Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Why 5e rules matter aka why the warlock is a broken shell

Long rest doesn't affect the world at all

Agree with OP... i kinda thought Warlocks seem that way in 5ed overall to be honest...

Which is why they were my go to for our 5ed trial run... they seem to have less at their core(in casting particularly as some have said) but also less on the subclass front... pact of the tome seems the only that isnt totally underpowered...

And while taking the tome you can get a familiar(albeit regular) and with the book of shadows pact boon you can pick up shilelagh... both decent tradeoffs to the other two pacts... blade has more potential than chain... whole class has an afterthought feel...

While they only gave us the worst(imo) pact... i think the class is just poorly designed outta the book despite the idea of them being totally cool... missed potential... you are a simple blast cannon... with admittedly, really good sound affects... ;D

Class balance in D&D works the way it does because there is an inherent price to pay when you rest. Time is passing (the world moves on without you and opportunities are lost), you risk being discovered by people or monsters that might try to kill you, and in some cases, resting actually progresses degenerative diseases. You can't get a full night's sleep more than once a night and if you go too long without a full night's sleep, there are consequences.

Choosing to rest should be a calculated decision - not something you can do with no consequence any time you lose a couple HP or spend a spell slot. None of this exists in BG3 and it throws everything else in the game out of whack because all of the systems in D&D are connected.

In BG3, the world feels totally static to me; nothing happens unless you are there seeing it happen. You can walk away from a standoff, sleep four or five times, and come back and nobody has moved an inch. It feels really wrong and it makes time meaningless, which contributes to long rests being available at any time with no drawbacks. In fact, you (the player) are encouraged to take long rests all the time, because that's when the majority of significant RP moments happen.

There are certainly games that make it feel like time is passing, even if the world is fairly static. For example, I'm playing Torment: Tides of Numenera right now and one of the things you get roped into is a murder investigation. Spoilers:
This is a great way to create a sense of urgency and make time matter. BG3 has nothing like this and it really suffers for that.

The question of whether letting players police themselves is a solution to the short-vs-long rest issue, and its consequences the imbalance-between-class and the overall-difficulty issues, is a classical question of game design : should designers let the players balance the game themselves ? My answer would depend on the specific context, but in general (and in the specific case of BG3), it's a clear no.

I would be tempted to say that the short-vs-long rest mechanism is clearly and plainly badly designed, but the truth is more probably that it is simply not designed. Yet. And hopefully that will change.


First, let me get 2 somewhat obvious things out of the way.

1) How often you long rest affects the over difficulty. Because more long rests mean more resources to use in fights. This is important because DnD/BG3 is of players-vs-game type (as opposed to players-vs-players). So the challenge level is determined by the rules, not who you play against. And challenge is linked to satisfaction when winning. Most games of that type let the players to choose a difficulty level, but each difficulty level is a well-defined set of rules.

2) How often you use short rest and long rest affects the balance between classes. Because some classes are designed to recover resources at short rest and some at long rest. This is important because DnD/BG3 is a cooperative game. Players on the table rarely want to feel as if the class they picked is just there as a secondary role or foil, while someone is playing the story's lead character or superhero. That is also why most advice for Game Masters include giving every player/character a chance to shine. (All this balance is to be taken at first-order optimal play, when everyone makes somewhat reasonable choices, and that's it. There are too many variables, so min-maxing power-gamers will optimise the shit out of the rules and find crazy combos, and some classes will be better for soloing the game. But that's not the bulk of the game.)


How does DnD handle short-vs-long rest ? Well, the referee Game Master says when the group can and cannot take a long rest, and under what conditions. That ruling is usually given sense in-game. For example, since time passes when you rest (in a the wild, or a dungeon), you have risks of being attacked. Alternatively, since you need space to set up your tent, you can't long rest in a narrow corridor or a slippery and uneven cave floor. But deep down in the mechanisms, the GM is the rules of the game, ensuring that a good experience is had.

How does BG3 handles short-vs-long rest ? Well, it doesn't. I mean, it caps the number of short rests you can take before a long rest (now it's 2 instead of 1, yeah, awesome !), but without any limit to long rests, this is meaningless. It's as if there's no GM, of the GM says "up to you, have a long rest whenever you want".


Let me replace the question of "short-vs-long rest in BG3" by a more clearly numeric one. How many HP's should characters have in GenericTitleRPG ? Let's say that, currently, you feel that your favourite class, the Fighter, should have 100 HP, but the devs were lazy and programmed it to be 255 HP or 999 HP. Whenever your character takes 100 damage, you consider yourself dead and you reload. Maybe I want more challenge and I reload when I lose 90 HP. Maybe someone wants a much easier game and considers 150 HP to be a full life. This is players policing themselves. This has two issues.

A) It's cumbersome. I mean, no, it's just super-bad design. We should be able to enter our max-HP in the game and the reloads take place whenever we reach the threshold. That's exactly what difficulty settings do.

B) It's letting players trying to find where the game is sweet. Indeed, most often, there are some values for the parameters (and other rule-things) that make the game experience nicer. There isn't necessarily a unique set of parameters, and a unique sweet experience (also, players have different tastes). But it's the designers' job to isolate one intended experience and set up the parameters accordingly. Or give us the list of sets of parameters, each associated with a nice experience. Each of these sets of parameters could typically be a difficulty setting.

Now, imagine the devs dropping players in a sand desert and saying "there's an oasis somewhere in there, the water is perfectly fresh, the palm trees perfectly green, really, an amazing experience" but not telling the players where that oasis is. Or imagine a curry playce that doesn't merely let you choose how much chili chutney you want on the side of your curry, it lets you access all the ingredients in the kitchen, make your own curry and cook it as long as you want, while telling you they cook the best currys in town and charging you the same price as any other curry place. To me, that's what letting players make the rules themselves feel.

Note : obviously, my example focused on difficulty, but you can easily adapt it for class balance. If a Fighter starts with 10 HP (without modifiers), how much should a Mage have : 4, 6, 8, 10, 12, 20 ? Just pick as you see fit !

Hmm, perhaps one HUGE reason why BG3 has nothing like such and such and allegedly suffers for it is because it is an unfinished early access game that is a year+ out from being a 'finished product.'
Whereas, the game you are currently playing is a 'finished product,' yes?
Therefore, for all practical purposes here, you are making a number of assumptions and judgments based upon an apples and oranges argument, so to speak.

They're asking for feedback on what they hand us, not on all of the possible variations of what this game could potentially exist in different parts of the multiverse. All I can do is tell them what's good and what's bad about what they have released. So, yes, I'm pointing out a way in which this game consistently falls on its face. It's up to them what they do with that information.

I make no assumptions about what they are going to do in the future. You seem to be suggestion that I should assume that they are going know exactly what I want and are going to implement it in a way that I'm going to find satisfying, and so I'm being silly for giving them the feedback that they have asked for.

Your assumption would be incorrect. I've played/DMed 5e since it's inception back when it was originally called D&D Next.

I simply don't require a game to police my actions.

You don't have to rest after each encounter, you choose to.
In BG3 you can take short rests after every couple of encounters and long rests after every 6th encounter and class balance is maintained.

You choose to break the D&D mechanics when you choose to rest after each combat -- that's on you, not the game.

In a tabletop game, there is a DM to tell you what is reasonable and what isn't. If you sleep 8 hours, get up and immediately have a 30-second fight and then say you're going right back to bed for another 8 hours, any half-decent DM would stop you from doing that. Why? 1) the rules say you can only take one long rest per 24 hours and 2) it's not a reasonable thing to do in the game world.

In BG3, there is no DM to say "this makes sense in the world" and "this doesn't make any sense" - the game engine needs to do it with rules. This is how you create a world that feels convincing and satisfying. From a mechanical standpoint, putting restrictions on resources is also how you make challenges satisfying to overcome.

Someone who is not familiar with D&D doesn't know that a long rest is 8 hours. All they know is that they hit the button and their HP goes back up and their spell slots are reset. And they can do this whenever they want. This isn't a good way to teach players about the world that their characters are living in. They don't have a reason to not take long rests after every encounter.

This is not a self-control issue. The short rest classes are built around taking short rests more often than long rests. The current rest system means that every third rest needs to be a long rest. That isn't how the classes and rest interplay is designed to function.

I think a good compromise would be when you enter a dungeon, cavern, non-friendly keep or tower etc you can’t long rest until you leave again. That would up the stakes dramatically and make those regions more about resource management. Short rests would become much more precious.

Perhaps you need to stay out in the open for a while until you’re strong and confident enough to take on that dungeon. Would definitely make the game more tactical, and remove the ridiculousness of teleporting in and out of the underdark at will before you even get a teleport spell.

OP : pretty much a fact. True.

Originally, I thought we would have many Short Rests and therefore Warlock would be great, but not so much for the moment if the player does Long Rest often.

I do not have a clue if Larian will find a solution or bother to find one.

When my friends/kids play D&D that is exactly how we play.

Short rests are lunch and dinner.
Long rest is sleep.
You get twice as many short rests as long rests.

Too many short rests tend to tip the scales too far for Warlocks, Monks, Fighters and Moon Druids.

100% yes.

For all we know, Larian had "figure out rest mechanism" on their to-do list since before the release of the EA version. So our feedback on this issue might be completely useless : possibly, they knew about how problematic it is not to have a proper rest system before players even experienced it.

Larian didn't communicate and give us a game with EA/playtesting labels, like "this mechanism isn't implemented yet". They have put everything on the same footing. So players should comment on everything and criticise equally all things that don't work.

I could censor myself, thinking "this particular issue is so blatant to me, surely Larian will work on it, there is no need to report it". But that would run the risk of them not having seen that issue at all. And as far as mechanisms are concerned, so far, I have not been given reasons to have a blind faith in the fact that Larian will get things right.

Thus, players should keep doing what we've been doing : give feedback on everything, without assuming that Larian has in mind.

I tend to naturally not take too very many long rests because I’d rather be exploring than hanging out at the camp. On my first playthrough that had the consequence of being level 3 before I ever saw the cutscene with Astarion, making his scene at the gypsy hunter’s camp *very* confusing to say the least. So I don’t think it’s too crazy to expect players to do a long rest with a couple of short rests before the next long rest (I like the breakfast/lunch/dinner analogy someone else made), and if you do that, Warlock and Fighter don’t suffer very much on resources, in my opinion. For me, the reasons I have no desire to bring a warlock are:
1. Wyll just comes to you poorly built, IMO so Gale seems a stronger pick. So no NPC warlock.
2. MC Warlock, I’d *love* to have *if* I could run Hexblade. But Hexblade isn’t an option right now, so no PC warlock.
3. Because I am a munchkin at heart, I really wanna run Paladin/Hexblade, but neither of those are options right now, let alone the multiclass. 😂

So I’m perfectly ok with the resting system, and while I haven’t yet had a reason to do multiple long rests in a row, it’s kinda nice knowing if one gets stuck and wants to pull out all the stops, long rest your way to victory. Solasta does a reasonable thing here where the game actually does track time and only let’s you long rest once in a 24-hour period. It’s really no different that BG3 in terms of impact, because if you insist on wanting to long rest, it’ll “pass time” to round out the 24-hours and then let you long rest, which changes the feeling of the impact of resting without actually changing the results (because while it tracks time, there are no consequences to time passing). The lenient long rest rules are also useful given the absence of difficulty settings in the event someone gets stuck, they can sort of artificially lower difficulty by long resting every fight or whatever. But I really don’t feel like the game has to force the issue one way or another. If they (or modders) were able to add customization on resting rules, that’d be ideal, but the current system works well enough as far as I am concerned.

TL;DR - for me, the problem with Warlock’s are down to available build options being basically the least interesting subclass and class features, not really bothered at all by the short-vs-long rest resource differences (how you choose to balance short vs long rests will favor different classes, D&D 5e isn’t perfectly balanced on tabletop even, nor does it need to be).

@Skyria - Solasta has you carry rations - you can only long rest if you have rations...and only at a camping site (which are infrequent). it is very different from the way BG3 does things and definitely adds tension. I would find myself asking - will I make to he next camp site? I also played a warlock in BG3 and found it fine - but because I would rest more than expected (to get my 2 or whatever spell slots back). The issue is about more than warlocks - any class that gains benfit from short rests and is *balanced* around this will be affected.