Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Poll: How many Long Rests do you take?

Yes, it probably depends a lot on which class you play. I play casters, and I would never have the goal to rest as little as possible. It would make combat very boring to me.

I'm into the habit to be conservative with limited resources and use them sparsely, plus I like to take rests only when necessary.
it's a good training to learn how to be efficient when the need should rise. Which is probable "never" in this game.

For all the original complaints about BG3 allowing unrestricted long rest spam, it has been a bit ironic to come to the the recent realization that there's also the opposite problem, and you are not pushed into resting anywhere near as often as the game seems to EXPECT you to do.
I take a very low number of long rests in my recent runs and frankly even then half of them are just because I go for "It's time to make that plot point progress" more than anything.

Without a tiredness/exhaustion system in place I can basically stroll toward half of the game before being in a position where I NEED a rest for resources.

As I got more and more familiar with the content of the EA it got so bad that in my most recent run I ran out of content before even "discovering" that Astarion is a vampire spawn and Gale a nuke in the making.

Are you familiar with D&D?

In D&D spellcasters are more fun because they get powerful spells that actually make a difference when you launch them, rather than spells that are equivalent to any other class' abilities. With that power potential comes the restriction of having to use them thoughtfully, and sometimes not having them available. If that restriction is taken away like it currently is in EA, there will be severe balance problems later where high level spellcasters can just steamroll through everything. At that point Larian will have to break the game (again) by clipping the power of higher level spells (not fun), or introduce magic resistant enemies everywhere (stupid).

Compare to DOS and basically every other game now where spellcasters (and everyone else) are just steady performers, dishing out the same average spells on rotation and cooldowns in every fight. It's not nearly as satisfying as a D&D Wizard being able to peak perform and completely swing the balance of a big fight. But that needs to be kept in check by not allowing Long Rest at will.

Yes, in general, in the sense that the LESS story progression they tie to long rests, even in the future, the better.


But on top of that, they could at very least "force" you in few "story-driven" mandatory stop gaps.

For instance the game keeps suggesting me to do a short rest after facing the intellect devourers and a long rest after cleaning the entry of the ruins with the tomb raiders... But why should I, currently? I go through both just fine, without even using any significant resource in the process.
If the party became exhausted after the encounter and resting would be the only practical way to be functional it would be a different story, on the other hand.

If there was actually a day night system or a game clock/calendar resting would actually be more relevant.

Now its just wait for a companion poke..."Huh, yea sure, after we do this and maybe this..."


This is the first Forgotten Realms game without said system.

HUGE step in the wrong direction.

19nevers calling!


Mario Party 2 and Minecraft outclass us .

I rest when I feel it makes sense from a rp perspective. This usually means 6-10 LR for the current content. If everything was further apart on the map, it might feel like I should rest more often (except for tadpole urgency) and if we had day/night cycle it would make it much easier to determine when to rest.

Do you use up your spells as soon as possible in a fight? I play a caster heavy party (custom is sorcerer, ranger, rogue, and wizard but occasionally cleric) and often find myself with spell slots left when I rest, especially on the pure casters. I tend to save spell slots for the "oh crap" moments and to set up chokepoints and debuffs rather than to do actual damage. Spike Growth, Web, Grease, and Cloud of daggers are usually my most used spells, and flaming arrows/Firebolt to help the first 3 of those along once the enemies are clumped up.

Okay. Quite honestly, I know D&D, but I'll stick up for Icelyn on this one. Low level mage's can be REAL frustrating when you don't have your spells. Everyone else in the party is the hero at low levels. You cast the occasional level 1 or 2 spell, and everyone else is hammering your enemies while you throw mostly Fire Bolt or some other cantrip. Mages don't really start to take off until level 5.

So, I can totally understand a mage player wanting to rest more frequently. Who wants to feel like a side kick in your own story?

Edit: That said, I personally enjoy spellcasters and try to avoid using spells until I absolutely need them because I view them in D&D as strategists who have to play their cards just right. They're like chess players, and they can be the most challenging characters to play well when you really restrict resting. Not everyone likes this, though.

Yes, no sleep shaming the Wizards.

1- Cantrip were designed precisely to address this issue. And you start with a certain amount of spell slots from the get go.

2- It's NOWHERE near as frustrating as it used to be in, say, AD&D and BG2 where a caster was literally useless an entire day after one magic missile.

3- No one in the party is supposed to be self-sufficient all the times. "B-but when I'm out of spell slots that character does better". Well, not shit. Conversely when you are not you outperform everyone else and can do basically everything, so there's that. It's an overall balancing act.

4- It's not like people are expecting you to go for days with only cantrips, but ideally you shouldn't get the free pass to blow your entire load every three goblins either.

I see the results of this poll suggest people tend to take a relatively small number of long rests. This is another reason to fix the "long rest-tied" cinematics and make them available at the same moment as their conditions are met.

Otherwise, players are going to lose on a big chunk of in-depth party interactions.


Edit: I saw only now that @fylimar already touched on the subject, sorry for the repetition.

Hey. I don't really disagree. I'm just saying that I get where someone like Icelyn is coming from. She's not alone in that lots of players want to be able to cast spells a lot if they play wizards so that they feel like they are the heroes as opposed to the side kicks. It's kinda the superhero mentality. Who wants to play a side kick?

That said, even in most superhero games, each superhero has limits to how often they can use their high powered super powers, and those that are standard attack powers are nerfed to balance the game.

But that's not really on topic, and we probably should let the whole "frequency of long rests and how it relates to spellcasters" thing go. Composer's gonna get on us if we don't stick to "how many long rests do you use" topic.

Settle, this poll isn't about how you think people should play, it's about how they do.

It's looking like most people (in this small poll) don't think there's enough in the EA to force them to long rest more than around 6 times. I'd chalk some of that up to familiarity with encounters, as well as most people not playing through large sections of the maps, but it's still probably well below what's necessary to match the pacing of the camp content.

I probably should have worded the resource option better, to something like "when I feel the party is low on ability resources"

With reference to LR and the combat encounters, I can understand it. But I insist on thinking outside the box without blinkers. Many here are only fixated on fighting and companion dialogues... But for me there is another one main reason namely LR for restocking vendors inventory as I reasoned at another thread:


Later in Baldurs Gate or other towns / villages you will surely have plenty of taverns and inns to stay overnight, so it's like a permanent LR. Deriving from this and with foresight on the changing trader offer, I propose as a compromise: set up / keep areas with vendors as unlimited LR save zones like Druids Grove. I am open to the design of LR outside of "vendor areas". This point should definitely be taken into account.

In reality I rest every time I hear a NPC say that they're tired, because that indicates there is a camp cutscene. This means I rest WAY too often for my tastes, like after every area and every other combat. In my most recent run, prior to getting to the grove, I rested:
-after landing on the beach, because I knew there would be a "Tav alone" scene
-after meeting Gale and Astarion
-after cleaning out the crypts
-possibly one more time, I don't exactly remember, likely after rescuing Lae'zel (this might have happened before the crypts)
At least 2 of the above were directly in response to NPC Companion voice barks. Midway through this playthrough I lost all interest continuing to play (for numerous reasons, but at least partly) because I didn't want to miss camp cutscenes, but LR'ing this often ruined any hint of game difficulty = interest in combat. We shouldn't have to choose between the two.

I would strongly prefer to be conservative with my resources and only rest when I'm low on them and don't think I can get through another fight, which would probably match with the ~6-8 LRs mentioned by other posters. That's what I did on my first playthrough before I realized how much content I was missing by doing so.
- Compared to the above, in my first playthrough, I didn't rest until after encountering Nettie.

depends on how RNG treats me. However of all the players i enjoy to play with fire, so i intentionally make decisions that are highly aggressive in my play style against NPCs. If i can not kill the enemy in one round [max 2] my party is going to be wiped of the map and i will need to long rest. You can say that i have learned bad habits from DOS2 and Xcom2. Such gambles do work in D&D but not to the same extent. It is living on the edge of risky.

Most of the time its my MC that ends up in the hospital wing, followed by my malee attacks or maybe one caster that the AI targets as they have the least HP and focuses fire on them.

I don't have one answer for this, unfortunately. It depends on how I'm feeling in any particular playthrough.

Sometimes I'll play for the mechanical nature of things, just fighting through the combats and pushing myself to see how far I can go without resting.

Other times, especially when I find myself connecting with a character, I'll slow down and reread everything and sleep whenever I think a reasonable person would need sleep. Which is to say, I think the average person would need rest a lot. Imagine, for instance, if you got into a fight today. And then another fight. And then another fight. With people dying each time. I think you would probably feel worn out pretty fast.

Sure, but on the other hand, 5e adventurers aren't "reasonable persons", if you're using "person" to mean people in our real world. D&D adventurers are exceptional beings who can use magic, naturally heal all wounds simply by resting, channel Ki, instantly go from near-dying to practically fully fighting fit, and in general do all sorts of extraordinary things.

Me? Yeah, sure. 1 fight to the death would probably make me need to sleep for at least a night, if not get urgent extreme medical attention and/or have died. But I'm basically a commoner.

Also, there could be a mechanic for this: exhaustion. Larian could decide on some triggers that cause characters to get a level of exhaustion (e.g., every X combats, going down in a fight, using X spells or abilities, entering X new area). This would be a neat, simple way of communicating to the player that their charactrer and Companions are getting tired from all the fighting & exploring. Then you, the player, gets a roleplaying choice: do you decide that your Tav would want to push through the exhaustion because they feel time limited? Or is your Tav satisfied with their progress that day, and so turns in for the night? [to be clear, in this system I'd suggest that a single LR cures all levels of exhaustion]

In all of human history nobody's made it to level 5

Eh. Wouldn't that be nice?
We hardly need to figure out how that would work, given that some form of tiredness/exhaustion has been a staple of the genre for three decades and counting.

I take long rests intuitively when I want to progress relations between the party. I think it is made poorly as of now, that only one NPC can get an exclamation mark during a single long rest. It pushes you to rest more than you need. You can kinda work around it by wasting resources during every fight and just have to take more long rests, but I kinda like to save my best cards for bosses and tough/epic encounters.