Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Should the game enforce 6-8 encounters/long rest

"Assuming typical adventuring conditions and average luck, most adventuring parties can handle about six to eight medium or hard encounters in a day. If the adventure has more easy encounters, the adventurers can get through more. If it has more deadly encounters, they can handle fewer."

Terms like easy and hard encounters refer to the exp budget in DM book. They also suggest 2 short rests a day, less nerfs short rest based classes like warlock, more can make them OP.

Should they enforce this or let the players decide themselves(like baldurs gate)?

Off course should lower game difficulties get more rests(or maybe no restrictions at all)

That's harder to enforce in a computer game.

I, personally, hope there's no 'exhausted' status like Kingmaker had. It was annoying when it popped up while I was somewhere I could not rest.

I really hope there will have exhausted statuts.
What's the point about "rest" if there's not ?

The point of resting in a D&D game is to restore your spells and your HPs, if you don't have any health potions left. Why would they need to enforce resting? It should be up to the player. It will even create a new challenge: how many encounters did you beat before resting?

Six to eight encounters is equivalent to a slew of 'trash mobs' in my opinion, and I've been in no 5e campaign in the last six years that even came close to that pace. Regardless, I can't see Larian doing that anyway.

definitly should have several encounters per adventure day, but having 4 hard ones is equivalent of having 8 trash ones. probably even more so since wizards probably wont waste any spellslots on most encounters that are trivial.

but yeah, there should be some consequence to resting.
I know people shit on kingmaker for having timed quests, but holy shit hte 15 minute adventure day is a blight upon DnD

That is why D&D 5e has short rests, and one reason why BG3 removing them is a dire warning sign to me.

Why?

In the BG series up to this point, players decided when to rest and it was always for HP and Spell regain. I am not sure I like the idea of enforcing rest on players after a certain number of encounters. Surely the loss of HP and wanting to relearn your spells is enough incentive, no?

This for me is one of those instances where I would argue PC Game over TableTop.

Or have I misunderstood here?

>short rests solve 15 minute advneutre day
>BG3 removing them

what the fuck are you on about? There doestn appear to be any indication that short rests are gone for one thing.
Also you realy think short rests solve anything? they just add another layer on top and makes some classes behave different to others, if anyhting it screws over the balance even further.

As to what the 6-8 enconters means: 6-8 encounters are the standard design of dnd 5e, the idea is that this is the standard ammount of encounters the PCs should have before deciding to rest.
a big problem is that nobody does this and most parties will try to rest as ofthen as humanly possible.

Don't understand why an arbitrary limitation should be added. In D&D the players get to decide if they want to push the envelop in regards to party resources. Maybe time is of the essence and they would rather press on than rest? Or maybe they got themselves into an area too dangerous to rest? Taking away player agency is never a good thing.

Also "Encounter" is a relative term. It could mean fighting enemies, but an encounter can also be a social encounter, a puzzle, some sort of survival/hunting skill check. The list goes on.

I have the same feelings.

I like "exhausted" status but due to time without sleeping, not due to a random numbers of battles.

There again, I really really fear what I saw in the gameplay video... Swen clicked on the "rest" button and the party was teleport to a part of the map called "camp i don't remember what" (like camp zone or something like that).

It sucks if you can't camp where you want and if your team is just TP... (or if you have to be in a specific zone... a party in the forest should sleep where it wants...won't we play lands where no one ever camps ???).

Of course it won't be possible to sleep where you want because yea, camping is a "super cool time" where you can bite your companions if you play a vampire...
And what about encounters during campings... Nearly sure you'll never be interrupted, which again is really not "role play".

Oh, oh, oh... another pointless discussion with roots in "I have no idea how Larian game mechanics and player agency work, but I really need to see everything through my limited vision glasses".

Seriously NO.

Player agency: YES.
Artificial limitationq: I'm not going to play a 80s style game where the worst thing you have to fight is arbitrary rules or even the terrible usability. This is not "California Games" either.

Just don't, ok? JUST DON'T!

Well, after the gameplay reveal people asked Swen about regaining spells and he said long rests. Now either the warlock is reworked and there are no short rests - why would there be if one of the main classes that benefits massively from it no longer benefits from it - OR he simply forgot about the warlock. There was also a health regaining mechanic you could use out of combat, which leads me to believe they simply removed short rests and instead added class specific things you could do in between combats (like arcane recovery or getting action surge back) - maybe limited to a certain number of uses per long rest. I kind of like that idea.

I personally think classes behaving differently is a good thing - more game replayability. Spellcasters in general (excluding warlocks) regain their power on a long rest while martial classes don't run out of steam and are good even at the end of the adventuring day, when the spellcasters are tapped out. It's one of the only reason why you'd want to play a martial class (the fighter being the most glaring example) over a spellcasting one, since obviously the spellcasters can do far more powerful things with their highest level spell slots than a martial class can in a singular turn.

Will the fighter be forced to rest when his wizard/cleric become tapped out? Yes. Is that a good thing? Depends on the situation. If anything, it's the job of a DM to decide how to make things balanced and fun for everyone involved, which means we either trust Larian to be a good DM for us or we are angry in advance.



This is one of the few things I agree with Maxi on - resting is used both for HP/spells regen and not suffering exhaustion after a long day of adventuring. I also really don't see a problem with people simply putting their sleeping bags/tents on the floor and resting - no need for this teleportation. If you choose to rest in an area where wild animals roam you better have some sort of watch set up or suffer a lot of damage in the first round of a random encounter when you're attacked.

Resting in the wild where there are either predators or even monsters is dangerous, there's a reason there are parties in D&D and not single heroes that do everything themselves.

All of that being said, the best way to enforce a certain amount of encounters per day is simply putting a timer on people and not letting them know how much stuff they need to get through - if the tadpole destroys you within a week you basically know you only have 1 week to get to a healer. Of course that doesn't mean anything if there's no day/night cycle. If the tadpole may be removed early in the game (like I suspect) then I'm not sure what's the next thing to "force" you to keep on going at a fast pace.

Of course on the other hand I know some people are super completionists and would rather not miss a single thing in their first (and maybe even only playthrough) so putting such a timer on them would be kind of a dick move. It's one of those things where I'm not sure how to adapt D&D into a videogame format to make sense for everyone involved.

My final conclusion from all of this is that there should certainly be areas in the world where resting is more dangerous and it should be quite intuitive about what those areas are (such as a cave filled with monsters). I for one choose to believe Larian will implement these things well, to make the game interesting regardless of whether you're playing a caster or a martial but in the end of the day, only time will tell.

I like Pathfinder for this. You can set up camp anywhere, and it is just some bedrolls and a little fire that your party actually uses.

I can't get behind an 'exhaustion' status effect.

It's an arbitrary brake-pumping for no reason except 'immersion'. It would stop the game to make players leave the cave they're in to rest or suffer penalties in combat.

If Larian wanted to add it as an option; cool. Make both sides happy. I could be cool with that. Maybe even make it permanently on in a Hardcore difficulty.
But I'd never turn it on, if it were toggleable, myself.

to be deleted.

I am pretty sure there wont be any random encounters, resting or not.

What about Role Play ?
Because this is what it's supposed to be...

There's a line drawn for player convenience over realism, even in an RPG.

But I'm aware that many people do enjoy that effect. Me? It mostly drove me nuts in Kingmaker.
"I want to walk to that town' *EXHAUSTED*
'Ok, I have one more fight in this cave' *No! Go camp! NOW!*
'Man, I'm doing good in this fight" *Now you're exhausted IN the fight!*

Again; I'm not against it being an option for players to pick and choose, but I know I would not enjoy it. I like resting to replenish my HP and spells. Or because I want to give my party a bonus of some kind. NOT because the game forces me to rest based on its internal clock.

Player convenience? You mean like battles not taking 3 days to kill 5 rats?