I think not allowing players to save and reload whenever they want would be a huge mistake. People should be able to play their game however they want. For co-op, yeah I can see some rules being agreed upon by the group, but in single-player there is no justification for not allowing the player to play as they see fit.
Some people argue that in a SP game players should be a ble to play as they choose, it is true, but I totally dismiss that arguement as patently flawed. The reason for that is that players find it incredibly hard not to cave in to the temptation to cheese a game (in whatever way) and in doing so effectively ruin their experience of it. Making it too easy for themselves, hating themselves for that, making it boring, taking all the drama and tension out of it, any number of other negative consequences. A game can be ruined because of this.
But the temptation is often too much. It's why we don't let supermarkets stack sweets by the checkouts.
The biggest challenge with D20 skill rolls by far is balance and transparency. How many should I be passing? In PF: Kingmaker you had many, many DC rolls in kingdom management. You found people save scumming these all the time because they got panicked about failing them. In reality the game was balanced such that so long as you passed better than 50% of them you were fine. But folks didn't know that. So they save scummed these DC rolls and then found the kingdom management to be a boring chore (because it became too easy and had no drama to it, no gameplay to speak of) and complained about it.
That's the kind of syndrome I am concerned about for BG3. Some kind of reasonably hefty anti-save scum measure would be very welcome, pretty much necessary I would think (basically something to replace that horrid DM)
The other concern is folk's insatiable curiosity about "what if..." leading to save scumming.
This is one thing PK: Kingmaker dealt with fabulously well. You simply could not save scum the story events because a lot of outcomes were determined by numerous micro-decisions you made when you didn't even know you were making them over the previous two to three hours. You had to live with the consequences of your own decisions/actions or faced two, three, four hours of replayed material without any idea of what the alternative outcomes would even be. You couldn't really find out "what if....." (unless you Googled it of course.)
This is I would say the best way to do it I have ever come across. But...........there were no dice rolls involved, just pure player choice and consequence. If things didn't work out the way they wanted players had to accept that it was their own decisions that directly led to that, nobody to blame but themselves. What concerns me about the DC rolls for main story events in BG3 is that players will not easily accept, or in fact refuse to accept at all, their fate being determined by RNG in that way. I think a lot of folk will see the dialog DC rolls as little more than a time wasting annoyance while they re-roll the numbers they need.
So I would say some pretty strong anti-save scumming systems would vastly improve the game, as I say, simply to reproduce the role of the DM, nothing more than that.
