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I’ve seen a lot of people complaining about how food is too overpowered, or it makes healing potions worthless, or that it shatters their delicate and fragile suspense of belief in a game with literal immortal bardwizards and elves, but this is maybe the first RPG in which I have ever cared about the food items.

In most RPGs that include food, I fully ignore it, because it is basically worthless. The usual pattern is that it will give you a ludicrously short term, mostly ineffectual buff, and one extra STR or CON for two minutes is just not worth the effort. It makes virtually no difference and becomes just another bit of clutter in bags that I have to pick around to conserve inventory slots and weight.

No, it is not a 5E rule, but it gives an otherwise useless clutter item a reason for existing, which I assume the in-development crafting system will add on to by letting us combine those food items into better food.

The fact they are sometimes “as good as potions” is only a negative if you are ascribing some arbitrary sanctity to the role of potions in general. People need to remember that this is not a pen and paper, purist interpretation and it never will be, and if we kept with the traditional model wherein potions were absurdly expensive and rare, they’d have to scale back the combat so much that it would be extremely dull. The only alternative option would be to flood the game with EVEN MORE potions, and then people would complain about how that was “not accurate”.

I am not interested in the “but it makes no sense” or the “it’s not realistic” arguments either because there is absolutely no logical reason that a potion should let you speak to animals, or heal external wounds either, other then it’s a random bit of handwaving we’ve just agreed to ignore.

The food system is fine.

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Except potions are already insanely common in the EA as is. I currently have somewhere around 12 normal healing potions, 1 greater healing potion, and 3(!!!!) superior healing potions. 3 of them is freaking nuts as a level 3 party. Add on top of that the fact that I can keep from ever needing to really use them simply by replacing them on my hotbar with a potato, and I might as well just go around selling my healing potions for fat stacks of cash.

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It skews the balance of 5e healing - it ties in to the balance of Cleric/Druid/some other subclasses, resting as a mechanic, and the usefulness of healing potions.

The encounters should be balanced around 5e mechanics, not around an infinite supply of food that heals you. If removing food healing means they have to look at encounters balance a little harder, that's a good thing.

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Ok well, thats just like, your opinion man.


You can give food a use beyond being useless clutter by having your characters consume food when long resting. Not necessarily a requirement to long rest.. but if you go a few long rests without food you'll start to suffer exhaustion, as per 5e rules, I think that would be great.

A huge amount of the combat damage is due to the ground effects which nobody likes. IF they removed them that would be all the toning down combat would need in my opinion.

The "handwaving" is magic. Potions are inherently magical, so yes they can do things that we don't normally expect since they don't exist i nthe real world.. we don't have any real world reference to judge them by. Food is something that we have in the real world and we know what it does in the real world.

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Food is retarded. It adds a million more extraneous items to clutter up your inventory, and since wizards can now heal it's doubly retarded. I really wish Larian would just give us more healing potions or something and get rid of all food items just to de-clutter the inventory.

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Originally Posted by Muldeh
Ok well, thats just like, your opinion man.


You can give food a use beyond being useless clutter by having your characters consume food when long resting. Not necessarily a requirement to long rest.. but if you go a few long rests without food you'll start to suffer exhaustion, as per 5e rules, I think that would be great.

A huge amount of the combat damage is due to the ground effects which nobody likes. IF they removed them that would be all the toning down combat would need in my opinion.

The "handwaving" is magic. Potions are inherently magical, so yes they can do things that we don't normally expect since they don't exist i nthe real world.. we don't have any real world reference to judge them by. Food is something that we have in the real world and we know what it does in the real world.

Just want to say I like this idea a lot. +1

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On one side a balancing factor of food (especially the one healing a lot like hams and pig heads) is that it tends to weight a whole freaking lot more than potions (up to 10 KG each piece).

Even if they want to keep it in as a "convenience healing", a quick and dirty fix to not make it "too broken" would be to just not make it usable during combat.
Another easy fix would be to put a cooldown on food after you eat a certain amount (let's call it a "stealth calories counter"), giving you some "debuff" saying you're too full to eat more.

None of these solutions addresses another problem I have with food that is even worse than "being unbalanced": this fucking stuff adds on top of all the books, letters, trash items and what else to make inventory management chaotic, cluttered and gratuitously painful.
Do we even need DOZENS of different type of food in inventory?

Even if we wanted a "hunger" mechanic where food is a necessity (but do we?) or to use food as a form of "out of combat healing" as suggested above, making it an abstract resource that piles up in a tiny counter rather than filling your bags would be probably better.

Last edited by Tuco; 13/10/20 01:58 AM.

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While I defend the 5e rules for reasons of game balance, after countless thousands of people have playtested...
I really do not mind the food in the game. It does not affect balance between classes nor combat.

I like it MOSTLY because we only have 1 Short Rest currently and I always challenge myself to rest as seldom as possible (i.e. I have not done a single Long Rest and I am level 3 and still going).

Last edited by Baraz; 13/10/20 01:59 AM.
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Originally Posted by Baraz

I like it MOSTLY because we only have 1 Short Rest currently and I always challenge myself to rest as selfdom as possible (i.e. I have not done a single Long Rest and I am level 3 and still going).

Sooo... we need more than once short rest, and smarter food management.

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Counter counter argument. Food is fine, but I am physically incapable of eating five wheels of cheese and an entire boars head in one sitting. There should be a capacity such that food can only be eaten so much per long rest.

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tbh I enjoyed having some food stockpiled at camp and going back to snack and have evryone topped before a dangerous area, it felt more like preparation than going to sleep; and let's face it at the end of the day food becomes too heavy real fast if you carry enough to make healing irrelevent.
I can see that it might trigger people that a boar's head is just as good as a small healing potion, but these kind of food are super heavy... and if we go down this road then should we remove the healing on short rest and long rest because we all know that when you've been sliced, impaled, arrowed, burned or mauled, all you need is a good rest and it's like it never happened. laugh
Guys if you dont like the way food makes the game too easy then stop using it or picking it up, there is no need to remove something that is completly optional.

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The healing item economy has allowed me to play the EA all the way through without a healer class and I for one think that is a great thing. Inventory management needs a lot of work, but with the rest system the way it is currently, food bridges the gap to starting each fight topped off.

(PC ranger, Asterion, Lae'zel, Wyll, if anyone's curious)

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So I am still mostly seeing arguments saying food is "retarded" because it's "not realistic" and "not 5E" without actually addressing the fact that this is all fake anyway, you're perfectly fine with potions because "a wizard did it", and you can't eat 8 wheels of cheese in one sitting in real life. Do you know what I cannot do in real life? Firebolt, Speak with Dead/Animals, Bless/Bane or Ray of Enfeeblement.

People are making way, WAY too big of a deal about this. You're complaining about realism in a game series most known for a belt that changes your gender and a space hamster and saying that "Nope, eating a bunch of food is where I draw the line at believability!"

Also, again, if the combat was balanced for actual PnP 5e, this would be exceptionally boring as a video game. For as many people here scream about how they come from a D&D background and play 5e or whatever, you all seem to be completely forgetting that, in a lot of PnP campaigns, you get maybe one or two encounters in a 3-5 hour session, and that one fight can take an hour or more. That is awful video game design. Yeah, that will cater perfectly to the absolute D&D purists, but literally no one else, and there are not enough purists on the planet to ever break even on that game.

The sooner people get over the fact this was never going to be a 1:1 conversion of your personal D&D campaign and concessions need to be made for this to be an enjoyable standalone product, the sooner you can maybe actually just enjoy this is a game and not spend all day on the internet raging about extremely meaningless first-world problems like a cantrip doing a couple of points too much damage or getting a superior healing potion before level 5.

I bought EA and came to the forums because I expected everyone would be working in good faith to actually make the game better, but thus far all I've really seen is people complaining about how it's not a perfect representation of their personal tastes or rabidly adherent to the apparently holy scripture that is the player's handbook, and thus it's terrible and the developers are dumb and should cater specifically to them, and I am just getting absolutely exhausted by the deeply entitled whining.

The fact this is even a thread is ridiculous. This should be the most meaningless aspect of the entire game, but I've seen SO MANY people complain about it across so many threads now that it's become the perfect encapsulation of this wildly puritanical crusade.

Last edited by Panicintrinsica; 13/10/20 03:39 AM.
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Food's only use in 5e is when it comes to spending gold on rations for when the party has to travel lol. Other then that there are like a grand total of like maybe 2-3 feats (Some UA ones) that are related to food, but their effects are fairly minor (Regaining extra hit die during I rest I believe is one of them).

Giving food the ability to heal is a bit wild, as it kind of makes Clerics, Druids, and any build that is related to healing...irrelevant. On that matter, there's a reason healing potions exist? Why should food do the same thing as a potion which in 5e has a baseline cost of 50gp?

Originally Posted by Panicintrinsica
I am not interested in the “but it makes no sense” or the “it’s not realistic” arguments either because there is absolutely no logical reason that a potion should let you speak to animals, or heal external wounds either, other then it’s a random bit of handwaving we’ve just agreed to ignore.


Right here's the thing, those are magic items. Food is not.

Originally Posted by Panicintrinsica
The fact they are sometimes “as good as potions” is only a negative if you are ascribing some arbitrary sanctity to the role of potions in general. People need to remember that this is not a pen and paper, purist interpretation and it never will be, and if we kept with the traditional model wherein potions were absurdly expensive and rare, they’d have to scale back the combat so much that it would be extremely dull. The only alternative option would be to flood the game with EVEN MORE potions, and then people would complain about how that was “not accurate”.


Like I mentioned the baseline cost for basic healing potions it 50gp, and with the amount of gold tossed around in BG3, it's not really an issue to stock up on them. Additionally, basic healing potions count as a common magic item, so it's not to ridiculous to think it's a common item. Additionally, with certain tool proficiencies, one can just craft the potion for half the price.

Last edited by flyboy323; 13/10/20 04:15 AM.
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Originally Posted by Panicintrinsica


The food system is fine.


food issue remove healers class out from the game completely, is it fine for you? there zero sence to use healing spell. so no the food system is not fine, not even close

Last edited by arion; 13/10/20 07:09 AM.
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Food would be better the way it is now, if resting wasn't so easy.

I vote leave food, change resting.

If resting were more difficult, some food items could then have additional other benefits perhaps... (Don't hurt me fellow adventurers, I'm just spitballing here!)

I don't mind the benefits food currently offers, it just feels unnecessary.

Last edited by RKLimes; 13/10/20 07:12 AM.
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Originally Posted by Redwyrm
Originally Posted by Baraz

I like it MOSTLY because we only have 1 Short Rest currently and I always challenge myself to rest as selfdom as possible (i.e. I have not done a single Long Rest and I am level 3 and still going).

Sooo... we need more than once short rest, and smarter food management.

Yes ! I agree ! Allowing a few Short Rests is the solution.

Food could be a cool cost or requirement for rests (short and long).

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Originally Posted by RKLimes
Food would be better the way it is now, if resting wasn't so easy.

I vote leave food, change resting.

If resting were more difficult, some food items could then have additional other benefits perhaps... (Don't hurt me fellow adventurers, I'm just spitballing here!)

I don't mind the benefits food currently offers, it just feels unnecessary.


The resting definitely needs some changing. The Short Rest acts like a bedroll from D:OS 2. It feels like it's missing a UI to spend hit dice or not (and also Arcane Recovery), and there needs to be 2-3 Short rests before a long rest - not just one.

I'm not completely opposed to a little healing from food outside of battle, but in-battle it has to go. Completely.

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I like the food... I didnt realize the first hours, that I can use it to heal xD But it was so usefull and failing (like a bad jump, running into fire,...) is less punishing. A lot of ppl would reload after doing that, if you just have a few options to heal. And with food, the rooms are so much more immersive... You find some meat on the skewer laugh! That made me looking around in every room way more.

If you are annoyed by item management and skillbar management, there could be other options, like a better way of clustering food and a skill like "eat until you are at last 90% life points". ^^

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+1 to the OP's post. Anything that allows us to play without having to assign a dedicated healer to one of those VERY SMALL number of party slots available is welcome. But I also agree with a few others here who correctly point out the need for us to have someplace to safely store stuff we collect that is easily accessible.

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