The Resting Mechanic

mampoa

Ok, so a long time player of the series, BG2 my favorite game of all time in fact.

There's just one thing that has been keeping me from playing it recently though: I find it too easy, or rather arbitrarily too easy/hard due to the resting mechanic.

I love a challenge, and have been playing with SCS for a long time, but it's really the resting that decides a lot of failure/success.

SCS mages in particular need you to dispel them, and not having the spells is potentially fatal.

Even so, what I'm looking for is some ideas on how to restrict resting for myself to keep a sense of resource management/tactics in the game as opposed to spamming my best spells and resting and repeating.

I've thought of a few things:

1) Only rest when all party members are fatigued.

2) Impose a real-time time limit of, say, an hour before I can rest, and I cannot simply wait around doing nothing to bypass this.

3) Simply make judgement calls on when it seems appropriate.

I dislike the third option the most; I guess I'm looking for the game to really impose limitations and for me to have to work within that environment.

I'm someone who is very comfortable with hard games and I really want BG2 to provide that to me like it once did!

Anyone who is familiar with the new XCOM for example, I've beaten that multiple times now on Ironman Impossible, and I just love the challenge (at least in the first 2 months, then it too gets easier) and there is a real sense of working with limited resources.

I'm hoping someone can come up with a novel idea on how I can once again enjoy BG2 to the fullest!

FinneousPJ

@mampoa I think the first one sounds best.

Shin

I use something akin to option 2; never resting more than once every 24-hour period and generally avoid resting altogether when inside dungeons unless the entire floor I'm on is cleared out and secured.

Schneidend

In Fallout: New Vegas I only rest when I can find a good, defensible spot where I can lay some traps around the area. It satisfies the roleplayer in me to think that, even if the mines did not kill people sneaking up on me, the noise would surely awaken me.

Corvino

I usually impose a limit of one rest per floor of a dungeon at most, preferably once it's been cleared and before proceeding to the next level. This forces you to conserve resources but not to the extent that you're afraid to use a single spell.

If you don't rest at all then it's very tempting to go very melee heavy and use specialists like Inquisitors to bypass the issue.

nano

Do you guys walk out of the dungeon to rest or rest inside and hope not to be ambushed?

I try to do dungeons in one go, or floors for the bigger ones. Obviously you don't need to rest every floor of the Nashkel mines but Watcher's Keep would be pretty exhausting without a rest. And some places it just makes no sense to rest (eg the illithid city).

jackjack

I always camp out in Gullykin.

mampoa

Thanks for all the replies, and I forgot to mention that, like you guys, I too want to roleplay things out as much as possible. So things like securing an area, or moving away to rest are in my mind too!

Good, satisfying mechanical difficulty AND roleplaying are a difficult combination to achieve, but it's what made BG2 great for me.

I wouldn't say I walk out of a dungeon to rest just to simulate that it is unsafe to rest in a dungeon, because it is literally just adding a tedious task of walking out, resting, and walking back in. In fact, I do have an issue with this in that you can walk out of dungeons all too easily; there is no roleplay reason in most dungeons to drive you forward to the point that you don't feel you can back out and rest. There's no consequence.

If the game gave clear indicators or drivers for pushing through a dungeon it would be better and easier to not back out tamely, rest, and continue safely.

If we're talking about the mechanics of an ACTUAL ambush, as in enemies spawning on you, then that is truly nothing to worry about - it's shameful how easy the spawns are and they really are just tedious to mop up and try resting again.

It's more the ability to roleplay, or lack thereof at times, that concerns me.

Emardon_Lareous

In the 3.5 edition DnD mod (Link Below) Holic75 introduced a separately installable mechanic to constrain sleep to once every 8 hours

https://github.com/Holic75/Baldurs-gate-dnd-3.5
This may help

[Deleted User]

The user and all related content has been deleted.

Raduziel

I did a no-rest-in-dungeons run in IWDEE. Quite challenging, changes the game a lot.

Balrog99

The problem isn't the rest mechanics, it's the fact that this is a video game with limitations. In RL if you rested in a dungeon with lots of hostiles around it's very likely you'd wake up surrounded by every occupant of said dungeon. No sane party would even try it. 8 hours is a LONG time in real life. The odds that you wouldn't be noticed, especially if you massacred a bunch of the denizens already, is extremely remote. It's much more likely that a party would go in, do what they could with their available spells and then retreat to a safe location to heal, refit, memorize spells, etc... The problem with that is it's extremely boring in a video game!

Humanoid_Taifun

@Balrog99 The problem is not limited to resting though. The enemies are spread out in bite-sized chunks across the map and even the smartest ones don't show any signs of coordination of forces as you cut your way through them.
Granted, invasion would be nigh impossible if the enemies actually made use of their numbers to defend their strongholds. But then, that's exactly the point of strongholds. Don't stop your criticism at the fact that the lazy bastards won't notice you resting, when they refuse to acknowledge anything that is outside of their immediate line of sight.

I respect people who don't rest in the middle of a dungeon conquest, but that's because I consider it a challenge, not because it seems realistic to me.

Balrog99

In real life I would have a thief scout out the entire dungeon, note the patrols and the timing of them, observe the denizens' tendencies, see who the leaders are and their strengths and weaknesses, map the whole dungeon in detail, and only then make a plan to invade. That would be extremely dull in a RPG game however...

Zaghoul

There is a mod that allows one to adjust the frequency of interruptions during rest. Might give one pause to think about resting when bumped up to x4.
Alter Hostile Rest Spawns
All games

This component will allow you to alter the frequency of hostile spawns when you try to sleep, e.g. monsters attacking when you try to rest. You can disable them completely, or adjust the frequency up or down: decrease 50%, increase 50%, double frequency, or quadruple frequency.
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/66940/version-4-of-tweaks-anthology-now-available#latest

Balrog99

Zaghoul said:

There is a mod that allows one to adjust the frequency of interruptions during rest. Might give one pause to think about resting when bumped up to x4.
Alter Hostile Rest Spawns
All games

This component will allow you to alter the frequency of hostile spawns when you try to sleep, e.g. monsters attacking when you try to rest. You can disable them completely, or adjust the frequency up or down: decrease 50%, increase 50%, double frequency, or quadruple frequency.
https://forums.beamdog.com/discussion/66940/version-4-of-tweaks-anthology-now-available#latest

That would help but unless it's the entire population of the dungeon that attacks you it's still rather unrealistic. I would assume that any dungeon would have multiple exits in reality so you should be surrounded by overwhelming numbers if you're attacked. I maintain that no sane party of six would risk that in RL.