After lengthy consideration this is what I would like for the resting system in BG3:
- A gold tax in the form of Camping Supplies to discourage long rest spam. Let the game reward you in gold for playing well and saving resources. Tax should be high enough to matter.
- Local resting spots. Abandoned houses, camps, ancient temples, friendly settlements etc. Mostly for immersion to make the world feel real and have a sense of distance and scale. But also for game mechanics, as explained below.
- Fatigue system that prevents you from always backtracking to a safe camp somewhere beyond a realistic distance. If you push deep into a dungeon, wilderness or the Underdark you have to rest there. Basically a fatigue system would effectively limit the radius in which you can operate at full strength and set meaningful intervals for resting. -snip-
This is probably too strict? If I'm reading this correctly, you want
-long resting to only be possible at specific designated sites
-fatigue that limits how far you can walk. How would this work: if you try to return to a distant campsite, at some point your characters just collapse and won't move anymore?? But they will get up and walk as long as you're moving "forward"??
Unless these rules are only present in a hard "Survival" mode, these two options combined will too easily result in softlocks where you're too resource-tapped to press onward and too weak to walk back to the previous campsite. You should always be able to manually walk back to your previous camp (or fast travel point).
I think a better option than "fatigue-limited backtracking" is that there are just more areas where you can only fast travel from a designated camping site. Basically any areas that are not on the overworld. E.g.,
-Hag's Lair: no campsites or fast traveling. If you want to return to the surface, you have to get to the end or climb back up to the surface (I believe this is how it currently works?)
-Entire Underdark: there are ~3 campsites (temple entrance, Myconid colony, shoreline). You need to walk to any of these points to long rest or fast travel back to the surface. Otherwise, no fast travel.
-Goblin Temple: no campsites or fast traveling
The combination of limited campsites + food cost (+optional random encounters) should be more than sufficient to discourage long rest spam.
