When you arrive at the inn, the battle has just ended. How do you know this? The inn's fire hasn't spread to all the rooms. Benryn is still pinned beneath a beam. The Flaming Fist still haven't busted open the door to get in to save the counselor. There are SO many implications that the battle for the inn was supposed to have just ended and the duke taken away.
So, immersion-wise, how does that make sense if I see the inn on fire and burning and I don't get to the inn for 3 or 4 long rests/days? That makes no sense from a story perspective.
I will give you that the nautiloid could burn for a long time. It's a stretch, but I could let that one slide. After all, it's an alien vessel that has who knows what kind of material and fuel inside. So, that thing could rage on for a long time.
And, again, the dragon I could see flying around for days. That's why I didn't have a problem with the dragon to begin with. The dragon is searching for you, so if it hasn't found you, it'd still be flying around in the sky days upon days later.
However, the inn is the primary focus of this post because it would not burn for days. It's a primarly wood structure, so it would spread pretty fast, as it does when you actually do get there, and it would burn to the ground within hours. Besides that, again, the story implications are that the fight just ended when you get there. So, you would not see it on fire days before you got there only to find a bunch of people trying to bust the door down to save people who just got trapped inside.
All I'm suggesting is that if Larian doesn't want to implement time in the game, which is fine, they need to not do stuff like this. It's completely weird and immersion-breaking. I see an inn burning and rest for 2 or 3 days and it's still burning and people are still waiting for me to show up to save them from being pinned beneath beams? No. Makes no sense at all. Even IF you tried to make me believe that it was smoking and on fire because the goblins started attacking it on that day but didn't actually finish the attack until 2 or 3 days later, that still wouldn't make sense. It's obviously not a major battle. There wasn't THAT many dead bodies to imply that the fight was massive and required several days before it was concluded. There are no barricades erected to show that the Flaming Fist were keeping them out for a time, or anything.
