Funny you bring up exhaustion this was my very next post
How about this, every time the flags for a cutscene are met, the party gets exhaustion.
You can keep playing, but now you have better incentive to take a long rest and not have what everybody is dealing with, skipped scenes and requirement backlogs that are messing up with the pacing of every companions story.
I think this is only really a problem in Act 1, because we're dealing with a lot of exposition for every character, but if this sounds too much like railroads for the D&D people, I get it.
Of course you were there so you would know...am I back in Kansas?
