What Respite was

Respite v1 tried to do this through UI. A contained dialogue workflow that walked the group through the rest. Setup phase, activities phase, events, resolution. All managed through panels and tabs and dropdowns.

I ran a rest with a group who'd never touched Respite before. Fresh eyes, no context, no walkthrough. And it was immediately obvious that the whole thing was too obscure. The UI was doing too much, asking too much parsing, and nobody could follow what was happening without someone narrating each step.

That's the kind of feedback you can't argue with. If uninitiated players can't contend with the interface then the interface is wrong. The problem wasn't the features. The problem was trying to fit a campsite into a dialogue box.

So I started pulling the whole thing apart. Part 2 is about what the camp looks like now.

-- Ionrift