eating food restores some health
As novel as I found Runescapes use of food in lieu of conventional healing potions, thats not one Id borrow. Chugging a potion in the heat of battle is one thing (even kung fu movies do this), scarfing down an entire monkfish is another.
What I get is a gameplay loop similar to New World (minus the PvP) where resource management and risk assessment (is it worth it to go to the Caves of Darkness for troll's blood, even though that makes the best healing potions) are as important as quests.
More or less. Part of the context (for the game Im writing) is that leveling up requires active use of your characters various skills, similar to the Runequest -> Elder Scrolls style of leveling, so the "pillars" of the game have to encourage skill use across the board.
Crafting and gathering in this sense not only makes adventuring have more of a point beyond chasing a story (and gives a point to random adventuring, something I think most TTRPGs, even OSR ones, tend to fall short of doing) but also gives more opportunities for players to level their skills and get those precious class levels.
Although, PVP in TTRPGs
is something I've been curious about, and I've actually tested a variant rule for my combat system for it. Works quite well and actually inspired me to stick an uber realistic dueling game in my back pocket.
and maintain the same 10 days rations that they got at level 1 somehow.
Im not familiar with the reference but Ill remind that survival should be optional.
Don't get me wrong, I personally
love survival and would rather be going full tilt gritty survival sim at all times, but not everyone is like that and my table sure wasn't. Thats why segregating survival out of the gameplay loop of the game is important.
Relatively few actually commit all the way to survival, and yet DND is still tying itself down to survival mechanics despite having long since made the bulk of them so superfluous that even for people that enjoy it, its rules are quite bad.
That Rests as presented can range from minutes to literal weeks at a time and can only barely affect the balance of the game is a testament to that. Epic Heroism was always my preference, and even with hour long Long Rests, the game didn't become
that much more balanced, only just so, and it took until the mid game for spell recovery to kick in and balance out casters. And most Im sure know that short rests being easier to take benefits those classes substantially, but they don't suddenly become OP, nor do casters and such stop reigning supreme.
The unimportance of time in DND fundamentally undermines the point and value of running survival at all, and dropping the rest system is just embracing that truth.