Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General The Long Rest Contradiction

I was just wondering if anybody else found it weird that we're actively discouraged from taking Long Rests (mechanically by Camp Supplies and narratively by our impending ceremorphosis) when so much of our companion backstory and quest progression is locked behind cutscenes that can only occur in the evenings at camp? And that only one companion can trigger their cutscene at a time, meaning we have to Long Rest multiple times to see the individual companions' scenes. It's a similar thing with the tadpole, you need to Long Rest after each use of your illithid powers to see the dreams and progress your condition. They hid a lot of the narrative behind a gameplay mechanic they apparently don't want us to use.

It just seems counter-intuitive is all.

Oh, yes, this feedback has been given many, many times. You're far from being the only player to find that this feels weird.

It is, indeed, contradictory messages and incentives.

It's as if we're playing a game that has been designed by several teams whose work was not coordinated. That, or the designers just don't know what player behaviour they want to encourage.


There are many other such contradictions in the game.

I made a long list at some point, but one of the other worst-offenders is the passing of time. Many story elements strongly imply the notion of time (the Druids' ritual, the burning inn, the metamorphosis). Yet the world is utterly static. In fact, you can see from the conversation history that Long Rest take a few minutes.

I suppose the next-worst one is the location of camp. It is safely hidden in a pocket dimension when you Long Rest in the middle of a dungeon, but it must be somewhere on the map and not too hard to find since the Tieflings/Goblins join you there for a celebration.

I was expecting this one Story-telling, immersion : tadpole and urgency, DM

And for good measure

Ah, I had forgotten about that one ... though it's a bit less focused on the contradiction than the current thread. And my link was to other contradictions/Schrödinger designs, not other instances where the particular contradiction around Long Rests was discussed. Now that I think of it, I think the last few times I saw that issue raised was on Reddit. So it's good to have this thread here.

And the opening post clearly lays out the problem :

The designers want the players to avoid using Long Rest too much, as

• the story tells us we don't have plenty of time,
• the mechanics of Camp Supplies tells us we can't use Long Rest all the time.

But the designers want the players to use Long Rest as much as possible, since

• the narrative system for the Companion Relationships requires us to be at Camp, and often.

In my view, the only way Larian can solve this contradiction is by removing the incentive to Long Rest all the time. Which means letting all queued cutscenes play out when we go to camp. (And perhaps have some play out when we are not at Camp.)

This continues to be the second biggest issue in the game, after the chain navigation system.

Yes, while some are concerned about abusing rest for gameplay reason, in my experience I have been missing character development and missing payoffs because not resting enough.

Might not be an issue when the full game is out as we might have only that much camp content and longer period of time to experience it, but the design is counter intuitive.

Some requested some kind of indicator when you have an event ready in the camp (maybe some kind of "!" By the long rest button?). I would like that, I think.

Just to point out:

For a system that's so confusing, everyone seems to understand how it works well enough to complain about it.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't complain about it. I'm just pointing out that it probably works better than most folks are giving it credit for. It doesn't take long to realize the transformation isn't going to immediately happen, and yet there's still this nagging sense of urgency. Which is probably exactly the way it's supposed to be.

Anyway, just a thought.

Maybe just maybe all the character development isnt suppose to happen in act 1.

I don't fully understand it, and I've not seen much of the content of the game because of how I play.

The only reasons I know I've missed so much stuff is because I read these forums and Reddit - which most players will never do when the game is actually released.

None of the scenes you've been through told you that you have time? That you're not going to immediately turn into a mind flayer? That the tadpole is in stasis?

Same here, we got to the point where I'm cruising through the content so smoothly and I'm getting so little rest that I ended one of my last playthrough without even finding out that Astarion is a vampire and Gale a nuke in the making.
For all the worries about rest being abusable at will, we are also hardly ever pressured to do it if we can go through fights efficiently enough.

It's bizarre because Larian keeps skipping on all the built-in D&D mechanics that would implicitly normalize this type of behavior: no day/night cycle or proper passing of time (and that's a lost battle, don't we know it?), tiredness and exhaustion, the need for attunement with special equipment, the need to rest to level up, etc...

In patch 8, I think they spaced events out even further because I only got Raphael's visit at LR6 (long rest 6) and Astarion's nocturnal visit at LR8. Gale only told me about his artifact problem at LR11(iirc).
I like having a save for each long rest so I can go back and try various dialogue choices and in my case, the patch 8 run took almost double the amount of long rests of previous patches.

I really wish they'd find a way to make the sense of urgency (or lack thereof) consistent. Some quests progress if you long rest and some don't. Some can fail. I haven't once gotten locked out of the grove due to the ritual (taking 6-10 long rests before freeing Halsin) Is it a bug or a feature?

I think setting an ingame day/night cycle would really help. An increasingly severe 'fatigue' debuff would also make it clear that it's time to rest. Atm, Tav sometimes interjects "I'm tired. I need some rest" but it can get covered by ambiental sounds or interrupted by other ingame events.

The entire party says it every now and then, but there's no genuine tiredness/exhaustion mechanic in place to make this a thing you should actually care about.

IF that's supposed to be your cue "Do a rest and we'll have some dialogue" then it's a terrible implementation.

TBH I'm annoyed by all the branching dialogues in combination with the rolling of the dice. Sure, that's part of the RPG, but you can also exaggerate. In other games, it's easier to go through the dialogue to filter out the consequences. Here you have to roll the dice correctly or reload...

As a passionate thief, I long rest more often. If only to rob the vendors with their changing offer. Some stuff like potion of invisibilty or two hand crossbows, you don't get that quickly. Same for extra spells by scrolls or healing potions if you play without a healer class. I also need a supply of magic projectiles for my fighter to replace the missing Arcane Archer subclass.

So thieving is my main reasons for long resting and it would be annoying if I cant do this bcs of a too limited way.

No one has any idea what's going on, in an in game sense, so no, there's no authority saying "hey this is what's going on, there's no urgency". An observation things seem to be different to some expectations doesn't change the basic fact there's a tadpole in my head doing god knows what to me.

There are also scenes where it's clearly having an impact with strange powers and one sickness scene where LZ almost kills me, so yeah, the sense of urgency is pretty well NOT overpowered by some "hmm, I'm not really sure what's happening, you should have changed by now probs" speeches.

Hehe .... That's how I found out the grove lock never happens, actually. In 3 different patches now I ran a thieving team and spent over a week of long rests selling and then emptying Arron's pockets. Act 1 ended with 10-20k gold in Tav's pockets, everyone decked out in +1 armor or better, all +1 weapons or rares, and no negative consequences for wasting time. Rather, those Tavs got to see more cinematics and had fewer companion quest bugs than rushing Tavs. Thievery ftw.

But I don't think adding a day/night cycle and a fatigue system would negatively impact thievery... it all depends on implementation, I suppose, but I can think of ways in which it could be even more fun:
* People going home & leaving some locked containers in the public areas
* Harder to steal from homes unless people are sleeping (in which case pickpocketing would be trivial)
* Significantly higher fines for breaking and entering but lower risk of getting caught if you use the dark areas properly
BG1&2 had their own problems with implementing (and taking advantage) of lit/unlit areas... but I miss that day/night cycle.

I've had this happen in several runs: Tav says "I'm exhaused", I go to camp for a long rest, Lae'zel and Shadowheart get on my case about the tadpole. And Tav has no basis to argue that the team really needs to rest becaus it was just an interjection with no actual effect on gameplay. *facepalm*

@JandK You are touching more the narrative, while I think what most of us are discussing is mechanics and its contradictions.

On one hand it is a resource management using up a potentially limited (but at this moment extremely generous) supply of food. As such it encourages to resting as little as possible - it's a bit like ammo in the shooter, in general you want to use only as much as you need or you are in danger of running out.

On the other hands they tied a lot of story content to players resting, making it feel like one is loosing out on critical part of an RPG if one isn't resting enough - that's why a request for camp event indicator so the player can know when it would be beneficial to rest even if resources don't call for it. It is even further confused by minicamps - are all cutscenes available in both main and mini camps? Am I looking potential story content if I decend into underdark too quickly?

There is nothing wrong with tying story content too rests - but BG3 uses rest as a pretty major outlet for encounters and conversations. I think they need to improve with how rest fulfills its roles as resource management system and space for story events.

That's the way it has to be. But I only had 8k. That was enough. That's extra weight too and I was too lazy to store it in camp. But without a "bag of holding" at least in the form of a purse for all the gold to take the weight, I'll probably have to visit the camp a lot more.


Not that, but I don't know where this whole thing of having enough food for long rests is leading us and whether this possible limitation will also result in cuts in the supply packs that can be bought / stolen?


Jep I dunno why to buy / steal potions of vitality bcs there is no real exhaustion...

When this was first discussed as an issue, I thought maybe I was jumping the gun a little, and that Larian was front loading conversations for testing purposes. We have seen some changes to the pacing there, Shadowheart brings up the dangers of, then endorses resting (though only after you've decided to), they added camping supplies, and they've limited the number of times you can use the tadpole each long rest. Note that's two changes to encourage more long rests and one to encourage less long rests.

There are still a bunch of conversations I wouldn't know about except when they're mentioned here, or randomly on Youtube.
Hearing Neleothesze talk about getting scenes only after long rest 6 and 11 is striking to me, because I think I must top out at LR 6 during my EA runs, and only when playing a spellslinger at that. Larian must have some metrics on what the average number of long rests is across the EA and are putting in mechanics to stretch them out more for a reason...I don't know.

no need to reinvent the wheel, a simple dialogue bubble that appears on a companions portrait, and them saying, "let's rest for the night when we can" when a cutscene or conversation is ready. As it is though, i've skipped a massive amount of conversations without even knowing it.