One small number
In the combat AI, a single coefficient: recklessness +0.08. No threat rider, no discipline cut, no kill hunger, no courage change. Restless nudges one dial, gently, and the first half of this page is about what a nudge that size does and doesn’t buy. The second half covers what the trait does outside the fight, which matters more.
For scale: Reckless carries nearly four times as much (+0.3) alongside two other coefficients; Hot-Headed +0.25 with three. At the careful end, Watchful is almost a perfect mirror of Restless at −0.07, and Curious sits just below at +0.06. The two traits are near-twins, mechanically, and everything on this page applies to Curious with the numbers filed down a touch further. What separates Restless from the genuine risk traits isn’t direction, it’s magnitude. +0.3 changes how a hero fights. +0.08 changes which way a handful of coin-flip decisions land.
The mechanism is worth spelling out because it’s where mild traits get misread. The combat AI scores every option each round, and most rounds one option wins clearly, and no coefficient this small touches those. Restless only matters in the rounds where two options score nearly level, and there it breaks the tie toward the riskier line. In a fight, that’s all it is: a thumb, lightly, on close calls.
Does +0.08 show up in a delve?
Most delves, honestly, no. Not in any way you could point at. Nobody reads a round-by-round report and identifies the moment a +0.08 recklessness bias made the difference, and you should be suspicious of anyone who claims to. What the trait does is statistical: across a season of delves, a Restless hero takes the aggressive option in marginal moments slightly more often than a neutral one would. Occasionally that’s the push that reaches a wounded enemy a round early and saves the party three rounds of curse ticks. Occasionally it’s a step into danger the cautious line would have skirted. Mostly it is nothing at all.
Where the direction of the bias earns a thought is on unforgiving floors. Under conditions that punish exposure (darkness, flooded halls, anything that taxes positioning mistakes), a bias toward risk is worth marginally less, and on floors that reward tempo it’s worth marginally more (the conditions page covers which is which). But keep the modifier in proportion: this consideration should move your party selection roughly never. It’s a tiebreaker for your decisions in the same way the coefficient is a tiebreaker for the AI’s.
Permadeath is the one lens under which small risk biases deserve respect: a career is long, and a hero who leans toward danger in one extra close call per delve runs slightly hotter across hundreds of them. Slightly. The word is doing honest work there.
Team considerations
Because the effect is a rounding error, role fit is nearly flat. A Restless damage dealer, front-liner or anchor is fine without qualification. Even on healers and supports, the roles where you’d refuse Reckless outright, Restless alone isn’t disqualifying; a support who takes the marginally braver line on rare close calls is not a liability, just a personality.
The one place the trait deserves a real look is stacking. Coefficients on the same parameter add up, and a hero who combines Restless with a genuine risk trait is buying more of something they already had: Restless on a Reckless hero pushes an already-extreme dial further for no compensation. Conversely, Restless partially cancels careful traits. On a Stoic (−0.06 recklessness) or Watchful (−0.07) hero the two coefficients roughly wash out, and on a Sure-Footed one (−0.1) you’re left with a whisper of caution. None of these combinations is a crisis; all of them are worth knowing when you’re reading a hero’s full trait sheet rather than one line of it.
Party-level synergy planning can ignore Restless entirely. No named pairing cares about it, and the synergy planner is better spent on the traits and pairings that move real numbers.
Valuing a barely-there trait
Never pay a premium for Restless, and never dock a recruit for it either. Both errors happen, and both come from reading the trait name instead of the coefficient. A scout report that flags a hero as “restless” sounds like a warning about oaths or a hero who’ll agitate for transfer. The code supports none of that: Restless does not change wages, renewals or transfer behaviour. What it does change is how a party moves, covered in the next section.
Practically: at the oath table it merits no adjustment in either direction. As a follower, a Restless hero is close to background noise. As the hero with the most Leadership in a party, or in the leader’s seat, they are a hero who pushes on, and that is the part to plan around. The recruitment guide covers the trait-weighting mindset in full.
Pushing on
Skipping rest rooms. When a party reaches a rest room, the game looks at the active hero with the highest Leadership. If that hero is Restless (or Greedy, Glory Hunter, Ambitious, Reckless, Hot-Headed, Arrogant or Tireless), there is a 75% chance they wave the party past. The party ransacks the room for 30 gold plus 10 per danger level and rolls for a find, but nobody rests, and every active hero gains 5 stress. A normal rest heals each hero 25% of their health, restores 60% of their resource and takes 7 stress off. On a long delve with a hurt party that trade is usually bad, so think twice before sending a Restless hero with high Leadership into a dungeon you expect to bleed.
Sealed doors and side rooms. At a dungeon fork, a Restless leader leans toward a sealed door (+1) and away from the known path (−1). That is about an 80% chance to open a sealed door and about 67% to take a treasure room or named lair, and the lean ignores whether the party is hurt. A leader with no lean takes a side room 60% of the time when the party is fresh and 20% when it is hurt.
The retreat order. You set when a party should turn back: after the first knock-down, at half, at most, or never. Restless is one of the bold traits (with Reckless, Dauntless, Brave and Glory Hunter, plus Hopeful) that push a leader’s order a step later; fearful traits push it a step earlier, and the net sign decides. A Restless leader with nothing fearful holds on one step longer than you ordered. Steady leaders (Stoic, Cool-Headed, Methodical, Steady, Iron-Willed, Unbreakable, Stalwart) follow your order exactly whatever else they carry.
Easy delves
A hero sent on an ordinary board delve far below their level can lose morale over it, from 1 to 9 points depending on how big the gap is. Traits move the point where they start to mind: Restless lowers it by 6, so a Restless hero minds sooner. Arrogant (14), Vain and Glory Hunter (12) and Ambitious (8) mind sooner still; Humble, Professional, Stoic, Loyal and Diligent mind later, and heroes raised in the hall have 12 points more patience. Taking a first-timer along excuses the veterans for that delve.
Conflicts and flavour
Restless can never appear with Methodical, Traditional, Tireless or Homebody.
- Rarity: common, neutral · draw weight 100 of 6,365 · about 1 recruit in 25
On pair duty the hero speaks with the “curious” voice shared with Curious, Quick-Witted, Pathfinder and Trap-Wise. The hero card links the trait to Stamina; that link is descriptive and does not change the attribute.
Coefficient history
Unchanged from v1.9.6 through v2.1.8: the +0.08 has sat still across every tracked build. The rest-room, fork, retreat and morale hooks above are read from the 2.1.8 code; earlier versions of this page missed them.