Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Resting system.

Ultimately, if you think about it, what is the big deal about letting people long rest as much as they want - provided that the story doesn't call for you to NOT long rest often?

I liked Kingmaker rest system because it gave you the ability to long rest as much as you wanted, BUT you always knew that you were on a time table. If you didn't manage your resources well, you'd mess yourself over in the long run.

The issue I have with unlimited long rests in BG3 is that you are, like kingmaker, on a time table. Yes, eventually people are like, "Oh, the tadpole isn't changing you as fast as it should," but YOU STILL HAVE A WIGGLING ALIEN TADPOLE IN YOUR BRAIN THAT WILL EVENTUALLY TURN YOU INTO A GRUESOME MONSTER IN AN UNSPEAKABLY HORRIBLE MANNER. So, if you take too many long rests, it is only logical that things should start happening in the game to discourage your from continuing to long rest so much. You should start showing symptoms of changing or the ritual should show signs that it's nearing completion or the goblins should find the grove again and raid it or the githyanki should not just sit there at the bridge waiting for you to show up but they come find you suddenly and ambush you at Moonhaven or wherever you are, or the tieflings should get restless and steal the idol again or SOMEthing.

But whatever. You know, I've come to terms with this one. Neverwinter let you long rest with a little processing please wait popup after every fight, and no D&D game has yet to develop a truly smart and fun rest system. So, if they don't do anything different with this, it won't break the game. Do I think they could make it better and more fun? Absolutely. It isn't an impossible task to make the rest system intelligent and fun at the same time.

I still think the absolute best approach is to treat it like you are the DM of a tabletop experience. Players can do whatever the frick they want in tabletop, but the DM provides consequences for abusing any system. If you long rest too much, make complications happen. Food and camping supplies management, overall, is boring. It is, to me, a secondary band aid fix. I'll put up with it, but ultimately, as a DM, I know that players typically don't like to micro-manage food and supplies. They like to glaze over that aspect of RPGing. I don't need to tell them, "You just picked up 6 apples, 4 pies, 3 racks of ribs, and a partridge in a pear tree. Oh, and there were 4 forks and 8 knives as well." They'd kill me if I did that to them everywhere they went to explore.

No, as a DM, and it would work well with video games too, this should be glazed over. It is assumed they are finding food and such unless they are in some desolate wasteland and resources are scarce. Then and only then might the DM apply some sort of survival aspect to the game, and even then it is usually handled via a Survival skill check.

So how does a DM handle resting in a tabletop session? They say, "You can't do that here," if there in some dangerous location like a hostile goblin camp or in a hag's lair, and they say, "Well, because you slept three days, the ritual came to a conclusion and the tieflings were booted out of the grove and you can't access it now," after several warnings that they'd best not rest too much or there are going to be consequnces. That's how D&D is played. DMs who let players just long rest infinitely when they are on some sort of time table story-wise are not DMing well. The whole point of an RPG is to create an alternate reality that people can escape to. It is fantastic in many ways, but there are still logical, realistic rules set up to make the world more real and immersive. There needs to be some explanation for things that don't line up with reality. "I let you long rest 8 times, allowing 8 days to pass, but the ritual is still not finished." "Why? How?" the player asks. "You slipped into a time warp and went back in time 3 times," the DM replies. "Ah,"says the player. "That explains it. But where did the time warp come from?" "The magical artifact you are carrying... perhaps..." says the DM.

At least that's explaining why you can long rest for 20 days in the game and nothing happens. Everyone and everything is still in the same place having the same conversations.

People don't like time constraints, no matter how forgiving they are. Many people will feel compelled to rush, which spoils the gaming experience.
Personally, I don't want any time limits, I like to play the way I want and not be forced to choose the most optimal path or worse, intentionally have to avoid certain areas as long as possible just to not run some script that starts the timer.
Fortunately, game developers know that time limits are not popular and do not try to force them into games.
People didn't like Kingsmaker time constraints (most of them at least) which ended up with WotR literally having one time quest.

I swear, as soon as I say consequences to taking too many long rests, people immediately assume I'm talking about quests with time constraints. I'm not talking about the typical, "If you don't do this quest in 3 days time the quest locks you out and you can't complete it, so move your butt or else," kind of thing.

I'm talking about standard DM logic. I, as a DM, would never want to lock players out of story quests and such. However, if they abuse long rests, I might make things slightly more complicated for them because they were doing things which didn't make sense in terms of the story.

Here's an example outside of BG3 of what I mean. Diadell and her companions learn that there will be a meeting between a lacky of a crime boss and a dwarf who is looking to pick up his money from a job he did. The meeting is to take place that evening, at midnight. In between, Diadell and her companions ran into a few fights, and they don't want to go to that meeting with next to no HP and spells. So, they decide to long rest. "Screw it," says Diadell. "If we miss the meeting, we miss the meeting. I'm not risking it."

So, not wanting the players to miss out on that opportunity, I, the DM, have an NPC friend of theirs arrive at the inn the next morning. "You aren't going to believe this," the NPC says. "I was in the slums at the meeting site where that lacky of the crime boss was supposed to meet with that dwarf who did that one job. There was a rival gang fight, and the whole thing was botched. Looks like the meeting is rescheduled for tonight. Thought you might like to know."

Suddenly, though they did something that should have messed them over so they couldn't complete the side quest, I, the DM, made it so that something happened to explain why that certain thing didn't fall through and so that they know they could still complete the quest. However, because of the rival gang fight, as a consequence for not going, I make it so that there are more gang members at the spot because they are expecting that there could be more rival gang trouble. Whereas initially, the encounter might have been easy, I make it slightly - SLIGHTLY mind you - harder to compensate for the fact that they decided to long rest. I originally built the encounter expecting that they would be weaker, so it wouldn't have been as tough. Now, however, because I know they are going to be tougher since they long rested, I increase the difficulty of the fight to make the battle more fun and rewarding.

Right now, the issue is that long rests in the game without consequences like this make every fight easier. That's not how good DMing works. If the players are going to long rest frequently, then there needs to be some sort of complications and such that make up for the fact that they decided to reset all their HP and spells and such.

Yeah, that's because many people couldn't spot a good mechanical design if it was sitting on their sternum and taking a massive dump.

It was the same with XCOM 2 and " suffocating timers". They made the game better in at least a half dozen ways, made the encounters and goals far more interesting AND they were trivially easy to disable entirely for the tossers who didn't want them, but hell if that ever stopped people from bitching night and day about them.

Man! I love XCOM 2 precisely because of the time limits. They made the game more exciting. And you could save as many times as you wanted so if eventually you messed yourself over, you could go back to a previous save and start back up from where you think you could fix it. But the point of the timers was that it was exciting, it kept you on the edge of your seat, and it made the game more challenging.

Now, that said, I do like to be able to explore RPG maps. But I don't think any of us is talking about having such time constraints that players feel like they can't explore maps in this game. We're just talking about having things happen when people abuse the system

I understand exactly what you mean. I mean, people that are unhappy about how LRs function in the game are completely free to use them as they see fit, and yet, here we are, right? So what's the real issue? Well, those "tossers" might abuse it, right? So it's nothing but "but someone else might do this, and I don't like it". Is it ironic that you provide the simplest solution of all to this game breaking issue, that I wouldn't even be aware of if I didn't read the forums, in the very post I quoted right here? If you don't like it, don't use it.

Nah, this is a bullshit comparison that misses completely the point.
Not only these two examples aren't actually similar but they are pretty much antithetical.

One is a rule that improves the game mechanically, by defining very clear rules and limits into the system. People can just sidestep it if they don't want to engage with it, by disabling it at the very beginning of a playthrough or even modding it out of the game.
The other is a BROKEN mechanic that (according to you) people could just choose to not abuse if they can self-impose restrictions on their playstyle.

Conceptually It's like purposefully adding to the game broken, overpowered equipment and then just claim "Who cares if it breaks any resemblance of balance, you can just use weaker items instead". Which is bloody stupid.

Incidentally, I DO NOT abuse the LR system. In fact, I rest as little as possible in general, regardless of how much the game regulates the mechanic. I think I've already gone through the EA at least twice by using something like three or four long rests IN TOTAL.
That doesn't mean that I have to like a half-assed, abusable system only because I can choose to not abuse it.

We already talked about this dozens of times in the past year, anyway, but the "TL;DR " is that "If you don't like it, don't use it" is pretty much the stupidest argument that can be made when it comes to discussion core mechanics and balance.
A game is pretty much defined by its rules and limitations. What you get when you ignore or sidestep them can be at best described as a toy.

I say that because I've actually done it. If I didn't read the forums, I wouldn't know there was an issue with LRs, because I wasn't even doing them often enough to get all the tadpole interactions I should be getting, let alone all of the comp story beats that are possible.

Regarding "core mechanics and balance", what are the settings for higher difficulties than Normal? I assume you must know, since you're railing against something that's existing in what could likely be the second most easy setting in the game. But hey, there's another thread complaining about speaking with some squirrels, and they're just silly "Disney squirrels". Does this mean that "don't talk to them" is a stupid argument too? You're in a SP game, what Joe Casual is doing is irrelevant. Set up some rules for MP, most assuredly do that. Make things harder in higher difficulties, that's a given. But when we're discussing what equates to EZ Mode? Nope, that's a control issue, not a game issue. I play my cRPGs on the highest difficulty I can. Going in on Normal shows me how easy the games could really be if I didn't want to be assed to push myself, and yet, never have I come to a game's forum saying "EZ Mode needs to be fixed, it's too easy".

The game should definitely challenge us and make rest available / unavailable at some points.
This does not prevent your biggest friend Joe Casual to spam LR by another mechanic.

We thought about this in the wrong way IMO.

What most of us wants with the resting system is some kind of challenge. Not restrictions so Joe cannot spam if he wants. One does not prevent the other.

The game should tell us when we can and when we cannot rest. If we consider the supply system, it does not prevent Joe to buy food at merchants and stack it at camp if he want to.

But I still don't have any kind of mechanical restrictions in the game with the amount of food we can find everywhere.

Restrictions is exactly why games have rules.
Players cannot ask Joe to play how they would like him to play... But you cannot ask players to create their own rules with core mechanics in a game.

They could restrict food availability at higher difficulties or as a separate toggle in the options for people who like that.

For myself I play casters because I like casting spells, and I find it boring to be stuck with using a crossbow or similar on a caster. So, the current normal difficulty with lots of food available works well for me.

The more I think about it, the more I think Larian already found "a part" of the solution.

But in my opinion it shouldn't depend the difficulty level at all, it should be a core feature of the game as it is in DnD (time in DnD, food in BG3).
That said, it seems extremely hard to balance especially considering the number of items considered as "food supply" you can find absolutely everywhere.

Of course you should be able to play as you will. That's why you should always be able to buy tons of supply bags to store them at camp

I think that time is the bigger issue at play here. If we had a discernable day, things would fix themselves. I think you touched on this in another thread, this is certainly not my idea, but with no dividing line between day and night other than being in camp, the waters get really muddy.