Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Ludonarrative dissonance and the rest mechanic

Right now, a lot of story progression is tied to the long rest mechanic. To experience the story fully, of all companions, you will have to rest a lot, more than necessary for mere survival in EA.

But from the perspective of the characters, they would want to do everything in their power to do encounters quickly, and with as few rests as possible, because there is always the risk of turning into a mindflayer.

So the goal from the players perspective should be to take as few rests as is possible, basically as a self inflicted difficulty setting, because otherwise it might be to late. But if I do that, and if I am reasonably good at the game (so do not take many long rests) the story does not actually progress.

Imo, either it should be communicated, that the tadpole is bad, and should be removed eventually, but is no threat atm for reasons we have not yet found out, so we can take our time, or we must be able to progress the story by just going to camp without resting, or with short rests

Another way to solve the problem:

- give achievements/ different endings based on the number of long rests taken
- make this dependant on the difficulty selected
- give as many short rests as we want, but maybe with the normal hit dice system for 5e
- this would obviously mean that you would have to change song of rest again, just make it give some HP, like in tabletop

This is something that throws me for a loop too. I thought there would be some kind of visible indicator that reminded me to head to camp if there were new story elements to explore. But in my second run through EA when I had gotten much better at combat and rested significantly less because of it - I suddenly realized I had missed a ton of stuff. To the point where I am wondering if I don't rest enough will I just miss major story elements when the game goes live? Or will it eventually catch up somehow?

It is probably the most frustrating part of the game for me.

I guess one could argue that it will be "fixed" by difficulty settings, so that it is no longer possible to be "too good" for experiencing the story. If you put the game on impossible, you will rest as often again as in your first play through.

But I on the other hand also don't want to frustrate myself and just play for fun...
Not the most optimal solution imo

There is already a thread on this with a couple of interesting suggestions : https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=829230


I'm not a fan of that idea personally.
I don't know how that solves the problem of having to long rest to progress the story.
This would feel like punishing the players who want to explore the story fully.

I do absolutely agree that the current system is counter-intuitive (e.g.: sense of urgency vs need to spam long rest to unlock the story), not user-friendly (e.g.: we don't know when to long rest to avoid missing chunks of the story) and needs a lot of improvements.
However, I doubt the story will stop being so tightly linked with long rests on full release.
So the suggestions made in the other thread have my preference.

Edit : I learn a new expression today ("Ludonarrative dissonance"), thank you for that !

Agree! I don’t like story punishments for resting or timed quests.

One of the nice mechanics in DOS2 is the exclamation trigger when something important needs to be discussed between characters (I haven't played BG3 since #6 dropped and I don't remember if this happens now). I'd like to see that kind of mechanic brought in to solve the resting issue you've brought up here. When the game needs you to rest to advance the plot one of the characters pops a "!" and when you dialogue they say something like "Hey we need to discuss something at our next camp".
Also D&D5th has an exhaustion mechanic that could be tailored to "force" long rests to make sure players rest more often which could solve the problem as well.

The exclamation thing does happen, though it doesn't indicate outside of camp that characters have things to say within camp.

As an aside, something I think would be really good for the game is if we could have camp scenes where the companions have moments between them that our charcater isn't directly involved in. Just stuff to make them feel like they have relationships beyond just our character within the party. It could be entirely seperate from us where our character kinda just sees short exchanges, or it could be arguments and things that our character ends up mediating.

In my opinion something like this is necessary and it should be noticeable... and it shouldn't just go away right away. There should be some kind of indicator that a long rest will trigger a story moment so that you don't just randomly miss part of the plot.

I don't mind if they make it a toggle or something - but it seems like this is an issue for almost everyone.


I have been kind of assuming this will be part of the game when it ships and something that they were going to be adding in later on after finishing up all of the PC-centric stuff. I'm hoping for it too!

I just checked this out.

IMO - this is a great solution to the problem:

Why not make a simple conversation indicator that replaces the REST button whenever someone in the camp wishes to speak with us, so the player knows there is content in the camp.

thank you guys, great thread
Btw is there a way to find out, what has already been suggested? (outside of reading all the threads since the beginning)

I have some other ideas, but don't want to spam this forum too much

Yeah, missing some threads is expected 😅 but you can try to look in the header for "Search" > "Advanced Forum Search". There you can use different filters to help with you search.

It would be nice if devs decided what they want to do with rest as a whole. ALl this was known way back in the orginal BG 2. Nothing was fixed.

As is, it's more or less meaningless the only exception would be the first few level mainly the first 2 levels but those are over on the ship anyway and you get a free rest on it. In turn it only makes a mess out of corrent story narrative as stated in this and other threads.

When it comes to narrative the whole thing can be gated 101 ways... They can leave camp and resting out of it like suggested in the other thread. Most rpgs do that because they don't need resting as a resource they use CDs or mana...cards or combinations...

if they want narrative urgency they can get it from the tadpole ceremorphosis but they need to stick with it not have it half way. Of course some players hate that urgency and gameover events so there is that problem that needs a decision and not every player will be happy either way.

Then you have the whole balance aspect of restin, the resources and how it effects challenge! Again a decision would help and again not everyone will be happy... So far it looks like they will just live it in the air doing nothing... Not a fan but what can you do not like RPgs growon trees.

The old saying: When you try to please everyone, you can end up pleasing no one. Fits here i guess.

They should just add a yellow ! on the character portraits rather than an awefull mmorpg ! uppon our characters head (at camp but not only...)

This has been suggested months ago.


Same about OP's suggestion.
Players should CLEARLY understand that they won't become mindflayer soon... Or the game should be better balanced so players don't have to rest too much + have a coherent resting mechanic that doesn't allow you have infinite rests...
If you have to / can rest less often it looks a lot less wierd story-wise on top of making the game a better tactical turn base game...

This one is the most severe and oldest problem the game has, regarding its narrative. Not to mention a very well-known one.

I think there are not many solutions besides having the cutscenes trigger immediately (or as soon as you click the exclamation point). Before the forge was added to the EA, I could easily manage to finish all the content with 2-3 long rests, without cheesing the game, but to experience all the content I should rest many more times. So the game not only has a ludonarrative dissonance, wanting you to rest a lot while the story suggests the opposite, but also punishes you for being good (few rests) by making you experience less story-related content.

Here is my take: at this point the issue isn’t fixable. Story content is tied to resting and not resting often means missing it. Story creates artificial urgency and player needs to act against it or they miss on companion story content. Here are “bandages” I wish for Larian to apply for 1.0:

1) make it fairly quickly clear that we are in no danger of changing. At this point all we get a speculation which IMO isn’t good enough. I would say that Nettie should be the one to tell us we will be fine, and we should search for Helsin for permanent help, though case it is he encounter still reinforces the concept there that we can turn at any time, which IMO isn’t good. Right now I feel we will have to wait until Moonrise to learn about true nature of tadpoles, and it is just too long for this dissonance between narrative and how narrative content is provided to continue.

2) as someone mentioned before: have a rest button change to indicate that we have new story content available at the camp. Depending on amount of story content it might be wise to enable more conversations to trigger per rest, but it might be a problem unique to EA, and it will be easier to progress companion’s story with more ground to explore in act1.