I actually do not think it's working well in Port... the rooms are being owned always by the same person, making those place exclusive to the people owning them for as long as they pay for it... and we know people have kept certain rooms for months and even for more than a year before. I personally think its a waste of area
You can still use the inn rooms for meeting point/base of operation even if you do not have exclusivity on it... players already have all the tool necessary without DM intervention to do their own thing. I prefer having those area available to everyone rather than to a select few players who got there first to buy the room.
The drain room I consider it more like a faction place, I don't think it can be compared the inn's room.
The inn rooms as they are right now, gives everyone the opportunity to use them as a tool for their RP. Changing it the system you propose would prevent the big majority of people from doing that anymore.
I might point out that there aren't even enough regular players in Port-a-Lucine to fill all 17 rooms of the Governor's Hotel at once. There are 12 Traveller's Suites, 4 Guest Suites, and 1 Penthouse. They are relatively expensive to maintain and keep, though not untoward in price compared to Port-a-Lucine-players' incomes. They renew every week. Admittedly, my character had his room for about six months, on and off. But that's because the character has lived inside of Port-a-Lucine, since early February. It was integral to his role play and allowed me to have conversations behind closed doors where any common joe can't just grab a key and check in on us, which is something that is fundamental to Port-a-Lucine's style of intrigue and deception.
This isn't including the Tenements, which is basically the Lady's Rest Inn Room-sized place, for 200 GP per RL month, and I think the Tenements have about ten or twelve rooms, too, but I may be mistaken. So player 'housing' in Port-a-Lucine is roughly 30 rooms, give or take, large, and that's over half of our active playerbase at any given time. There's never a lack of rooms, there's just a lack of the 'fancy' rooms that everyone covets. People are spoiled, and want the Penthouse, or one of the Guest Suites and throw a tantrum when they don't have it. But the people who usually have it, using them enough to justify the 1,500 GP - 10,000 GP price of the bill, depending on which room and how many keys you're renting out, per week.
Now, this being said, I don't really see a way or a place beyond the Blood o' The Vine that could be useful in Barovia as a similar system, because Barovia isn't about intrigue and politics, and secret closed-door hush-hush scheming. Barovia is about IADUL OUTLANDERS and the beasts of the night trying to murder and destroy everything.
What I WOULD like to point out and propose, however, is how difficult it is to get any resemblance of privacy on this server. It is considered wholly legit, IC, right-now, to be able to go through and take a key from the Lady's Rest, and open all the doors just to peep on what's going on behind them. I can't tell you how many times people just catch a man and a woman in there and the rumors start, or how many times someone is trying to have a closed conversation and the door is opened just as someone speaks. People want privacy, and in order to find their privacy, they are forced to go to unpopular areas of the server where they are less likely to be happened upon. Say, the Wachter Estate. The commons in Outpost Krezk, Blood o' The Vine (which is what was stated as the opposite intent..) and the Fishing Lodge, to do their clandestine, closed-door meetings. This is actually a contributing factor that is doing the opposite of the intent, forcing people to go far away from the common areas of the server, just so they can be alone and talk about whatever it is they're talking about. People will do that, whether you try to corral them with nonsensical OOC incentives or not.
So, to counteract this, I propose we change up the scripting behind a lot of the taverns, so that each room has a different key, and is a different room. You talk to Bianca, the script checks to see if any of the rooms are currently occupied or the key is rented out. The renting lasts until you walk back out of the room, and the key disappears from your pocket, or the room has no entities inside of them with the key on them. If you go in an opposite direction of Bianca, into the main room, you step on a trigger that also forces you to lose the key, to keep people from buying a key and holding on to it.
