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.
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.
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 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.
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.
