There is really no way to implement a meaningful limited rest system without running the risk of ruining playthroughs.
Shall we try again?
1) Let people set amount of their Camp Resources (including or excluding food) in difficiulty settings, including 0.
2) Set specific locations wich are the only places that count as "safe enough" for our party to rest ... again, let people enable/disable this in Difficiulty setting.
3) Let people set amount of encounters per Long Rest ... you wish to fight once, twice, thrice, four...ice?
Whatever ... you set it, and thats when Long Rest will be enabled for you, not a moment sooner ... and it probably dont surprise you, but yes, this should also belong to difficiulty settings.
Whoah ...
What would you say, it took me like ... how much a minute?
Maybe two ... and i found out three ways that "dont exist".
There are some glaring problems with your solutions.
1) requires metaknowledge - what number should I use to have a good experience? Assuming most people won't even do one full playthrough it is a very nieche option
2) Some other RPGs did it, and it wouldnt' change a thing - really, there is already one "safe zone" that we can rest in: camp. We can just teleport it from anywhere at any time. Even if we were to limit places in which we can initiate camp teleport - currently we still can teleport anywhere we want at any time. Even if that was removed, the game has no respawning enemies, so backtracking is almost always an easy and safe option. As such no limitation on resting would be implemented, at a cost of potentially making resting a bit more tedius.
3) Again, metaknowledge - how do I know how often I should set the rest, without playing. Also not a good way of limiting rest. Not each encounter is equal. Also what is an encounter? If I ambush and kill a singular sleeping goblin does that count? If I want to rest before big encounter does it mean I need to backtrack and farm encounters to do so? Sounds like an annoying mechanic, that wouldn't actually fix much.
I am with Warlocke on this one - I haven't seen a really good implementation of resting system in a cRPG - at best, I have seen games encourage good rest pacing, without enforcing it. Any harsher attempts at limiting rests (kingmaker) came with new laundry list of issues. I think that if one were to implement meaningful rest system, one would need to rething structure of a cRPG to accomodate it.
