Where do I sleep?

As far as I remember those different rooms are mostly for flavour - you feel like a lavish noble if you have spent the gold to sleep in the parfumed heavens of a royale lodging. Or you could lie in a common room, sharing with all the other party members and feel like a true Paladin, sworn to poverty who would not spend a copper for himself but tithes away all but 10% of his share.

Game mechanically in most of those games the party does heal - a bit - more in the more expensive rooms.
And as in some of those games you can not rest safely everywhere but only in some specific safe areas (No, you may not loiter on the market square...) using the inn makes some sense when you come to town anyway to sell off the plunder that fills the parties bags.

 

The room quality affects healing amount if you have ‘rest until healed’ turned off. In that case characters heal between 1 - 4 hp per rest based on the quality of the room.

 

To answer the question about sleeping outdoors, in an Inn you have no chance of being interrupted, but otherwise you get the same benefits from the "peasant" accommodations as you do sleeping outdoors.
The other rooms will heal you a bit more HP, I think in one of the games you get more than 4hp for resting in the royal rooms, but still less than 10.
I just can't recall if it was BG1, BG2, IWD1, PST, or IWD2 that had better healing in better rooms, although they all will give you slightly better healing in the better rooms. However, it just isn't worth the price as opposed to casting Cure spells, then having your Cleric, Druid, Paladin, and Ranger memorize nothing but Cure spells, resting in the peasant room, casting all those cures, then re-memorizing their spell book and resting in the peasant room again. For 3gp and 24 hours you are fully healed.

 

As Tarrasque said, depending on the room, you get 1-4 hp restored. To my knowledge, this is a hardcoded amount in all IE games. Resting outside is identical to resting in a peasant room, with the exception of the chance of being interrupted by enemies.

Here's an article on the topic (though it doesn't contain much more data): https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/Rest

In 3E D&D, characters should recover 1 hp/level when they rest. I'm not sure if IWD2 follows that rule or what effect the inn rooms have.

In NwN, resting works a fair bit differently: https://nwn.fandom.com/wiki/Rest

 

Well, the 2E version of Paladin had:
"A Paladin never retains wealth: He may keep only enough treasure to support himself in a modest manner, pay his henchmen, men-at-arms, and servitors a reasonable rate, and to construct or maintain a small castle or keep (funds can be set aside for this purpose). All excess must be donated to the church or another worthy cause. This money can never be given to another player or NPC controlled by a player."

In other words a true Paladin is more and is held to a higher standard than a mere knight.

 

The castle or keep could be for the protection of all the civilians in the area, rather than for the paladin to live in luxury.
If he's the town's protector, the castle would be more of a fortress than a palace.
Medieval castles were often drafty fortresses rather than luxurious palaces.
Yes, they were expensive, but as the town's protector, putting all the wealth the paladin earns into creating and maintaining a fortress to protect all his charges would be in line with the intended ethos.

 

I dislike the forum software now... I read Slicks respons, wanted to simply "like" it, just like I did a few times before - and what happens? That forum software secondguesses my intentions and asks me if I REALLY want to like his post...
Being able to correct a possible error in clicking is sufficient. Being stopped before even liking feels like machines taking over the forum...

 

That happens with Xenforo forums if JavaScript is turned off or blocked with NoScript (or similar like YesScript) or Adblock (or similar like uBlock).
If JavaScript is on there is no confirmation.

 

Actually, before they switched to WebEx extensions, I used to have an extension called "QuickJava" that could toggle JavaScript on and off with a button, and the behavior described is normal on XenForo when JavaScript is turned off.
I tested with YesScript (like a stripped-down version of NoScript but defaults to unblocked until you tell it to block a specific site, where as NoScript defaults to blocked until you unblock) and that is exactly what happens when JavaScript is blocked on Sorcerers' Place, Spacebattles, Sufficient Velocity, and Questionable Questing.

 

Back when I could use XP to browse the web (are there any web browsers for XP on a Pentium III that can handle the modern web?) my 1ghz system with 512mb of RAM would be noticeably slowed down by the annual Christmas Lights on this site. I would use YesScript to turn off JavaScript. Granted that was before the switch to Xenforo, but I've noticed that if I have too many tabs open to either Sufficient Velocity or Spacebattles on my 12 year old Gateway 4200Dx with a 2.25ghz quad core and 6gb of RAM the browser gets noticeably slowed down unless you turn off JavaScript.

 

I never get any notifications for new media, so I would assume that's something you can turn off.

 

Yeah, that's the number of chat participants I think, and since I'm almost always there, you'll probably have a permanent (1) there.