As a DM of 15 campaigns who runs 3 games a week for yearsssssss I don't agree that rest systems are easy or formulaic at all. It depends on the area, how well people find a spot, preparations they take, who the watchers are, what they are looking for, odds in that area to have a fight and what CR beasts youll be fighting in what combination. There is a lot of DM discretion for when a short rest is pushing it and the odds of having done 2 so close together is going to have a pretty high chance of encounter. If someone wants to gather food, poisons, go hunting, find water, they are at risk of a solo encounter.
Resting is a serious mechanic in a lot of settings and you either have to try to put all of that in for a "D&D" experience or you have what Larian typically does which is a bunch of encounters are that are deadly-lethal difficult where you take more damage than you probably should and they drain you to the point you couldnt handle another one. Dialing up the difficulty to rest isnt solving any problems - its just making it arbitrarily more difficult. The problem would be the need to rest that much in the first place.
Since you can wander around, there is no guarantee youll hit hard, easy, easy, easy hard / rest patterns. You might go from deadly to lethal to deadly if youre just kind of zagging around the map. They dont really have "travel" like pathfinder kingmaker so much, so those types of bespoke encounters cant be dropped on you at will.
The core concept of "Someone has determined they need to rest to be able to progress in the game, I dont think you should let them do that" doesn't seem to do anything other than say that their concept of fun is wrong. There are going to be a lot of party comps, skill levels, and pc levels based on how people play the game and questioning their judgment on if they can play the game anymore is bizarre. If rest patterns are going to be formalized, the combat and encounters need to be formalized so you have just about one way of progressing through the game with little enough variance that the guard rails of rest limits would make sense in enhancing gameplay as opposed to detracting from it.
Last edited by Orbax; 10/10/20 06:31 PM.
