Because people were trekking back every chance they got to rest at an inn. Yes, it's tedious, but people did it anyway. The solution is one-time use camping sites in dungeons and the dungeon to slam the door behind you so you can't go back. With an an autosave just before you enter the dungeon as a sort of compromise, so you don't end up trapped in the dungeon with no save file and no way out.
It amazes me that people would do that and not just turn down the difficulty or respec their party and I am in no way some video game veteran who plays on POTD. I do actually like that idea though because camping supplies were a little annoying. I enjoyed the challenge of making the ones I had last and as I got better at the game I found I almost never needed the ones that were always conveniently placed in every dungeon.
That's a *terrible* system. What you're basically talking about is save-points, and those have mostly been done away with because it artificially binds you to the developers idea of how long you should be able to go before you reach that camping area. Then they have to balance where and how many of those one-time-use resting areas there are--you run into the same problem as camping supplies, where there's either to few for anybody but the die-hard "I wish you just died!" people or so many that it becomes pointless.
The solution to the problem is to increase the number of wounds until death, and make the amount of damage dealt by wounds vary by type of wound--5% to 25% depending on wound type. So you could have three wounds and be down 15% or 55%, or some combination up 'till death. That way not every two-wound situation immediately equals a strong pressure to rest, there's interesting variability in the wound affliction, and meaningful choice comes back into play.
Any resting mechanic is pointless if you can rest as much as you want. You can just ignore bonus from food and rest all the time. Why should i care about these bonus? I did not care about resting bonus in the first game.
