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Sleep can cure anything... even death!
—From the webcomic Chicanery
For sword impalements, dragon attacks, meteor strikes, gunshots, any and all of the Standard Status Effects, and even death, nothing beats a nice, refreshing, stay at an inn — guaranteed to cure all your wounds!
The inn is surprisingly cheap, given how powerful it is. And somehow, the presence of inns that can heal any ailment for a pittance does not render traditional doctors and medicine obsolete. Of course, this can probably be explained by the fact that the game only considers your party members dead or poisoned on a gameplay level.
Often, the actual inn is optional and a guy standing in the middle of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon asking if you'd like to rest will get you the same effect. Forget about sleeping in your comfy bed on the Global Airship, though. That doesn't count.
This is quickly becoming a Discredited Trope, as modern RPGs are steadily replacing the Trauma Inn with automatic healing at save points. When an inn actually appears in a game with save point recovery, it's either there for a plot event, or it's just decorative scenery.
Note that if the stay at the inn is unexpectedly free, there will be a Cutscene that night. It is highly possible that the Trauma Inn is an off-screen subversion of the Nobody Poops and Bottomless Bladder tropes (Inns have toilets right?).
Examples:
- Neverwinter Nights does away with the inconvenience of inns altogether and just allows you to rest just about anywhere (even some dungeons). This is supposed to be your standard 8-hour sleep and cures the same ills, but it takes only 15 seconds or so while your party members kneel on the ground. In Neverwinter Nights 2, the time was further reduced to 5 seconds.
- In the Quest For Glory series, staying a night in an inn recovers only a modest amount of health, unless it was one of the QFG games where going to sleep even 5 minutes before dawn regenerated your health and mana completely (4, 5). Going from nearly dead to full health requires magical healing or multiple nights at the inn. Beyond this small nod to realism, bedrest is still able to cure anything the games' monsters can dish out.
- Resting in Erana's Peace, or really ANY of the clearings or spaces enchanted in passing by the enchantress Erana, would usually restore the player's health to full. This is explained by the fact that the space is, in fact, quite magical, and presumably just sitting there would cause injuries to mend at a drastically accelerated rate.
- The Dragon Quest series features this trope, except sleep can't revive dead characters and heal status effects- you have to pay a few gold at the church for that.
- The same system was present in Golden Sun (indeed as with Earthbound below there were several other ailments which could only be cured this way).
- In Earth Bound, hotels did heal HP damage and restore MP, but didn't get rid of status effects. In fact, there were no less than four different people you had to talk to to get rid of different effects. To revive your unconscious party members you have to talk to a nurse in a hospital; normal status effects like poison, sickness, or sunstroke can be healed by a doctor at a hospital; strange status effects such as "mushroomized", "diamondized", or "possessed" can be fixed by a man in every hospital who just calls himself a healer; and homesickness can only be fixed by calling your mother and talking to her. Also note that "mushroomized" and "homesick" are the only two status effects that you can't heal via
magic PSI powers.
- Mother 3 skips over all that and just gives you hot springs, comfy sofas, and "instant revitalizing devices" (a single one of which appeared in Earthbound) to fix all your ailments.
- The Final Fantasy Legend games (actually part of the Sa Ga series) had it so you had to pay for your inns based on how much HP worth of healing you needed, which made it cheaper to cast healing spells on yourself before entering and recharge your magic almost for free.
- In the original FFL, though, all characters except the main character could only die three times before they were really dead. I guess Inns can't do everything.
- Romancing Sa Ga 2 used a similar principle but Life points were the standard instead of hearts. If you the Artifact Of Doom you actually lose Life Points when at any inn except the emperor's bed.
- They basically stole this from Final Fantasy II (except for the Final Death bit). Final Fantasy II and the Sa Ga games were both directed by Akitoshi Kawazu, and are similarly noted for being rather obtuse and sadistic in their mechanics.
- In the handheld Yu-Gi-Oh game The Sacred Cards, this becomes an irritatingly ridiculous trope, as there is only one Trauma Inn in the entire game: your character's house, which is not only the only place you can save, but the only place you can restore your life points inbetween duels, despite the fact that no other game in this series or even the anime required it.
- Breath Of Fire III had camps, which overrode the need for inns, unless you suffered a Non Lethal KO, which would reduce your max HP until you, yes, coughed up for an inn.
- In Breathof Fire IV, resting at the inn provides the same benefits as the above example, as well as fully healing your dragon forms' Hit Points and the one-at-a-time only Dragon evocations.
- In the Baldurs Gate series, inns restore your spells and heal between zero and eight health points per character, depending on how much you pay. All other damage and status changes must be cured through spells or temples, though BGII does at least give you an automatic "cast healing spells on rest" option.
- In Betrayal At Krondor, resting in an inn will heal you, but to completely recover from "near death" (the game's version of being killed in battle) requires resting for almost four months. You're far better off looking for magical healing.
- Dungeons and Dragons 4e has all Hit Points and Daily abilities restored after a 6-hour "long rest." Granted, HP in 4e are more along the lines of Plot Armor than real, physical damage.
- In theory, they're like that in the previous editions too. In practice... not so much.
- The early dungeon-crawl game Telengard had this sort of inn; until you found magical assistance, sleeping in one was the only way to gain back lost hit-points. (And the only way period of charging up your spell-casting powers.)
- Made fun of in this
 Monster Hunting Made Easy comic.
- In the Pokemon games, simply sleeping in a bed on a ship or in your house was enough to heal your Pokemon of all HP damage or status damage as well as revive fainted Pokemon. Despite all this, Hyper Mode and Reverse Mode will persist, making those the only two statuses that good old rest cannot fix in the entire series. (Pokerus is positive in nature and does not qualify)
- Achaea has sleep gradually restore Hit Points, but status effects must be cured using herbs, spells or various other abilities. Sleeping can be done just about anywhere; inns do exist, but mostly sell food.
- Like every other RPG trope, the webcomic Adventurers! makes fun of this one, too.
- The Anime Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei has an episode where the whole class take a trip to a Cleansing Spring. It gives a brief peek at the sign next to it. If you pause the episode right there, it will say on the bottom line that it cures Petrification, Poison and other RPG-Debuffs.
- This is particularly silly in Secret Of Mana. Since the game is action-based rather than turn-based, characters knocked to zero HP actually turn into ghosts (so they can continue to follow the other characters around). Yet even this isn't enough to stop their inevitable return to life after their teammates rest in an inn (and the ghost stands beside one of the beds.)
- It's gets even sillier in Kingdom Hearts. While it doesn't have any actual inns, there are sleep-related items like "Tent", "Cottage", etc. that let you restore your HP and MP to full immediately after using it in the menu, essentially making them cheap super-potions whose only condition is that you can't use them in mid-battle.
- Murkon's Refuge, patterned after the classic [=RPGs=] of the day, naturally has one of these. The inn itself will only restore HP, though; the clinic is where you go to cure poison, paralysis, and yes, death. The lower-level inns and clinics are dirt-cheap, but the higher-level ones have ridiculously exorbitant prices (to avert Money For Nothing), so resurrection spells are more favored there than trips to the inn/clinic.
- Kingdom Of Loathing spoofs this with the "tiny house" item, obtainable on the Penultimate Fantasy Airship, which you put on the floor and have everything go dark for a few seconds. It only heals a moderate amount of HP and MP, but unlike most items it does heal Standard Status Effects. Of course, very few status effects in this game are standard...
- In Fallout 3, sleeping in a bed for at least an hour will cure any health problem, including broken bones. The only things sleep can't fix is radiation, which can be reduced with medicine or paying a doctor, and any addictions that the player may have, which can also be fixed by paying a doctor (world's fastest rehab), or purchasing a laboratory for your house.
- Done similarly in Oblivion.
- Cave Story has beds that you can sleep in to repair all health, but they are mostly useless since there are usually health monitors that work much faster and restore all your ammo. One is used to advance the plot, and another is used to get a secret bragging rights item. What is it? Lipstick from a pink Mimiga who appears in the same bed you wake up in. What!?!?!?
- The later Wizardry games use this halfway-characters do slowly regain hit points when they rest, but usually much less than casting healing spells, and while resting tends to heal status effects that naturally fade with time, such as paralysis, confusion, and nausea, more permanent effects will remain, and others, such as poison and disease, will continue to deal damage as the party rests-it's quite possible for a poisoned character to die while resting.
- Paper Mario has these in the form of Toad Houses. Your HP, FP, and Star Power all fill up.
- The Mario & Luigi series subverted this, there are no Inns to restore all your health. Partners in time has the same thing, however Bowser's Inside story gives Mario and Luigi the Emoglobin Juice to restore their stats, however Bowser gets nothing like in the previous games.
- Final Fantasy III averts this trope surprisingly hard. While an inn will restore HP and MP, it will not do a thing about ANY status effects, including KO. This in a game where status effects are rather more problematic than your standard RPG. (Early on, if you only have one caster and s/he only has one MP for level 2 spells, do NOT cast Mini on yourself for any reason until you level up enough to get a second MP) Oddly enough, there is a free inn on the airship.
- Wonderland Online has one in every country/city. Almost every one. The cost increases with your level and begins at LVL 11. Before that, it's free.
- Beginning in the Final Fantasy series with Final Fantasy X, save points fully restore HP and status. Final Fantasy X 2 mocks the trope in Guadosalam. In one of the sections there, the player can ask for the use of an inn, to which the proprietor responds "There's a chair, use it."
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