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.
