Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Healthy changes for challenge: Injuries, hostile resting, expensive food

Playing through the game I absolutely love it! I do however feel like the challenge is a bit lacking if you put some thought into builds and tactics (tactician). Me and my friends use mods (tactician plus, enhanced enemies) for new playthrough and it's better but still lacking. I think the main culprit is that resting supplies, and potions are so abundant, and that getting knocked down has no consequences. So even if a fight should go wrong and a friend or two get knocked down, you can just AoE heal, finish the job, throw a potion on all your friends or quick rest and be on your way again. It makes it so you're not afraid enough of the enemies. "Tank it with your face, we'll get you back after". For non-caster characters it's even more noticable as their resources often aren't very dependant on long rests, so they can just go and go.

Suggestions for fixes:
- Introduce injuries and injured statuses as a result of getting knocked down in fights. Like a concussion or broken bones that impose debuffs until next long rest, or maybe even next X long rests. Something that makes getting beat down feel more impactful and incentivices more long rests for non-casters.
- Introduce hostile resting environments. If you long rest in the wilds you risk being woken by wandering packs, surprised and attacked. For balance they probably shouldn't give significant XP or loot when defeated.
- Make resting supplies more scarce and make it a costly commodity in inns and at vendors. Remove most food found from random jars and boxes - maybe put more of it in much fewer places where it makes sense, like select storages.

What do you think of these three suggestions? Any of you have other thoughts along these lines?

Agreed. I got bored of the gameplay loop of bulldozing through every fight with reckless abandon because getting knocked out or even killed has zero consequences. Long Rest is more of an inconvenience than a real mechanic that forces you to manage your resources wisely. Boss fights like Raphael are such an anti-climax when you can just spam Help or throw healing potions and he can never hope to beat that because they party simply doesn't stay down, ever. Immersion-wise, it's just not cool reviving someone 7 times in the same fight. If it wouldn't work for a movie scene, it doesn't really work in a CRPG in my opinion. They even put regeneration in Helm of Balduran that revives you automatically so you don't even need a party and just bounce back up at the start of your turn every time. It's ridiculous.

The worst thing they could do to increase challenge is to make another mode where enemies have increased stats. That would only force players to resort to more cheese and limit them to using the most OP character builds and nothing else. They need to increase the challenge through limiting Long Rest and removing cheese like buffed Shove, Help being a free magic heal and the asinine potion throwing that don't exist in D&D to begin with. The fights would be plenty challenging if the game actually played like 5e and players would have to play smart and manage their resources.

As for Long Rest, they need to just remove the pointless camp supplies and figure out another way to make it a meaningful mechanic. That means limiting where and how often you can rest through logical restrictions and stuff like getting ambushed trying to rest in a dangerous location. Which in turn would require some kind of restrictions to teleporting to camp and some meaningful consequences for spending time (fast) traveling back to safe locations. I think the weird "camp areas" that don't exist in the actual game world were a mistake to begin with. Campsites should have existed in the real game world and they should have been the fast travel points.

These all sound like good ideas to me, and I also agree that hitpoint bloat is not a good way to improve the challenge. With that being said, I think that these features can be modded into the game, so we do not necessarily need to wait for Larian to do it.

Very good ideas.