Went through the entire game, needing supplies to rest added only a small amount of tedium via backtracking.

 

What would be much more fun is having to gauge the risk of travel.

 

 

 

Stealth and Survival could play a part in how likely you are to be waylaid successfully. It would not reduce encounters, rather you'd get the jump on a group of hostiles that you can then choose to avoid or engage - this way no one feels like they're getting less loot/combat for taking these skills.

 

 

This would also make athletics a bigger consideration. Right now you can travel freely knowing you'll never run into combat, so traveling large distances while tired comes with no risk.

 

 

 

An additional mode could be added to flesh out the system if necessary, some people may not like it but I'd welcome a more eventful and somewhat slower paced campaign with resource limitations coming into play.

 

I would love a random encounter system for this (both non-fights and hostiles). A few things I'd prefer though is that have the chance be fairly small-ish (because it gets annoying as hell after a while), have the encounters actually be challenging (because fighting trash mobs is pointless to the system) and, as you say, maybe have some skill-usage involved in avoiding fights and so on.

Yeah I was actually wondering about that a little. It'd be a nice addition and another hat-tip to the IE games which inspired this.

I agree that supply limits don't quite accomplish their purpose as they currently are. However, adding random encounters won't really solve the problem as they turn the tedium of backtracking into the tedium of saving, then backtracking, then either fighting a weak enemy that just wastes your time or a strong enemy that maybe kills you in which case you reload and then backtrack again...  I guess it would be meaningful in Trial of Iron, but that could suck pretty bad too, if you get an unlucky encounter at the wrong time.