Militibus Elementis Arc 1

Map file size is a tiny, tiny portion of the final project size for a tile-based game. Especially if you put multiple houses in a map, as Gredge suggested. If you're only worried about filesize, there are almost certainly much bigger factors.

You could always do the menu-based town thing instead.

author=Liberty
You could always do the menu-based town thing instead.

I kinda like this option, as I loathe mapping it saves time for both you, and the player. Saying that, if mapping is a thing you enjoy, by all means, map your towns!

*Edit: To answer the question at hand, I don't think the inability to enter houses would bother me too much. I just think you have to make it clear which buildings players can go into. Such as, say, using an open door (or archway, or whatever) for the places players can explore, and a closed door for places players can't?

Menu-based towns are essentially a SHOW CHOICE command. The best example of one, off the top of my head, would be this. Though, in fairness, the implementation I actually did was outlined in this blog.

The first example is easier to pull off, so going by that, you could replace "Repair" with "Inn" (or "Tavern", or whatever), replace "Ship Outfitter" with "Blacksmith", and "Marketplace" with "General Store".

Just stick to a classic town! For the OP not having houses that you can enter isn't a big deal. :) I say you can have a bunch of houses you can't enter because really you shouldn't be going into other people's houses anyways. As long the NPCs who give quests are outside in the town then it should be fine!

I will go against the flow and say that I have always hated talking to random idiots about nothing in RPGs. From a gameplay standpoint, it doesn't add much because they never actually say anything useful. And why would they? You've never met them before and will never meet them again, and they have nothing to do with any events in the game. And from an logical standpoint, why would people even let you in their houses in the first place? And from an aesthetic standpoint, this random dude's living room and kitchen are unlikely to help reinforce your game's themes or complement the parts of your artistic style that catch people's eyes, unless something very weird is going on. (If something very weird is going on, though, then go wild.)

I do like having some downtime to do things other than fight. Shopping and upgrading my characters makes for a nice break. Looking around a small area with no danger can sometimes be nice. I just hate the traditional Dragon Warrior town with three shops, four houses, an inn and a church. Make your downtime area be, like, a single building, maybe including the grounds outside it, so that it's large enough to explore a bit and there are a few relevant people to talk to. Make it be a boat that the player has to spend some time riding. Make it just be a bar with a secret hideout underneath the jukebox. Make it be a single person's house out in the wilderness, or a tiny military camp near the front lines, or a sealed gateway that the player needs to find a way through. Anything but Kalm.

I look for some pretty different things in games from LockeZ, but I'm going to broadly echo his advice here. I personally think that you should never allow the player party to enter NPC houses unless you have some particularly interesting content to justify it. Personally, I love wandering around talking to people and examining things for interesting dialogue and text, but not only does letting player characters randomly walk into strangers' house not make a lot of sense, most games just don't fill them with interesting enough content to reward the completionist impulse to explore them. I'd especially advise against letting the player explore NPCs' houses for the sake of finding random items hidden around them. Yes, it can be nice finding some extra loot to reward your exploration, but when the "exploration" consists of wandering around clicking random objects to see if items come out, you're rewarding activities which are intrinsically not very fun. You don't want to motivate your players to engage in drudgery.

If you have some particularly interesting content in mind to include in NPCs' houses, I think that by all means it's worth keeping in the game, but I think that if you're in the position of already having interesting ideas for the content, you're probably not at the point of contemplating whether to cut it out entirely.

author=Linkis
WRONG !!!! :)

Sorry Desertopa but other than being called a thief, I love searching for things.
If you feel that way, then you also don't like finding chests in caves.

That clearly doesn't follow. Treasure chests in caves are a visually distinct marker of something that you can search for an item. If you see one, you know there's an item there, even if you can't get to the chest as soon as you see it it's an obvious target.

If you hide items in random boxes and barrels and such, there's no such distinct marker, so instead if the player wants to seek out the available treasure, they have to wander around clicking on random objects most of which do nothing. It's one thing to "explore" a map by wandering around and seeing all the content the designer saw fit to include, it's another to "explore" the map by scouring the perimeter clicking on every object, when most of them aren't even interactive. Still worse when you get some kind of message like "there's nothing inside the barrel" most of the time.

If you want the player to enjoy a game, it's better not to incentivize them to engage in activities they would find unfun if they weren't doing it for a reward. If NPCs in your game are interesting and fun to talk to, rewarding the player for interacting with them occasionally gives them positive feedback for something they would have liked doing anyway. If they're boring and tedious, rewarding the player for interacting with them gives them an incentive to engage in activity which would normally be a slog.

If your environments are full of interactive objects which offer interesting feedback for players who examine them, then by all means give the player the occasional material reward for engaging in an activity that's designed to be fun anyway. But scouring maps clicking on nondescript, mostly non-interactive items is not something anyone would normally do for fun without a reward.