Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback BG3 and the 5 minute adventuring day issue

If we had 6 man parties we would use less resources per character per encounter.

Problem solved.

No, then you have to adjust the fights and add more opponents.

We still haven't managed to come up with a sensible compromise between nice mechanics and a sensible class balance.
The only thing that comes to my mind is to provide 3 short rests before the long, but it will not significantly affect the situation we have now

They could, of course, add a timer. The shield around the tadpole only lasts so long until it dissipates and you die horribly, story over. Having a time limit would be just as effective at forcing people to limit their gameplay as a fatigue system. However, I suspect timers are disliked by mainstream audiences even more than fatigue.

I would say they are disliked by most people (see pathfinder which is definitely not a mainstream game)

Oh I know. I enjoyed them in Pathfinder actually, although I felt they could have been stricter with them. To each his own though, I agree I didn't need to specify there.

Even this option would help slightly, as it would encourage continued adventuring after a short rest or two.

I am pretty sure the characters mentioning they are tired is linked to spell slots available.

I didn't read six pages of this thread, so somebody else might have already said everything I'm gonna say. If so, I'm sorry.

A big part of the problem with the resting mechanics as they currently stand, for me, is that narrative is tied to resting. There are tons of scenes and dialogues that happen if you rest all the time, and you can completely miss out on them if you rest sparingly. This is . . . frankly unforgivable to me. (I mean, not literally, I won't boycott the game over it, but I will be unhappy with it forever.)

My only other point is that they should probably largely tie resting availability to the difficulty level chosen. They can have Games Journalist Mode, where you can rest every 2 seconds, and every time you rest the clouds break and rain diamonds down on your camp, and a portal to the Plane of Naughty Nymphs opens up next to your campfire. And on the other hand, they can have Big Britches Mode, where you need to spend limited resources to rest, and you have to physically walk back to a waypoint, and monsters can attack you in your camp, and enemies get stronger if you waste too much time, and a portal to the Plane of Sentient Septic Tanks opens up next to your campfire. And some ones in between. Wouldn't that be a good way to please (mostly) everyone?

I don't envy Larian on this one. The resting mechanics, and the things tied to short and long rests, are difficult to balance on the tabletop. Individual groups play D&D differently, and you'll see many DM's that prefer an "adventuring day" have only 1 or 2 combat encounters rather than a slew of more moderately challenging ones. When I DM, it depends more on story than anything else for that kind of thing. The way rests work is going to be different for a party attacking an enemy stronghold versus one exploring a trap-filled, monster haunted dungeon versus one investigating the criminal activities of an evil nobleman. In a single campaign you might have a party do all of these things. Balancing encounters, then, is done across many weeks, months or even years of play-time. The Fighter will likely excel in an adventure where the party can take advantage of many short rests, but isn't able to take frequent long rests. The Wizard would excel in an adventure that takes place over a short period of time - like say one night. The player knows they aren't looking at a battle of attrition, but rather one where they can act freely with their spell slots. And so on.

Larian is tasked with balancing rests in a video game where they are trying to give lots of freedom to the player. That's extremely tough. As it is now, you really have no penalty for taking a long rest after each combat encounter, and so much story unfolds at the camp that you are encouraged to do so both from a perspective of plot and gameplay mechanics. I think the easiest way to deal with it, is to force the player to take the party to a runed waypoint and travel to the camp - only in the camp would you be able to start a long rest. This would make fast-travel more difficult, though they've put enough waypoints around that I don't really see it as much of an inconvenience, and encourages exploration, if anything. Combining that with more short rests per day and having some explicitly timed quests would probably encourage a play-style closer to the tabletop and honestly more immersive. The story unfolding at the camps might have to be toned down and pushed out into the world a bit.

Others have mentioned it, but I think there is a fair chance that Larian hasn't actually puzzled this out or implemented it yet.

It's been explained a number of times, directly to you. I'll try once more.

• UNLIMITED LONG RESTS ALLOW FOR AN EFFECTIVELY UNLIMITED USAGE OF SPELLS.
• UNLIMITED SPELL USAGE MAKES THE IDEA OF LIMITED SPELL SLOTS A USELESS MECHANIC.
• THIS MAKES "NORMAL" FAR TOO EASY.

It makes just everything far too easy. I am soloing the game with a wizard at the moment and there is not a single encounter that gives me the beginning of a challenge.

Any idea how to fix it without blocking the player's progress or making the mechanics mostly irritating (and really not limiting)? The system would also have to be understandable to the player.
Practically, the only idea that could effectively limit the rest are time limits, but if larian introduced it, players would pull out forks and torches (this will not pass in such a large game).
We are discussing ideas and still have not been able to find a reasonable compromise.

Just joining into the conversation after I posted my own big feedback thread.

There are several huge issues with the resting system as it is currently:

- Short rests are obsolete since you can long rest almost anywhere, at any time
- You have full HP and full Spell slots at any point in the game, making characters with spells slots much stronger than they should be, but making Warlocks weaker since having full spell slots after every encounter isn't anything special.
- The camp has many important story interactions (dream scenes for example) which only happen at camp. Currently the player does not know when any of these important events happen, so players are encounraged to camp "just to find out if anything happens".
- Because the player is always at full HP and full spell slots, you start piling up tons of scrolls, special arrows, healing potions, throwables.
- Food in particular, along with Short rests should be used to recover HP inbetween fights. There is such an overabundance of food and healing potions that you can just eat a pig head several turns in a row and heal 50% of your HP as Gale, making potions obsolete as long as you have food during combat. You should only be able to drink potions during combat, not eat food.

But the biggest reason:
The game is way to easy. Once you get accustomed to the environment, make sure to use sneak and high ground for advantage aswell as preparing yourself via the turn-based mode with cantrips like blade ward, most encounters are not very challenging. But they should be considering you always have full HP and full spell slots.

So I suggest to massively cut down on the amount of long rests you can do, increase the amount of short rests inbetween long rests you can do. You end up with so much food and potions that you will always be at max HP after every encounter by using short rest + food. Just not always full spell slots, which is how it should be.

Also the fact that there are so many magic items which give you spells is both a blessing and a curse:

Spells like Scorching Ray from the Circlet of Blasting use your intelligence modifier for chance to hit, even if you are not a Wizard. So this means, as a Warlock, who would benefit greatly from a free Scorching ray every rest, you have low chance to hit because this spell does not use your charisma modifier.
Spells from items should use your primary stat for spellcasting as a Warlock or other casters. These magic items favour Wizards over other casters. And lets be honest, Wizards are way too strong currently given they have full spell slots after every encounter, they get a super powerful magic missile artifact and they can learn and cast ANY spell from scrolls and cast them using intelligence. If Wizards can cast any spell using intelligence, then other classes must be able to cast spells from items with their own spellcasting stat.

To me this is a huge weakness of D&D. Maybe the biggest weakness of D&D. And it always has been. There was only one edition where they fixed this, balanced the classes, and made it possible for every party member to remain useful for many encounters without resting. And everyone hated that edition, so they rolled back all of the (in my opinion, positive) changes that had been made. C'est la vie.

I hate timed quests though, so I hope they don't choose that as their solution. I'd rather they just make resting a pain in the ass somehow, so people don't want to do it as often.

I fully agree with all of this.

Normal is the default difficulty by definition. Most people are going to play on the default difficulty. Poor balance on the default difficulty is bad. Are you really completely incapable of understanding that poor balance is a bad thing?




I do have an idea which would try to achieve both the goals of preventing long rest spam and avoid blocking the player's progress. It's not perfect, but it's at least something brought to the table.

• A Fatigue meter is in the game, which increases based on distance traveled out of combat, and healing received from all sources except short (and long) rests.
• Distance traveled is defined as the number of steps or meters moved by any party member, divided by 4. This accounts for times when the whole party travels together, or if someone goes off on their own scouting or sneaking and moves around a lot while everyone else stands still.
• Movement via Fast Travel would probably not generate as much Fatigue as walking there directly, because that could lead to it accumulating faster than intended if the player is just doing questing or shopping. Perhaps only 1/3 to 1/2 of the fatigue you'd get by forgoing Fast Travel and walking there directly.
• The distance is reset to 0 after a long rest.
• Healing received is fairly self-explanatory, it accounts for recovery from spells, potions, and food (if healing by food is kept). Only actual recovery of HP counts - any healing which overflows your maximum does not count towards Fatigue.
• You can now have up to 3 Short Rests before a Long Rest.
• Healing from Short Rests does not increase Fatigue - or, at least, not by a lot - because the intent is to promote better balance between short and long rests. Also, if Short Rests increased Fatigue, you could have the situation of taking a Short rest to recover, but that pushes you to a point close to exhaustion and you'd need to take a long rest immediately after the short one, and that seems silly.
• Once your Fatigue has passed a certain point, say, 67% of full of the first Exhaustion point on Normal difficulty, you can then take a Long Rest.
• If you wish to Long Rest, but do not want to fight, you can continue to move around until crossing the 67% Fatigue threshold.
• The threshold could possibly be lower or higher based in difficulty level.
• If the fatigue reaches 100%, the entire party receives a point of Exhaustion.
• If the threshold is crossed in combat, the Exhaustion penalty will not apply until combat is finished.
• You can continue to play, your Fatigue Meter will continue to increase and eventually you'll reach additional points of Exhaustion.
• The 67% threshold is only for when you have 0 points of Exhaustion. If you have one or more Exhaustion points, you can Long Rest freely.
• Once you reach 5 points of Exhaustion, you are forced into a long rest before proceeding. If you are still in combat or conversation, those will be allowed to conclude before you are forced to camp.
• Taking a long rest will remove all points of Exhaustion and reset Fatigue to zero. (This is more forgiving than the tabletop rule for smoother gameplay.)

The idea is that you can't get blocked without being able to long rest - like you can be in Solasta from running out of rations. If nothing else, you'll always be able to walk around to reach the 67% threshold. This will however, force you into more shrewd management of resources, since you will be barred from long rests until you've passed 67% fatigue. If a player wants to exploit this by walking around after every combat and then taking a long rest, they're only sabotaging their own fun with tedium.

Resting worked great in BG1 & 2. No need to reinvent the wheel. Just use the constraints and limitations the series has already been using.

I proposed this a few pages ago, but it still doesn't solve the underlying balance issues.