I can try to play reasonably, sleeping only when I think my characters would be tired, but there's no metric to measure that against except for how many resources I've used and that is entirely a player decision.
I actually hadn't thought about this until your post. If 1 sec of real time = 1 hour of game time, then in theory one should long rest every 24 seconds whether they used their short rest or not. I know that sounds ridiculous, but with no day/night cycle, no concept of time or hints of its passage who is to say when that cuttoff occures? If 30 seconds real time = 1 hour game time, then we should long rest every 12 min. If 1 min realtime = 1 hour game time, then every 24 minutes. But no one knows. So who can say when it is/isn't appropriate to use short/long rest?
Excellent point.
To be fair, this poster said
your character actually complains fairly frequently that they are tired if you don't rest. it has been toned down a bit in the latest patch but it is still there
which is technically a metric. In earlier patches, companions' complaints about being tired were (allegedly) actually just a means of notifying the player about dialogue/cutscenes, so they didn't count. But if the MC complains about being tired, and it's *not* just because there's a camp cutscene, then that's better than nothing I suppose...I'd still prefer a more mechanical effect though.
