Guys look. It's not about gaming habits and lives. It's about how the game currently forces people to rest a lot, which is exactly the opposite of what people should be doing if goblins are threatening to kill a bunch of people and your only hope for a cure that you know of could die at any moment.
The game forces you to End Day in order to have dialogue with characters and character development. So it isn't about gaming habits. The point is that unless I rest even when I don't really need to, I miss out on cool stuff.
All I am really asking for, when you really come down to it, is that they untie the dang dialogue from End Day so that I don't have to End Day in order to have character development. That is my main beef. I'm also asking that they stop having characters say they want to go to bed when the whole party is full health and has hardly done anything just because I need to trigger a dialogue.
I feel like you guys are trying to prevent me from being able to play the game the way I want because you are afraid I'm trying to take away some sort of element that allows you to play the game you want.
But think about all that I suggested. How does it really hurt the common player?
1. Create an Auto-Search function that is an Option you can enable in the Options menu so that if you don't want to search every room the way you do now, you can just trust a Perception check. If you want to search the game as you do now, don't enable the Auto-Search. Let me have it, though, so that me and players like me can use Auto-Search and keep the pace of the game going without having to play Hidden Objects.
2. Untie dialogue from End Day. That way, if I don't End Day all the time, I still get to have the same dialogues all the rest of you have who End Day whenever a dialogue is available.
3. 2 Long Rests a day instead of End Day. How does this hurt you? Instead of each time you Long Rest you end an entire 24-hour day, it only makes 8 hours go by. So you get 2 Long Rests per day so that if you do need a Long Rest more regularly you aren't making an entire 24 hours go by; just 8. This makes it more believable that goblins haven't attacked the grove yet if you long rest a bunch of times. Again, doesn't hurt you. It just makes the game a bit more believable for people like me. It gives you MORE freedom to Long Rest without each Long Rest being a full day. I might be willing to Long Rest more if I know it is only 8 hours.
4. Time Sensitive events. This is the only one that I admit might be perceived as hurting other players' gameplay, but honestly it would ONLY give players the freedom to trigger events like the fight at the Druid's Grove without being evil. It rewards players for doing things in a timely manner, like dethroning Kahga, so druids help in the fight. And if you have 2 Long Rests a day, even 3 days is 6 Long Rests and 12 Short. So that's still a lot of Long and Short Rests, and that's half the time I was suggesting.
The number of long rests isn't my suggestion. It's that they limit Long Rests in some way, triggering certain events after you have done X number of Long Rests. So I'm just suggesting that after X number of days from the time you get the quest to save Halsin, someone says, "I just learned the gobbos are about to attack. They'll do so in X days, we think." Then you know you have X number of Long Rests left before they attack. And even if you don't do it in that many days, the game's not a failure. You may have not succeeded in accomplishing that mission in time, but the main quest still continues. Shoot! They could even make it so that the tieflings and/or druids still survive if the gobbos attack and you raid the base while they're out.
So what I'm saying is that I'm trying to offer suggestions that create MORE freedom for players. That's the part I don't get. Allowing time sensitive quests allows you to have even more ways to do things in the game. Race to save Halsin before the gobbos attack, or sneak into the base while they are fighting the tieflings and/or druids. You decide how you want the story to go. If you know Lae'zel might leave if you don't get to the Gith in x number of Long Rests, then prioritize that quest and get there because you don't want her to leave the party, OR, if you don't care that much about her being in the party, ignore her demands. Right now. Lae'zel is just a nag about getting to the creche and she doesn't follow it up with action if you never go there. Same with Wyll and the gobbos. It's about prioritizing what you want to prioritize and playing the way you want, giving you MORE options. It is meant to give MORE flavor to the game, giving you more endings based on decisions you make.
Roleplaying is all about molding the story based on your decisions. Right now, there are only two decisions that affect the story. Long rest a lot and develop characters and story or long rest very little and miss out on it all. No matter how fast or slow I go, it doesn't matter. My choices don't really matter. I'm moving towards either being good and killing gobbos or working with them and killing tieflings and druids. That's it. No deviations.
