Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback [SPOILERS] Idea for introducing urgency to the story

If this was already suggested in detail, please ignore.

So now that patch 3 released (I'm loving it btw; thanks for listening) and we now got 2 short rests per long rest, instead of one, I'm still concerned about the urgency/time pressure of the story or whatever you want to call it. Basically, as has been discussed before, the tadpole doesn't actually feel like a problem, since we are not showing any signs of ceremorphosis.
Since important role play moments, story pieces, and opportunities to develop relationships with your companions are all still happening at camp, I am now even more concerned than before the patch. You can basically decide if you want to really roleplay, and rest as little as possible in order to not turn into a mindflayer, or develop realionships with companions, etc.

My idea for introducing some sense of urgency to the story is to add actual consequences if you rest too often. Specifically, it could be done so that every long rest (above a certain threshold, of course) makes it more difficult to "be good". For example, at the scence where Minthara is at the gates of the druid grove, where she commands you to betray Zevlor: if you wanted to resist, but you have rested too often (and therefore allowed the tadpole to grow more powerful) there will be a wisdom saving throw. The DC gets slightly higher every time you rest. If you fail, you cannot do the "good thing" and have to obey the absolute.

What are your thoughts on this? Any ideas on how to improve on this? Or do you have a completely different suggestion?

Only if it was a very high threshold - so high that you could see all the story/relationship beats before the penalties kick in. Otherwise you're making players choose between exploring major aspects of the game or maintaining their agency. Also it would disproportionately penalize good-aligned (or, at least, non-Absolute-aligned) characters.

The best way to solve the urgency problem, IMHO, is either to decouple story/relationship beats from long resting, or to make it more clear earlier on that you have more time than you think.

Long resting at will really isn't D&D though. It's a kind of lazy way of improving balance for spellcasters too instead of fixing AC/HP issues.

Maybe the path of least resistance is to go the opposite route. Instead of adding urgency and punishments, get rid of it. Make it so we can talk to our companions and we all come to realize the ceremorphosis isn't taking place sooner in the story. What if we come to realize we've been on the ship a few days from the time we are infected with the tadpole to the time we manage to escape. When we are meeting our companions, those like Gale and Lae'zel can mention how it's odd we aren't turning already, and something is definitely off about the situation. Maybe even add a line from Gale about how he would like to of course get the tadpole out as soon as possible, but we don't seem to be in any danger of actually turning. The goal of this being to give hints to the player that they don't need to rush. Make the companions encourage the player to long rest, not yell at them for it (especially the first time you decide to rest). Hell, to add to this, give more dialog barks from the companions wanting to rest for the day. Give companions who have no features or spells left the eyelash icon from the original Baldur's Gate series. A visual reminder that the characters need to rest.

I like all of dreambled's suggestions. They'd have the added benefit of reinforcing the relationship between PC and companions - if you go along with their suggestions and take more long rests, you'll get to know them better and advance their personal storylines; if you go your own way, it'll be much harder to befriend them.

Some good ideas here, although I did like the dialogue with Lae'zel about not wasting time resting, it fits her personality. :P The rest or rush needs to definitely be thought out better. I wish they would rethink the lack of night/day cycle, this would really help to figure out when to rest, no matter what time of day you prefer to do things.

That's a basic problem of all RPGs which give you some sort of very urgent task for the main quest.
Normally people would directly go to solve the problem, as it IS urgent, but modern RPGs go much more for doing side quests and exploring and anything but the main task. Regardless if it's Witcher's find and save Ciri, Skyrim's "Dude, you need to stop the dragon problem".
But if you would go for the urgent task directly (unless it directly tells you to get much stronger before doing so, but then it wouldn't be that urgent anyway) afterwards there would often be no real interest in going on and doing other things instead.
That would only work if the urgent "main-quest" was designed to be only the initial part.

It does fit Lae'zel, but it would also fit Lae'zel to dump the party and go off on her own if you don't make tracks directly to what's-his-name, then to the githyanki patrol, then to the creche. The fact that she hangs around no matter how much time you waste exploring and questing is a problem much like the urgency one.

It worked in Kingmaker.

It is a really big disconnect for me in most games where the rush issue is supposed to be personal, this is why I always download alternate start mods when possible (FO4, Skyrim.) In this game you even have other npcs telling you to hurry up. Coupling this with having no visual cues telling you when you "should" be tired makes it worse. As the player I know that doing everything else but the main quest will get me stronger, as my character I would not know this. Having us know sooner that the situation is less urgent would help I think, but a day/night cycle would still be useful for the visual indicator.


Agreed. If you never recruit her, she goes off on her own (journal told me she got killed looking for her people). However if we find out sooner that we don't need to rush so much, it would make a bit more sense for her to stay with us

It worked so well that you can find complaints about time restrictions in the forums. I don't remember any other game that actually had them, much less any AAA games.
Serious time restrictions don't suit games.

Especially games that are full to the brim with loot containers that you need to check one by one.

My first play through I got to the Tiefling celebration having used long rest twice, one of those being due to not knowing how to leave camp otherwise and I wanted to swap a companion. Given that the story progression is tied to resting, they actually need to direct you to rest more. The number of encounters are definitely low for 5E's expectations, before you consider how plentiful food, potions, and other consumables are.