Is resting cheesy in RP perspectives?
I've never had much difficulty with BG1/2 even in my first playthrough; I rested after each fight, and my party was almost always fully buffed, in full HP, with arsenal of various spells ready.
Replaying the game with BGEE and BG2EE with Roleplaying mindsets, I am restricting myself by not using any buffs before combats and not using meta-knowledge for things like spell choices. (that's why I always memorize at least one protect from petrification.) This adds a bit of unpredictability. However, I feel it is not enough and magic still feels a bit overpowered. I am thinking of resting in each area only once.
The problem is that I don't know if it makes any sense RP wise. In PnP or real life, how often do adventurers rest? Do they refill used spells after each fight? Or do they clear a dungeon without resting? I can justify it with some made up explanations, but I would like to know which way is the most fitting RP wise. Rest after each fight? Rest after x number of fights? Don't rest until you've returned to INN?
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I think that only the player knows how to answer it in each particular case.
I'd like to mention that in PoE you can only rest not in an inn when you have supplies and on each difficulty the number of these supplies vary: for example, on a hard setting you can only have 2 supplies which means you can only rest 2 times between returning to inns and taverns.
In some of my BG playthroughs I self-impose a rule that I can only rest when I come back into a town/a village.
But more often I play with the SCS mod and with a no-reload rule. In this case I think that it's absolutely fine for a character to make everything she can to survive. It's absolutely fine from the RP sense for this character, if she's a caster of some kind and/or has wands and items, to rest everytime she needs it. And quite often it means resting between any major fights becase dealing with the SCS enemies requires a lot of spells/abilities.
Ask yourself 'would the party feel safe resting here or would it feel too dangerous?'
If they have just killed a major threat than perhaps they feel safe resting. If instead they know the area is likely still swarming with enemies they might decide to keep moving.
Wouldn't the decision to rest be tied to the amount of food supplies one has at his disposal? Even if one wants to be utmost careful, he can't explore a dungeon for a month without going back to inn which will most likely refill the area with threats that they had cleared.
Since there is no notions of supply or unpredictable respawn in BG, I have to limit myself for a better RPing experience.
I found that making a clear rule to abide by does help a lot in RP and it prevents myself from cheesing then making lame excuses later to justify it, because one's interpretation of unclear rules can be really biased depending on situations. For instance, I made a house rule of not escaping combat by leaving an area(since AI can't follow) unless at least half of party members die first to represent a loss by enemy's pursue.
However, I don't know where to exactly draw the line between no rest at all and rest with every fight in this case.
Rest only when you are fatigued/in INN. The game doesn't give any disadvantages to resting so players tend to abuse it. This rule would mean rest once in 1~2 areas or go back to inn for resupply. Still not sure if it would make sense RP wise.
I also try to avoid some of the ridiculous things the game will let you do, like resting right outside a Big Bad's chamber (yeah, try that in a PnP campaign!). If my party needs rest, they retreat to a safe location. In the Nashkel Mines, for example, they go to that large chamber on the second level with the guards and where you can give Kylee his dagger.
Well, a good reason to sleep at the inn I suppose. It is also good to play a female or an evil elf to repulse a certain scheming drow. There seems to be a problem with the new enamoured npcs, it is difficult not to be assaulted with or without regular bathing.
I'm not trying to restrict myself with that. Similarly with no pre-buffing, it's just my habit and it's difficult for me when playing Pillars of Eternity. "My characters are barely alive with almost no spells, but they're not fatigued - I may have to rest, but I don't want to".
Speaking as someone who has seen combat in RL and seen real friends really die, I can state quite categorically that there is no such thing as 'cheese' when your life is on the line.
However in the context and spirit of the game, when it comes to taking advantage of weaknesses in the game mechanics I try to adhere to what I believe to be the intention of the game's developers. With regard to resting, I generally try to stick to a realistic cycle (day/night above ground or when fatigue sets in underground) unless the tactical situation demands otherwise.
In RL rest is a tool you use both to re-gather your strength and clear your mind, so it only makes sense to get as much rest as possible before going into combat. Having said that, once you're in contact, movement is the key to survival and being forced to rest invariably weakens your position tactically. So, in the game I will give myself the luxury of as much rest as I want before setting off on a mission, but once underway I switch off "rest until healed" and only rest when absolutely necessary, retreating to a known secure position if my exhaustion/injuries become life threatening.
It also helps us developing good tactics , because you won't be able to re-memorize your spells until you've finished up as many quests as you can.
1. Resting often essentially makes your 'spell ammunition' bottomless. Considering how overpowered magic is as it is, it is actually worse a cheat than giving yourself infinite magical ammo for ranged characters although the game does not restrict resting. In practice, with unlimited resting, you can use level 9 spells throughout the game against every enemy. This diminishes strategy involving spell choices and makes a whole lot of spells from relatively less useful levels even more meaningless. Also you spam spells instead of saving them for strategically more important fights.
2. I hate inventory management but I never consoled-in bags of holding unlike some LPers who said going back and forth between dungeons and merchants is tedious because I never did back-and-forth traveling. I simply loot most valuable items or golds then abandon the rest, even if items I left behind are magical items. I don't come back to pick it up for RP reason. Likewise, the game actually doesn't severely limit the number of spell usage; you are simply spamming it.
3. I considered a rule of resting when fatigued, but some spells(haste) makes your party fatigued very quickly. If I rest when fatigued this allows abuse of haste in every fight without suffering consequences of being tired.
4. AFAIK there are many P&P restrictions that were not implemented in BG2's magic system. My understanding is that many spells in AD&D require you to have materials needed to cast the spell. Seeing how BG2 lacks any of such restrictions, I feel it's necessary to limit myself with house rules and better LP.
So I will try to clear an area and then rest because at that point in RP perspectives I can be relatively sure that the area is at least momentarily safe. If I can't clear an area and ran out of options, I will travel back to INN and try again later.
I really think there should have been restrictions to resting from the vanilla game, such as extremely powerful enemies surrounding your party camps when you try to rest. The enemy interruption at rest is a joke and nobody is discouraged from resting after every fight to refresh level 9 spells they just spammed because of it.
There's a lot of realism missing from fantasy, for a reason (or, more appropriately, lots of reasons). Equipment wear and tear, food requirements, lingering injury effects and the like can be included in a game, but they're completely un-fun (stopping to repair equipment with consumable blacksmith gear, for instance... I'm looking at you, Bethesda...)
Anyway, I rest when my party needs to rest - whether for healing, or for spell recovery. It works for me, and I don't normally end up resting more than twice in a given map area (more often in dungeons because of monster density).
Somehow implying that NOT healing or re-learning spells just because "we're resting too often" is absurd. As someone else said, at the end of the day there's no style points.... you either won or you lie dead.