Example: It takes, let's just say, 50 Long Rest Points to Long Rest. You crash on the beach. You meet Shadowheart and befriend her. 5 Long Rest Points. You fight the devourers. 30 Rest Points. You meet Astarion. 5 Rest Points. You encounter the fishermen and the mind flayer. 10 Rest Points. Ah. Now you can Long Rest if you need to. Otherwise, you only have Short Rests to be able to recover HP and such. (Again, Short Rests trigger dialogue. I can't stress that enough.) You meet Gale. 5 Rest Points. You find the Harper stash. 10 Rest Points. You find the chest near the ruins. 10 Rest Points. You rescue Lae'zel. 10 Rest Points, because you had to deal with the tieflings first. You face Gimblebock and company, 20 Rest Points. You've now earned 2 Long Rests, and if you haven't even used one, you're doing pretty good. You face the mercs within the crypt. 20 Rest Points. You face the traps and scribes and find the book and meet Withers and everything else in there, you earn another 50 points in all. 3 Long Rests earned by this point. At lower level, this is good. If you haven't used them all, you are storing them up for later. If you have used one or two in order to just get through, that's fine. You've still got a 3rd you can save for later.
With a game like BG3, I have to wonder if this is the only approach that will really work.
You are definitely overcomplicating things here, I think. A certain difficulty level or a setting (not the default for everyone, mind you!) needs to add just 2 things:
1. Drastically reduce the number of Camp Supplies available in the game.
2. Make them mandatory for Long Rests.
Done. No artificial constructs begging for Occam's razor, just the standard DnD mechanics. Only, I wouldn't expect Larian to implement that; this probably will have to go to modders.
Also, personally I don't think Long Rest limitation is a good idea. You can hit a particularly long streak of bad rolls, for example when you deal with traps, and your party will have one foot in their graves. What do you propose us to do in this case - save-scum? A TT DM can always adjust Long Rest requirements, but will this game to the same? Don't answer, it's a rhetorical question.
