Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
You can spend up to 2 hours standing watch. You can also spend fewer than 2 hours standing watch and still gain the same benefits, because that’s what “up to” means.
D&D 5E Elven trance and long rests
Horwath
Legend
I was making a point for Elven trance. that lasts 4 hrs and counts as 8hrs of sleep for human, but does not count for long rest. So "8hrs of sleep" are less resting than "up to 8hrs of sleep", with minimum of 6hrs.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
It does count as a long rest.
Sage Advice Compendium said:
http://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/SA-Compendium.pdf
Trying to filter prospective players with weird corner-case rules questions is a great filter for prospective DMs.
People tend to assume that sleeping straight through the night for 8 hours is what is meant, because it seems so normal to all of us. However, the rules aren't actually tied to that. The need for sleep and the need for long rests are two separate things.
Long rests can be taken without any sleep at all. It's perfectly fine to stay awake chatting and polishing your armor for 8 hours and call that a long rest.
Short rests don't have to be awake -- you are allowed to take a nap during a short rest if you want to.
Sleeping 8 hours doesn't have to mean 8 hours in a row. It could be a series of two-hour naps through the day.
Similarly, elven trance doesn't have to be 4 hours in a row... you could trance for one hour during each short rest.
Consider, for example, an adventurer that takes a two-hour nap, then does productive stuff for 4 hours, then another nap, then another 4 hours of work.... repeating that forever. He would get his 8 hours of sleep every day. He would get one long rest every day, and two short rests. And the other three 4-hour periods could be adventuring.
Long rests can be taken without any sleep at all. It's perfectly fine to stay awake chatting and polishing your armor for 8 hours and call that a long rest.
Short rests don't have to be awake -- you are allowed to take a nap during a short rest if you want to.
Sleeping 8 hours doesn't have to mean 8 hours in a row. It could be a series of two-hour naps through the day.
Similarly, elven trance doesn't have to be 4 hours in a row... you could trance for one hour during each short rest.
Consider, for example, an adventurer that takes a two-hour nap, then does productive stuff for 4 hours, then another nap, then another 4 hours of work.... repeating that forever. He would get his 8 hours of sleep every day. He would get one long rest every day, and two short rests. And the other three 4-hour periods could be adventuring.
mortwatcher
Explorer
depending on your definition of strenuous activity, I would consider being productive as strenuous and thus interrupting the long rest, as per the definition:
A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps or performs light activity: reading, talking, eating, or standing watch for no more than 2 hours. If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity—at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting Spells, or similar Adventuring activity—the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it.
At the end of a long rest, a character regains all lost Hit Points. The character also regains spent Hit Dice, up to a number of dice equal to half of the character’s total number of them (minimum of one die). For example, if a character has eight Hit Dice, he or she can regain four spent Hit Dice upon finishing a long rest.
A character can’t benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period, and a character must have at least 1 hit point at the start of the rest to gain its benefits.
Yes, but there are four 4-hour periods each day. Only three of them are productive, the other one is resting.
Also, BTW, the latest PHB errata changes that definition of long rest. It requires that most of a long rest be actual sleep, just sitting and chatting is no longer acceptable. However, elves can still do what I described.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
No, they cannot. At least not as of the August 2017 errata to the resting rules, which changed the wording of the rules for a long rest from:
pre-errata rules said:
to:
post-errata rules said:
The purpose of this errata was to clarify the ambiguity in the wording, “sleeps or performs light activity: reading, talking, eating, or standing watch for no more than 2 hours,” which could be interpreted to mean that you can spend the entire rest sleeping and/or performing light activity such as eating, as long as or performing light activity, provided you do not stand watch for more than two hours. The new wording, “sleeps for at least 6 hours and performs no more than 2 hours of light activity, such as reading, talking, eating, or standing watch.” makes the intent clear: reading, talking, eating, and standing watch are all considered light activity, and you can spend no more than 2 hours of a long rest performing such activity.
Under this new wording, it is abundantly clear that a character does in fact need to sleep for at least a total of 6 hours during a single 8-hour period in order to gain the benefits of a long rest. Those 6 hours do not need to be consecutive, but the 8 hours do. So you could, for example, sleep for 3 hours, stand watch for 2 hours, then sleep for 3 more hours. Or you could sleep for 2 hours, stand watch for 1 hour, go back to sleep for 2 more hours, stand watch for another hour, and sleep for another 2 hours. But you could not sleep for 5 hours and stand watch for 3 hours, nor could you sleep for 6 hours and then go back to adventuring. At least 8 hours must be spent doing some combination of sleeping and light activity that totals at least 6 hours of sleep and no more than 2 hours of light activity, with no more than a 1-hour interruption, otherwise it is not a long rest.
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Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
This has not been the definition of a long rest for 16 months.
Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
Technically true, since the text of Trance says only that elves need to meditate for 4 hours a day, not that those 4 hours need to be consecutive. However, that seems like an overly technical reading of a text that is written in natural language, and I would personally require an elf character to meditate for 4 consecutive hours to gain the benefits of the Trance feature(which is to say, the benefits a human would get from 8 hours of sleep, which would include the benefits of a long rest, provided those benefits had not already been received earlier in the same 24 hour period.)
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