Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Mega-threads and Guides Camping and resting.

As many mentioned, long rest, shall be divided into 2 different camp:

-Outside :
*Keep the current camp scene
*Moderate/Low chance to get ambushed while sleeping
*Consume rations/food (also food shall not recover HP, this will make the use of them)

-Inside (cave, dungeon, etc)
*Separate scene with the current environment or just a campfire on ground
*High chance to get ambushed while sleeping
*Consume rations/food


This shall be the basics of long rest. They could even add more encounters chance, based on the more you rest (can be based on the fact your tadpole attracts monsters).

First let me just link this other, non-mega thread. It's highly relevant. Maybe it should be merged in, I dunno, but for anyone big on this Mega-thread's topic this other thread is worth reading. https://forums.larian.com/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=680197#Post680197

Now then.

It is a general rule of gaming that if a player can do something without any in-game time passing, no game-world progression, then they should be able to do it without spending any real world time either. Both as a handy dandy QoL feature, and also because there's just no basis for players to not be able to do that instantly.
If you can stand there and manually stort your inventory for an hour without anything happening in game, no passage of time, then the game should just provide an autosort button that does it for you, instead of wasting your time.

So let's say we limit long resting to designated locations. Campsite (entrances) on the map.
If a player standing 10 feet from a highly dangerous cave boss but undetected can turn around, leave the cave, walk to the nearest fast travel point, teleport across the map, walk to the campsite, long rest, do that journey in reverse, then attack the boss after, with the rest of the world being in the same state as it was before they left, limiting camping to that location has had absolutely NO effect. It has done nothing. It has addressed zero problems. The game is in an identical state to how it was before that change. All of the issues causing people to ask for changes to how long resting works will still be in full effect. The only minimal effect is wasting a couple minutes of real time that shouldn't have been wasted.

So, if the player is able to do that, then they shouldn't have to. They should just be able to click a long rest button to do it instantly while standing next to that cave boss. And to be clear, when the player does that, they are not teleporting to camp, nor are they camping right there. They are making the whole long trip described above; the game is just letting you skip the "cutscene". So really, it shouldn't even effect your immersion. Either way the fact remains, location dependent long rests are in no way a solution to any of the problems, since it won't have any affect on them whatsoever.

Another idea discussed, equally as useless as location dependent camping, is adding a real time delay to doing another long rest. Once per hour, or once per in game day/night cycle (that doesn't actually progress time in any fashion) are both examples I've seen. Similar to how a player that wants to rest whenever they want can go back to camp with location based resting, a player can just let the game idle until the timer wears off for delayed resting. Rather than the round trip from and to that cave boss, they will just afk and go make dinner or play a game on their Switch or whatever while the timer ticks down so they can take the rest right next to that boss. The idea accomplishes nothing.

But something does need to be done about the long rest problem. As it stands, there is no point in Warlocks existing, since Wizards can use every single one of their spell slots every single fight. There are numerous other examples of why what we currently have is bad but I feel like that's the most glaring.
If you were to attack the goblin camp, instead of getting the ability to walk through peacfully, you would realisticly *have* to do it all in one day. I have not done this so I'm not sure how many separate combat bubbles that would split into but for the sake of discussion let's say the gaps in clusters are big enough to make it 4 seperate fights. I'm taking these coming numbers from DnD class pages so unless they changed in game a level 4 (level cap as of this posting) Warlock only gets 2 level 2 spell slots, and a Wizard gets 7 slots 3 of which are level 2. With our current abilty to long rest whenever we want the Wizard can cast 7 spells every fight for 28 total, 12 of which are at level 2. 28 spells for a set of fights that would have had to have been all in one day. And the Warlock only gets to cast 8 spells, losing not only in total count but in count of highest level as well, which is supposed to be their thing. Using short rests, my expectation would be to see that averaged out Warlocks and Wizards cast the same number of spells per fight, but instead we get the stated numbers. As far as I'm concerned this dynamic alone serves as absolute proof the current system requires changing. There are HUGE balance concerns here.

I'm low on time so I'm not about to type out a long winded attempt at solving the issue but the gist of it seems rather obvious to me: players should not be able to long rest whenever they want. And more imporantly, the restriction on when they can rest needs to be not a real-world restriction, but rather an game-world restriction. A restriction that requires the game world to actually progress in some manner before the player can rest again. A simple example would be needing to get through X amount of fights before the long rest function unlocks again, but I'm not actually proposing that as a solitary solution since not all days or fights are equal. Some days a party would indeed only do the one fight, and other days it's the four fight's of the goblin camp.

I think for the sake of simplicity there should simply be ‘zones’ where you cannot long rest, until all enemies are cleared. For instance the goblin village, the underdark, any large dungeon or tower etc. That makes those regions more challenging, and short rests and other resources become far more valuable (spell slots, scrolls, potions etc). No different to the bandit camps or subjugated villages in Witcher 3 – you can’t meditate until the area is ‘safe’ which is often marked by villagers returning etc.

Sure, you can run your ass back out and find somewhere that you can long rest, but if you head back in you’d better be sure you’re ready.

I would suggest reactivity in the world. Something like:

1. After getting to the grove, if you long rest five or more time then the ritual is complete. The tieflings are cast out and the grove is forever closed. Maybe you find dead tiefling bodies every so often. "Goblin gotcha?"

2. If you go somewhere like the goblin camp and attack then retreat to go long rest... when you return the goblin camp is reactive. There are more guards, they're more vigilant, maybe the leaders have gotten together in conference which would make them harder to confront. People coming in are questioned more fully.

That sort of thing. Make the world progress in measurable ways as the long rests continue.

+1 for world reactivity.
For your grove example, there should definitely be some sign that the ritual is progressing. Louder chanting, magical effects appearing, dialogue changes. That'd be super cool.

I think Darkest Dungeon has a very good System.

1. Every profession has unique Camping Skills.

Some enhance the dmg for next fights. (sharpen weapons)
Another heals (clerics)
boost morale (jester aka bard)
reduce the chance for ramdom attack (dog master at watch)
etc. ...

2. Small Rest aka Camping is a commitment which cost resources.

You have 2 stacks firewood and rations which use inventory space.
People have hunger and need rations or the moral drops
you can eat rations for little hitpoints
you use rations for resting for the bigger effect

With such a system Darkest Dungeon has no need for dedicated healers.
Healers are strong in the camp when they can heal for big Chunks but not infight.

The whole system is very immersive and a constant consideration between possibilities.

Divinity Original Sin was amazing! The combat was fluid, and I highly recommend sticking with that combat mechanic.

I loved the way you had a set number of action points each turn to attack cast spells, etc (as well as more powerful abilities that could only be used once or twice per combat). In Baulder's Gate however, you have zealously enforced D&D long/short rests as a mandatory mechanic which makes combat and resting feel VERY tedious.

I get that resting IS an important mechanic in tabletop D&D, but in a game it's just... boring.

You can keep the D&D flavor of the world and setting (which I love), and encourage visiting your camp for the story line elements already in the game, but go back to the Divinity Original Sin 2 action point system and eliminate "resting" all together.

We should still have a "Go to Camp" option to regroup, heal up, chat with companions, craft, etc, which would be voluntarily used, but it shouldn't be mandatory to regain your spells / abilities. It's much too tedious.

As it stands now, I would rename the game to "Baldur's Long & Short Rest".

You have the game mechanics perfect in Divinity Original Sin 2. Don't throw that system away. Take that combat, and throw it into the D&D universe, and pow! You've got yourself an amazing D&D game that has the Larian Studio's flavor that we all love!

You aren't *supposed* to be long resting after every fight.
More to the point, you aren't supposed to use everything you have in every fight.
A key element of DnD's design, which is of course what this game is advertised as emulating, is that you going into fights thinking that you don't want to use all your spell slots or whatever because you want to save them for the next fight you'll get in without them replenshing.
Resting doesn't ruin the flow of the game, it's meant to be a vital component of the flow of the game.
To remove that element, which to be clear is already the effect we have with the ability to long rest whenever we want, would completely destroy the class balance.
If they remove resting that will destroy so much what is being taken from DnD that they would have to change it so heavily that they could no longer advertise this as being a DnD based game. It couldn't even be said to be in a DnD universe.
Regardless of all that, Divinity's combat and "perfect" do not belong in the same sentence, unless placed around the phrase "is not"

I just have a problem with Long Rest being essential for certain dialogue and characters saying they need to rest because there is a dialogue to trigger. This has caused me to long rest, run through Blighted Village, no fights, and suddenly a party member wants to call it a day...WITH A TADPOLE IN YOUR HEAD. Nope. Not believable.

I think the following about resting:

1. 2 short for every long.
2. 2 long rests a day, not 1. Days are too short for people with tadpoles in their heads and long rests are like 8 hours in D&D, not a whole day.
3. Long rest changes day to night or night to day so we can move about by night, allowing us to sneak better into the gobbo camp for example.
4. Food is ONLY able to be used during resting to heal, either short or long. Every HP you heal requires a food or drink item. This makes food different from potions, making then both more important for different reasons.
5. Give us Hit Dice like 5e is supposed to have. I need to heal 10 HP, I roll d8, I get a 5, I eat 5 apples or maybe 1 cheese wheel, I decide to spend a second hit dice, I roll a 7, I'm fully healed and consume a pitcher of water, or something like that.
6. If you rest outside of camp, you risk a random encounter. The more dangerous the area, the greater the risk. Perception checks are rolled if encounter triggered to see if surprised.
7. Limit Fast Travel so that if you are unable to safely get to a Waypoint rune you can't fast travel. This way, I'm not short resting in a hostile gobbo lair or teleporting to camp and back right in the middle of the base somehow getting past tons of enemies. Thus, short resting in a dangerous place might actually be a necessity. Find a corner and hope they don't find you.
8. Stop using "I'm tired, let's call it a day" to let people know a dialogue can be triggered. Instead, just have the dialogues able to be triggered in some sort of order. Whenever you go to camp, if dialogues are available the exclamation appears. With 2 long rests a day and dangerous resting outside of camp, players will be forced to camp more often to trigger dialogue. Even short resting in camp would be safe so people might go to camp for short rests too.

wait wait what? Is *that* why the ambient "I need to rest" lines are spoken?
I thought those just occured if their health was low?
That's the only time I've noticed them.

I think it would be cool to just make spell-slot/long-rest-ability recovery cost inspiration points. Those points can then be refilled at temples/shrines/inns via "donations". Solving quests awards inspiration points. Obviousy those points can only be spent outside of combat.

Being downed in combat incurs fatigue, fatigue can only be restored by resting. Likewise you can only consume a limited number of food between rests to restore health. Fatigue in turn decreases movement pointss/acrobatics/athletics.

Resting in itself does not recover spell slots, but costs rations. During rests you can either heal or recover a very limited number of inspiration points. Story-related rests do not cost rations and can be triggered by talking to the relevant companion.

That way you decouple health recovery from spell-slot recovery which imho is the crux on why resting is so difficult to balance. It also gives more control for "world-building" spells such speak-to animals/dead and the like.

Resting as is works fine for vanilla DnD where the DM can regulate the flow of the game, for a video game I feel as if more granularity is needed IMHO.

All this could be conveniently explained into the DND rule-set with the tadpoles.

Bonus: add some flavor items which restore a number of inspiration points. Different companions like different items.
Double-Bonus: Resting slowly resets vendor attitude. Vendor attitude increases by buying items from the vendor.
Tripple-Bonus: Some quests are timed and resting gradually reduces inspiration/money earned.

Yes. I didn't notice it at first, but after lots of playthroughs and such, I discovered that every time they say they're tired it is because of a dialogue being triggered that you can go to camp and speak with someone about. It may not even be the character who said they were tired.

I first noticed this when I had done a long rest, ran through Blighted Village, and got to the crossroads north of the town. I didn't fight at all. Just ran through town. Suddenly, Shadowheart said, "I'm exhausted. Can we call it a day?" I thought. That's odd. I just did a long rest and ran through town. There is no reason to end the day right now. I ended day, and sure enough, I think it was Gale had something to say to me with an exclamation point over his head. I tested it out multiple times. It's ridiculous. If they say they're tired, or your character says he's tired, that means someone wants to say something to you at camp.

It's particularly dumb when Shadowheart says she's tired, you go to camp, and she says, "Why are we doing this? We have a tadpole in our heads. We need to find a healer." When that happened, I thought. "You're the one who said you were tired and needed to rest for the day. Now you're asking me why we're doing this?"

It's also stupid because you have a tadpole in your head and everyone is telling you that you can turn into a mind flayer if you take too long. So, when I first played through the game, I thought, "I'm not resting if at all possible. I'm not going to end the day. I'm in a race against time. If I can push on, I'm going to." Thus, when I learned I missed out on tons of dialogue because I hardly long rested, I was pretty upset.

Long rest and conversations need to be untied. I don't mind it if it's at camp, but then you need to give me reasons to go to camp to trigger the convos. If I can only short rest and long rest safely at camp, then I'm going to go to camp more. Still, if I'm racing against time and every day counts, at least make it so that a long rest is like it was meant to be in tabletop D&D. It is equal to about 8-10 hours. Short rests are supposed to be about 1-3 hours. So if I adventure for 30 minutes, short rest, adventure another 30 minutes, short rest, that's like maybe 4-6 hours of the day. Then a long rest would be about 8 hours, now I'm at 12-14 hours. Night time. Let me travel around by night, fight a battle or two, short rest, do some more, short rest, do some more, long rest. Now it's morning. That's my suggestion. That makes a whole lot more sense.

Now look at how many times I might have gone to camp to trigger dialogue conversations. If I know that I might get attacked if I short rest in the wild, I'm going to go to camp more to safely rest. If I'm not in a super dangerous area, a fast travel to camp even for a short rest, isn't that big a deal gameplay-wise.


I disagree about spell-slot/long-rest recovery costing inspiration points. This is 5e rule breaking and presents lots of other balance issues if you do this. Inspiration points are for rerolls only. Resting is classic D&D spell slot recovery. Refilling Inspiration at temples and such, especially with fast travel, would only allow mages to be SO much more powerful, thus throwing off the balance. Resting to recover spell slots is meant to be limiting to prevent OP mages. Plus, Inspiration points are supposed to be for good roleplaying only, as a reward for doing well in the game, thus giving you the ability to reroll for important moments, etc.

Fatigue in the game would be more true to D&D 5e rules. If you don't regularly eat and drink and rest you would suffer fatigue. If Larian implemented a fatigue system, then food would not be needed to heal. You could just do away with food healing at all. It would then be specifically for preventing fatigue or removing it. This is what it was meant to be in D&D anyway, not hp recovery. So, in my book, that would be way better anyway, more meaningful and realistic and would create a bigger difference between potions and food. It would give food a bigger purpose, which was the reason I suggested making food only recover HP in camp. Add a fatigue system, and do away with food recovering HP. I'm good with that.

I do agree, though, that they should implement consequences for wasting time. If you take too long to attack the goblins, for example, they just show up at the druid's grove and start attacking. Things like that. This could easily be implemented with what I said: 2 long rests equal a day, not 1. After you long rest like 10 times, 5 days, the goblins show up and attack. Something like that would create more of a race against time element that would keep players on their toes and keep them from abusing the rest system to recover after every single battle.

But ultimately, we HAVE to uncouple the dialogue/story/character development aspect from long rests. It's ridiculous to have a character hardly do anything and then say they need to rest just so they can spark a conversation. I've literally had sessions where I adventured for 5 minutes and suddenly they want to end the day. Dumb.

So much this. Let companions talk to us on the road, or implement short rests where your party sets up a little camp wherever you are right then, and you can talk to companions then.

And Larian needs to do something about the conflict between tadpole urgency and resting. If they really really need us to rest and get that cutscene showing that the danger isn't as immediate as we suspected, then find a better way to force it. Give our characters levels of exhaustion (we were just kidnapped, put in vats, implanted with tadpoles, fought our way out, and then fell out of a ship), or in the Gale/Lae'zel introduction scene have one of our characters hear a horde of goblins approaching and heavily imply we need to find a place to lay low for hours, or something.

As it is now, like GM4Him, in my first playthrough I tried my best not to rest, thinking that there was some sort of time pressure. I first rested significantly after leaving the Grove, which resulted in the game never showing me that "hey, we're not all turning into mindflayers!" scene, so I continued rest as little as possible. This resulted in me missing even more cutscenes/dialogue.

Sorry, totally against an exhaustion system in this game. I mean it is fine in games like XCOM2 where you have a bunch of soldiers to work with when your others become "wounded" or "exhausted", but in this game, with these few companions it would be terrible. Can't say that I ever had an issue of not camping to see the rest scenes. That is a new one. I mean after a few battles, you have to to get your short rests recharged. Not to mention, I was pretty sure they weren't going to make the main character a mindflayer in the first chapter.

In D&D 5e, resting removes exhaustion. In PnP a long rest only removes a single level of exhaustion, but I'd be fine with Larian homebrewing that it removes 2 or all levels. You wouldn't have to go without any companions, because you'd simply rest and everyone would be fighting fit again.

In the post you're quoting, I'm not arguing for an "exhaustion system." I'm arguing for a specific instance of scripted exhaustion that incentives resting for the first time, so that the game ~ensures you get that resting cutscene. Assuming that Larian wasn't "going to make the main character a mindflayer in the first chapter" is a metagaming, not in-game, reason to rest.

And it's not really true that after a few battles you have to get your short rests recharged. With food and scrolls, you can go a very long time before actually needing to rest.

I just can't see any way that a real resting "penalty" that is true to DnD rules could be implemented that isn't awkard or forbiddingly resource-consuming, since the PnP solution itself feels like a crutch. It allready implies characters "meditating" or "preparing" spells while resting. All my suggestion does is put it into a currency a video game can understand. I don't think the inspiration thing would make mages OP because it still costs the players money and actual game time.
The POE/Pathfinder-Kingmaker solution to resting (basically rations) was a worthy attempt at making resting meaningful, it just ultimatively fizzled because it was incredibly difficult to balance/tune the cost/frequency of them. Diversifying this system feels like a decent way to improve on that. I could live without temples/inns but it would create a scenario where a player could get stuck and would have to backtrack.

I also think that adding "deadlines" to a videogame that doesn't even have a day/night cycle opens such a giant can of worms in terms of making the campaign feel coherent. How do you f.e. communicate the different time-limits in a way that isn't awkward at best and frustrating at worst? How do you differentiate between quests which are supposed to just "feel urgent" (tadpoles) and ones that have actual deadlines? It is a whole lot of work/Q&A to implement and IMHO can't really be simply tacked onto a game without a boatload of redesign and you are ALWAYS bound to miss something. Just take a look at EA and the amount of work still left to do with filling in all the blank spots in reactivity. Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see a game suceed in doing it - I just think it is reeeeeeally hard to do. Kingmaker had a system which sort of simulated the passing of time and basically had to engineer the entire campaign around it.


In the same vein I think adding "time"-based fatigue is really tough to pull off in an RPG in a meaningful, fun way. Again, POE had an exhaustion system similar to the one you are proposing and tbh, it didn't really add anything and at best amplified the use of rest-spamming. The only reason why I am even bringing up exhaustion as a possible mechanic is because during some of my playthroughs I had characters downed 3 times during a fight to the point of it feeling like cheese to keep an enemy in place.


I sort of agree, but I can understand why larian is handling it like that as a story vehicle because it is the only place where you can get all characters together and you can control the environment. Maybe all it needs is a line like "Lets get back to camp and I will explain" to make it feel less dumb. You wouldn't have to end the day, just return to camp.

Agree with all of this. I can see maybe adding fatigue and food not healing as a menu option though, as some people (not me) seem to like the current unbalanced system a lot. I would still prefer a system with one long rest per day and 2? short rests (not sure what is usual for this) but resting would be a lot less confusing if they could add a day/night cycle. Characters should definitely be able to talk to us at any point rather than just at camp.

They added a slight bit more suggesting that we aren't going to turn into mindflayers but it is still not enough imo. None of this new stuff would make me feel comfortable just taking my time doing whatever. I still only rested because I knew I would miss dialogue with companions, not because I wanted to. I would think most people would still want to find someone to remove this unwelcome tadpole as soon as possible since it does not belong. Perhaps they should add something implying that the tadpoles cannot be removed at all and we have to deal with them.

I had no need to use short rests on anyone except my warlock. I as the player obviously knew we wouldn't turn into mindflayers, but my characters would not have this information and most of them wouldn't just believe someone saying this to them. Even if I was playing an idiot character who believed everything they were told, I still would not find myself needing to rest as often as the game seems to expect us to for companion dialogue.

That would be a good idea if they can't decouple dialogue from camp.

For the tadpole urgency vs long rest disconnect, I think there should be more in-game justifications via story/dialog that make resting seem at least somewhat sensible.

Instead of basically doing nothing for us, Nettie, Halsin, Ethel, Priestess Gut, Minthara etc should all have dialog that suggests that they've actually slowed down the ceremorphosis process somehow, even if only temporarily. The more often we rest right now, the clearer it becomes that whatever the normal ceremorphosis timeline is supposed to be, its clearly not working in the same way for the party. But that could also be revealed through the main story beats.

I feel like that would be more interesting than "We need to find a healer!" and then every healer we find can't actually do anything for us. Instead of just perpetually punting the permanent solution to the tadpole prob, the various NPCs we meet along the way should actually step in with some magic or witchery that's ostensibly buying us extra time and affording us opportunities to rest more normally. I liked the idea from earlier posts about having set-piece story occasions to rest after first entering the Druid Grove, or the Goblin camp, or after Waukeen's Rest and the like. Maybe internal dialog that suggests that the tadpole has gone dormant 'for a time' or that resting for now is safe, after interacting with the NPCs who were presented to us as possible solutions. The Nautiloid doesn't even touch on resting as a thing, since it has those recharging pods in every other room and Lae'zel is in a hurry. But something should definitely happen by the time the party has reached the druid grove or the goblin camp to make periodic resting seem logical, even with the worm in our brains.

Agreed, I guess it is mostly the amount of exposition tossed at the player in such short a timeframe without proper introduction of the resting mechanic which causes the large disconnect. If Larian can adjust the pacing a bit more I think things would be a lot less awkward.

had posted the thoughts below in a related thread about day/night cycle, but also wanted to include here as it impacts camping/resting - and i do agree with other posters, that some work on these mechanics would go a long way when the game ultimately launches