Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback BG3 Resting discussion

Resting DOES belong in ANY D&D game. It's been part of the game since it was just a module in Dragon Magazine, and in every version since. The example about stealthing to get out of combat and resting isn't a problem with resting, wizards, or stealthing.. I'ts a problem with groups of enemies not being tethered together properly, and how NPC will just stand there and yell at you if they can't see you, instead of looking for you.

I agree that it's annoying to HAVE to go back to camp so much. You have to if you want to switch characters, progress the story (even to just not miss something you have to go camp all the time), as well as just resting to regain spells and heal.
Also, it's stupid that when you replace a character, the character you removed doesn't heal when you rest. He/she is still in camp.

Having to go to camp to replace a character is ridiculous btw. Also, when you get a new character, you should be able to immediately tell one of the characters with you to take a hike and bring the new char with you.

The hp bloat and other overtuning of monsters (ie flying minotaurs with AOE damage and knockback) make NOT being able to long rest all the time kinda ridiculous. HOWEVER, I'd rather play the game as written in the tabletop version. I'd rather fight actual swarms of goblins then a handfull of goblins that have as many hit points as an Ogre in tabletop. The hp bloat also breaks ALL spells that have target hp limits to effectiveness.

I guarantee that you would not want to fight swarms of goblins after the first fight in which you will have to wait 10 minutes for your turn.
Already at this point, fights with a large number of enemies take a long time, even when the AI is working properly.
An additional increase in the number of enemies will not be good for the game.
In turn-based games, fighting with smaller, stronger groups of enemies is always better.

The reason to "not" have random encounters is that Larian scripted out the combat and exp gains specifically to control items/economy/levels to fit in this module....(items and economy are defeated by an opposing mechanic on vendor inventory resetting after long rest....but that is another topic).

I see the reason they got rid of random encounters so that encounter structure is intentional and not random, but this is a design choice that could go either way.

Random encounters on rest are used as a mechanic in games to pressure players and to make sustained party health a mini game of resource management. The question is, do we or Larain(mostly Larian) feel that the game should be focused on party survival via attrition, or combat success via scripted fights?

You can't have scripted fights be balanced by allowing players to gain exp via grinding. If so you have the issue of either A) forcing players to grind prior to an encounter. Or B) having encounters be too easy because the bar was set too low.

I personally like the idea of fights being challenging and purposeful. I am opposed to a "final fantasy" style grind prior to fighting a boss....if anything breaks "immersion" (hate it when people keep complaining about immersion, but here I go!) it is having to hang out and kill goblins and rats prior to fighting a boss.

"IF" resting could be limited and zero exp gained from encounters, that would allow for random fights...but then players would feel cheapened by getting nothing out of the encounter and it would just be an annoyance. Hell, in old D&D I got sick of all the random encounters and I just ran from as many encounters as possible in the old Gold Box games at one point. It was more time efficient.

Long rest could require the use of food (there is TONNNS of food in the game, and this would provide a disposable resource use). This would limit long rests, but then the problem of story being tied to long rest creates a new matrix of problems.

Bottom line, there are too many systems at play with the long/short rest feature and pulling on one breaks the other. Maybe that was a bad design choice...but this is where we are now.

I'm not sure i'm looking forward for this exhauted thing to be implemented. As an experienced player of BG2, i like to not rest too often, and i like to use my spells only if needed. Usually, it means 'i do this area/this dungeon' with what i have, and rest between when all is settled. With some exceptions, like illithid cities, or gladiators arena where i wanna shine

But after 3 playthrough i find myself forcing me to use spells and rest after each little zones when i'd prefer to use cantrips and move on. Just because events are tied to resting in camp and i want to experiment all of them. It's a bizarre felling^^ The more i learn about the 'metagame', the more i feel i can go through it with only an occasionnal and strategic spell or consumable, wich feels good...but at the same time, the game punish me for being good at it by deniying me all the narrative stuff wich happens when you go to the camp.

Instead of a rule that force you to go to sleep, i'd much rather enjoy a way to have this narrative outside the camp, or without the need to sleep. Can i have a button saying to the game 'ok, i'm done fighting and exploring, now i take five with my mates (in the camp or anywhere) so we can chat and all?

I always felt defeated ina way when i wasn't able to do all the quest/area/dj without sleeping in BG1 and 2, it's very odd to feel punished for achieving it now.

Edit : yeah, formers bg had a fatigue system too, but unless you overused haste (love this spell <3) you could do an entire quest without it kicking in. Now i can't go around 5 minutes, even without combat, before one of my group ask for sleep. We just went to three doors and a cave

If going inside an inn to cast it just to run faster to the edge of the map is overusing then I guess I'm overusing it xD ( #No fast travel)

I have to say, I hope:
1) They do implement some kind of exhaustion system to sygnalize the rest is required. I finished the game not knowing there is romance in it. I got the mindflayer powers nearly before the outcome of the game.

2) Sleep is balanced and straight up forbidden before a certain point(Maybe based on difficulty?). That would require some kind of time management system or another way to calculate it but right now ....well, the most optimal way is to rest after every fight. By not doing so I'm playing in a sub-optimal way. I forced myself to do so, cause i knew those poor mobs weren't ready for this. And we don't have high level spells yet! But yeah, either rests get balanced either we will end up with more hp for the sake of more hp on higher difficulties :|

Presuming its something they just didn't a chance to finish. If this is true, we more than likely will get a day/night cycle. Its EA, an some stuff is obviously not finished.

btw your characters will say something along the lines of golly gee i need some sleep, passively while your traveling around, nothing happens though.

Here's how I would do it:

Give each food item a food value, say from 1 to 10. An apple would be a 1, a pig's head would be a 10. When you want to rest for the night, a window pops up that tells you that you need 3 (or 5, whatever) food value per party member resting, and lets you pick whatever food items you want from those that you have, to add up to the required 12 (or 20, whatever). If you don't have the food, you gain only half the normal benefits of resting and you become Hungry. Once you're Hungry, you cannot rest at all until you have sufficient food. Then just make sure that each of the merchants always has at least a little bit of food available to buy. On the off chance that the player hasn't managed to collect the hundreds and hundreds of food items currently available in the world.

What is the point of introducing this type of restriction when nothing really limits it? There is so much food in Action 1 alone that it would probably be enough for half a game with rest after each fight. Let's add food from traders and we have a PoE mechanic that has no real impact on the gameplay The only thing it does is irritate when you have to go back for supplies in the middle of exploration (although in this case we have fast travel so it matters even less).

My biggest gripe with the resting system is how a lot of the comanions' story quests are tied to it. After finishing my early access playthrough I saw a lot of people on the internet talk about all kinds of cool scenes they'd gotten while in the camp, but I had no idea what those were since I had tried to use the rest system as sparsely as possible.

I can't agree with you on that - long rest is very important in D&D.
The problem with a long rest in BG3 is that its a little more too available - you can spam it as much as you want, but on another hand, we are constantly told to hurry up -
in my first playthrough, I didn't go camping often - and I miss a lot of narrative due to that.

It may be an important part of D&D, but it doesn't fit in with the current way of designing games.
For this reason the rest looks like it looks now
It would probably be better if they returned to the concept of a short rest after each fight.

When was the last full-fledged D&D game released? I think it was NN2 but I'm not sure if anything came out after that.

Concerning 2) you could still fast travel and then rest there, which would replenish resources and then travel back. The only thing added by this would be the times it wastes. And BG3 already wastes a lot of my playtime with poor movement, long loading times, a rather slow turn-based combat and the resting how it is implemented. Well not waste in some cases, but it takes a lot of time and time economy is very subpar currently. Technically you could argue that resting in certain areas might not be advisable (like in a dungeon), but still a necessity. The Fellowship rested in Moria, for example, because they had to. You could make the same case for many dungeons in RPGs.

However it is true that resting is a essential concept in the PnP experience. You could argue though that it's necessity and reason to exist in a video game is diminished. Hence it's soft implementation in BG2 or PoE (and especially PoE2). So far, BG3 forces resting for gameplay and narrative reasons. I can not see them changing that, most interactions would have to happen in the real world then. So limiting resting would not make much sense either, because you would make the game harder and players would miss story bits.
It is a conundrum, for sure. I am not even sure, they went with a worse mechanic than others, just with a rather cumbersome in an already very slow game.

The game needs to give a better balance between the urgency of removing the tadpole and reasonable amounts of rest. Exhaustion is a good mechanic to make you rest but I would like to see something that prevents you from overdoing the rest. Could be something simple like "you are not tired yet" or the end the day option is simply not possible to take. Could even make it only possible to rest if one of the characters complains of tiredness. Having a day/night cycle would help us to better figure this stuff out.

I guess the game could count how many dialogue scenes and battles you have done and authorize you to go to camp when you have gone through enough of them. Or if you have casualties or not, or pending dialogue scenes at camp with npcs.

It doesn't have to be a lot but it feels ridiculous when you just start a battle after a long rest, stop mid fight, go back to sleep and then resume the fight where you left it at afterwards. You can even do that several times for one battle, as long as you can sneak an escape.

So lets consider the game as is.

You have one system that "wants" you to rest so you advance story line. This typically happens after a plot point, such as discovering or ending a quest, or updating a dialog option for that character. This also happens after pushing the tadpole and "leveling" it up due to use.

On the other hand you have a system that typically limits how often you can rest, and was used to replenish resources after difficult or long encounters. Handing out too many rests, lessens the difficulty of resource management and reduces the reason to have short rest and other resource replenishments based on short resting.

So if limited long rests were required, it would make resources more important (supply and demand, less "supply" of long rests, more value/demand of it)....but it would hinder story development....unless long rests are only provided "upon" triggering a plot point in the game. So only after you use the tadpole in a conversation and advanced the story past the goblins or found a new ally, or completed a quest. That way story development can still happen as required and resting is reliant on advancing the story.

Otherwise, arbitrary limits would have a domino effect/tug of war on the two mechanics.

Come back to the exhausted mechanic....if you advance too many stories you become fatigued and it becomes harder to keep going. Should there be a reward for pushing through the story though for players who better micro manage resources? Or should efficiency be punished?

Probably the best method would be to copy the mechanics from PoE2.
Most spells had a limited to "per combat" , rest was mainly used to heal and restore some of the limited resources (although they didn't matter too much).
Maybe it's not too in the spirit of D&D, but it would fix so many problems with the game. It seems to me that players aren't very used to limited resources these days.
With the current game project, rest won't be too limited anyway.
Currently, rest look more like it was implemented by force.

I want to be optimistic and say the fatigue mechanic either isn't properly implemented yet or simply is disabled for the first iteration of early access so Larian can get in-depth feedback about how the players handle individual encounters when they have access to all of their spells and abilities.

The pessimist inside me fears that exhaustion will be completely removed outside of spells like Sickening Radiance and that you'll be free to rest as much as you want to.
With Larian's talk about contemplating adding a loaded dice option for lower difficulties to help new players ease into the D&D mechanics, I imagine they'd also either remove exhaustion or heavily tone it down on lower difficulty levels.

Whatever might happen I just hope that the full release of the game won't make you feel like you're forced to rest because of arbitrarily defined metrics. Personally I like to attempt to go for as long as possible without resting since I like having to be mindful of health and spell slots (as opposed to just resting after every encounter) but in the current version of BG3 this means that I, apparently, miss out on a lot of companion dialogue since the companion quests only progress when you rest in a camp.

If I said mana would it be considered sacrilege?

Yes, that's one of the other issues. Missing out companion interactions because you want to push your limits in terms of resource management feels like you have to choose between challenge and story. And it's a bad design in my opinion.

You would probably be burned at the stake