Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Full Recovery Zones/Items

I would also prefer a PoE2 system.
The system was fine and i think this is perhaps the best compromise for making a meaningful rest system.
Of course, system works mainly because most of the skills were limited to per fight.

The point of this post was to try to provide an alternative to using Long Rest just before a boss fight, which in reality makes no sense to do. I pick on the hag fight because it was the most traumatic for me. It makes no logical sense to confront the hag in her home, she kidnaps Mayrina and escapes into her lair, I take my party down there to face her, but I decide just before fighting her that I need to rest for practically 24 hours in order to be fully healed up and have my spell slots. I honestly think that in situations like this in the game a player should not be allowed to Long Rest. If they do, they should fail the event. If you Long Rest at any point from the time the hag escapes into her lair until you beat her, Mayrina and the hag should be gone. The hag escapes with Mayrina and you lose them. Maybe Larian could implement something where if the hag escapes with Mayrina you meet up with them in Baldur's Gate or something and can make an attempt to save her there. I don't know.

But my original idea was to provide players who need help defeating the hag and other tough bosses an alternative to Long Rest, which makes no sense at all to use in such situations. However, I do get what others are saying in this regards. If you provide Full Recovery zones or items of any kind, then you completely ruin the overall gameplay.

One thing I think people don't understand about D&D is that the game is partially about strategy and about carefully managing your resources. A lot of people keep using arguments that this is a video game and not meant to be necessarily realistic. But that is the exact opposite of the point of a true Roleplaying game; D&D being the original roleplaying game. The point of a Roleplaying game is to create a fantasy world with some unrealistic elements but you have these rules in place to create a sense of realism. It is to balance fantasy with reality to allow players to escape from our real world and live temporarily in this fantasy world. Without obeying the rules, there is no sense of reality and the game loses all sense of immersion. Roleplaying games are supposed to immerse the players into the world, and a video game Roleplaying game is supposed to immerse you even more because you can actually see the world unfold before you.

Most video games fail to immerse players because they get away from the roleplaying aspect and focus more on the video game aspect of it. The more they do this, the more they lose the immersion factor. That is why so many have such issues with Larian's failure to stick with the D&D rules. The more they move away from the rules, the more they lose the immersion factor.

You aren't supposed to just go around and use every spell in every battle. You are supposed to carefully manage your spells and items so that when you do have a big boss fight you aren't left totally helpless. You aren't supposed to be able to Long Rest wherever and whenever whether it makes sense to be able to do so or not.

This all being said, a good DM is one who knows their player characters' abilities and what they can handle and what they can't. They don't throw impossible fights against their players or the game is no fun. So maybe the solution is that the DM, Larian, needs to not have these incredibly impossible boss fights expecting that their players are going to Long Rest before the fights. They should restrict Long Rests prior to the boss fight, if it makes sense to, like the hag situation, and not have the boss fight so incredibly tough that the players will need to save scum to beat it or may not be able to beat it at all. Even if the boss is incredibly hard to beat based on your characters' levels, the DM needs to provide other ways to defeat the boss that make sense.

Whatever the solution, the point is that Larian needs to provide some sort of solution besides Long Rest for players to be able to realistically defeat bosses like the hag. Right now, I can't even sneak into her lair without her still getting a surprise round and practically blowing all my characters to the Hells before I even get to act. It's very frustrating.

On the other hand, I don't want fights like the hag fight to be so easy that it is lame. The last thing I want is some sort of method where you can easily kill the hag once you discover this one solution. For example, I don't want something like the ability to shoot some item and destroy it and suddenly she has no magic abilities to defend herself, which is a thing many video games do. I don't want a, "Just shoot the amulet" solution. There has to be some sort of in between.

Theoretically, you can limit the rest to a large extent to force the player to fight several battles in a row. There is only one huge problem that cannot be solved.
The game has no DM, which can constantly change difficulty level and adapt to the state of party.
Composition of the team has a huge impact on the difficulty of fights, but you must also remember that players have different levels of skills and tactics.
You cannot forget that the game is heavily rng-based, so the same fight can end up with full hp or you can come out barely alive.
How do you want to balance with so many possible variables?

Larian is the DM. It's their responsibility to balance it. They can limit it in various ways. Have mechanics that evaluate character level and dumb down hag stats based on character level, for example. Or allow players to recruit masked adventurers to aid them in the fight, but only if game assesses the players has used 50% of spell slots or are not fully level synced or hp is low. So restrict Long Rest, but offer other solutions.

So instead of killing off the masked adventurers, if you reduce to 0 HP or whatever, they are just defeated, not killed. You can remove their masks and gain their help in the upcoming fight.

Stuff like this can be fairly easily done.

You write as if it were to be simple and I guarantee that it is not.
The number of possibilities that such a system would have to take into account is large. Remember that there will be dozens of fights in the game.
I'm not saying that it is completely impossible, but you should consider whether the potential profit justifies the high costs that would certainly be required.
The current system, despite its disadvantages, is quite an effective solution of the problem.
What mainly requires modification is the management of events in the camp that should be completely redone.

The point is that something needs to be done to make this better. When I first played through the game, I didn't think I could long rest much. Other players will and do think the same way. So they push themselves to get through the hag's lair and other areas because they think that there will be negative consequences if they don't. This is logical because according to the story it wouldn't make sense to End Day when trying to chase a hag who has just kidnapped someone. Likewise, it doesn't make sense to Long Rest after you kill Priestess Gut and then return to the goblin camp seeing that it has had no impact on anyone in the camp. They don't care that Gut is dead. You can still roam about as if no one cares that she's been missing practically 24 hours.

So there needs to be some sort of way to help players other than to allow them to long rest.

So yes, I make it sound easier than it probably is, but it is a big hang up for some players. If it wasn't people wouldn't comment so much about it.

I care, but maybe not as much as you think. I'm not one of those people who will stop playing the game if they don't implement this. However, I will say that if they want this game to be truly epic and great, they need to implement some of these things. That is why I suggest things. It isn't that I hate the game or I can't live with something. I'm just wanting to help improve it.

My suggestion now is to offer alternatives of some kind. Short rests are believable. The hag is preparing her trap for you. The goblins are busy and haven't discovered Gut's body yet. That's not the issue. A Long Rest, however, makes no sense from a story perspective and should therefore be restricted. If you restrict it, though, you need to allow for more ways for players to continue without struggling so hard or making it impossible to complete.

That's why I said they could do things like having it so that the player could recruit the masked adventurers to help. Shoot! Larian wouldn't even need to make it so that the masked adventurers couldn't die. If you kill them, you just shot yourself in the foot. If you knocked them out instead, then you could revive them and get their help against the hag. Things like this shouldn't be that hard to implement in the game but it would give players more options to help them fight tough battles besides long resting all the time.

Same with goblin camp. You kill Gut but need help? Maybe you could free Volo and he helps you. Maybe the guy on the torture rack could be given a health potion to help you fight your way out with his help. There are SO many ways they could help adventurers so that tough boss battles don't require Long Rests.

So I agree that my original solution of Full Recovery Zones/Items is dumb. I'd much more prefer Larian do something else like what I've just described to make these battles a little less reliant on Long Rests.