<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.
Um, not sure what your trying to say here. The TT rules for resting are largely irrelevent, and always have been. You rest as much as you want and as often as you want. If this requires going somewhere safe, and you choose to do it, then you do it.
The cost to the player is exactly what the DM chooses. The standard trade-off used to be the chance of "wandering monsters" while asleep. But all this achieves is to ensure that resting occurs even more frequently to ensure you still have spells for attacks while resting.
One of the early sets of modules D1-D3 that introduced the Drow, actually denied arcane casters ANY spell recovery when in the Underdark. So guess what; when the arcane users ran out of spells ( or had used a certain portion ), the whole party trooped back to the surface to rest.
And yes, you have reasonably analysed where Larian sit as DM. They know there is no point in trying to force any particular resting cadence ( which would be wildly unpopular ), so they design on the assumption you will rest as needed. Typically, I find I get through 2-3 fights before needing a long rest, due to the choices I take. But if I needed ( or wanted ) to long rest after every fight, that's exactly what I would do.
The only thing I would disagree with is that there is any real or implied relationship between "balance" and the TT resting rules. Nothing in the resting rules forces any particular behaviour upon the player, so any intent to use the resting rules as a "tool" for class balance woud be an astonishly poor design choice. I suppose that is possible, but if so, I don't see that it should be Larian's responsibility to fix it.
