After many hours of early access and beating the game on normal difficulty a few times my friends have mostly moved on from BG3 to other things, but I stuck around and decided to try to beat honor mode which has changed the way that I enjoy the game. Let me explain briefly, Honor Mode is BG3's "Ironman Mode", where you get one save slot, auto save on quit, and perma-death, making the many choices in the game permanent and effectively ensuring a unique playthrough every time since you can't save scum your way out of undesirable outcomes.
BG3 isn't a very forgiving game on normal difficulty and I don't think I could tell you the number of times I died and casually reloaded my previous save. I got really used to hitting F5 to quick save so I didn't realize how ingrained it was into my game flow.
I died a lot in my first few hours of Honor Mode play. For one thing every encounter is tuned-up with more enemies, and the enemies in turn have better equipment and use better strategies. A group of goblins that were mere scenery in Act I on normal mode may suddenly become a real threat, equipped with flaming arrows and "hold person" spells that could be used to freeze your party members in place while they are cut down, defenseless.
Eventually I settled into a new flow that is more successful in honor mode, and as a bonus it also feels more true to the intent and spirit of a dungeons and dragons game. In my latest run my party looks like this:
The rules I follow for Honor Mode:
The last one is probably the most important, what it does in practice is limits my BG3 sessions to one or two really satisfying encounters. I'll start out by either exploring an area or deciding which encounter I want to take on next. Then I'll spend some time preparing, spell books, scrolls, equipment, etc. Next I'll do the fight, and depending on how much damage the party has taken I'll plan the next fight or call it a day. Sometimes I'll do all of the planning and prep in advance so that my next session can start off with the battle already set up.
Now that I've started playing this way I'm not sure I can ever go back, it's really satisfying to use just the right weapons and abilities on a monster, and blowing all of your spell slots on "trash" is it's own kind of fun. I also enjoy the way it paces the game, since many of the cutscenes that progress the story are triggered when you long rest it gives a sort of episodic feel to the game. Wrapping things up right after Astarion asks you to look at some strange markings on his back is like ending the night on a cliffhanger.