<snip>The best way of moderating resting in the field remains the original idea of random encounters; but that gets boring quickly. The alternative is to do what Larian have, and assume that resting occurs often, and construct the game on that basis.
The issue is that Larian has only done ~half of what is needed to construct the game assuming resting occurs often.
Aspects that complement or encourage frequent resting- Combat encounters seem to be constructed assuming you have ~full resources for each fight.
- Long resting is encouraged via the camp cutscenes (although Larian obviously needs to put more emphasis on this, given the # of players who don't rest and miss a significant chunk of cutscenes)
- You can fast travel from almost anywhere directly to camp and then back to where you teleported from, and resting doesn't require resources or provoke random encounters.
Aspects that aren't constructed for frequent long resting- Balance between classes. Short v long rest-based classes are a big thing in 5e, and most of Larian's changes haven't addressed this. Long rest spellcasters are relatively much more powerful in BG3 because they can afford to use all of their spell slots each fight.
- Prevalence of consumables, food in particular. You would think that, since long resting fully restores HP, a 5e game with unlimited resting would have less healing consumables. However, there is a ton of food & potions in BG3 which discourages long resting because you can just heal by using these. There is also a ton of scrolls, flasks, etc which everyone can use (I suppose this actually helps to balance martials vs casters, but at the cost of class-uniformity), allowing you to do more fights before needing to rest.