D&D 5E Just how long is a long rest anyway?

[clearstream]

Except you really can’t get much adventuring done in under an hour. The term “5-minute work day” is illustrative hyperbole, making fun of the incentive D&D creates to get into an encounter, go nova, and then immediately take a long rest. But that brushes over the time it takes to, you know, travel from your resting place to the dungeon, actually traverse the space within the dungeon, and do all the things that happen in an adventure that aren’t fighting, like searching rooms, picking locks, disarming traps, identifying items you find, etc. Not to mention the time it takes to get back to your resting place. Unless of course you’re proposing takimg your rest right there in the dungeon? Cause that is an incredibly dangerous plan if so.

The concern is that per A (the Crawford RAI) an adventuring day (6-8 encounters according to the DMG) won't interrupt a long rest. The DMG implies that adventuring days ought to happen between long rests, but per A there is no reason not to put them inside long rests! It doesn't matter if any given "rest" gets interrupted. The party just start long rests speculatively and sees how things go... that's no more dangerous than usual.

One reason I liked your approach of encouraging abandonment is that it can address the ineffectiveness of the Crawford RAI for interruption. Notwithstanding, it operates unchanged even if there were no such rules. Thus it has to be analysed as a work-around, not a proof that the Crawford RAI makes any sense.

From a system mechanics perspective, I think a generous reading of the Crawford RAI goes something like this

1. The rule admits of two meanings, but under an appeal to authority we can decide on one of them (what I am calling the Crawford RAI)
2. Read literally considering all cases, the Crawford RAI has absurd consequences; but we ought to assume that the design intent was not absurd, therefore we ought to assume that such consequences are just a result of poor wording and ignore them as edge cases (it's hardly uncommon for designs to have problematic edge cases!)
3. Seeing as now long rests aren't interrupted by an adventuring day (per the DMG) of encounters, we might have to live with parties who nest their adventuring days inside long rests
4. Seeing as that also sounds absurd, we might say that it is precluded by the DMG: parties can't nest their adventuring days inside long rests because adventuring days happen between long rests... but we're not guided as to how to forestall that because, once we accept the Crawford RAI, we're not permitted to stop a rest just because a party take on an adventuring day of encounters
5. Given 4. we might feel like authoring some house rules to fix the problem, and those might be tacit - our players just know that it's suspension-of-disbelief-breaking to speculatively start long rests and do their adventuring inside them so they refrain from doing that - this will leave the problem of correctly distinguishing between long rests that are illicitly started, and those that are legally started, so we will need a collection of filters to judge that.

Under a generous reading the Crawford RAI is insufficiently specified. To the extent that authoring rules and filters to complete the specification is justified, it is equally justified to decide on the alternate reading instead, which has none of the problems.

Now here as you probably appreciate I am taking a very strict approach to the meaning of rules. I'm speaking very specifically about the system that the rules constitute, which I am expecting to be robust and avoid absurdities, lacunae, paradoxes and so on. A DM can make anything work, but I am saying that when choosing between RAIs there are good motives for favouring the one with the least technical problems, assuming we don't have any preferences for how we want it to play. The thing is of course, that we usually do have such preferences. The challenge is to separate our preferences from our analysis, do the analysis, and then reconstruct our preferences with a clear view of the alternatives.

 

[Charlaquin]

The concern is that per A (the Crawford RAI) an adventuring day (6-8 encounters according to the DMG)

Ahh, I see the problem. You’ve mistaken the number of recommenced encounters in an adventuring day for the definition of an adventuring day. This is incorrect. An adventuring day is meant to contain 6-8 encounters, but it could contain more or fewer, and 6-8 encounters do not necessarily constitute an adventuring day.

won't interrupt a long rest. The DMG implies that adventuring days ought to happen between long rests, but per A there is no reason not to put them inside long rests!

Except for the part where there’s no way you’ll fit it within an hour. Adventuring involves more than just combat. Other things will happen between these encounters, which will take time.

It doesn't matter if any given "rest" gets interrupted. The party just start long rests speculatively and sees how things go... that's no more dangerous than usual.

It’s absolutely more dangerous than usual because “starting a long rest and seeing how things go” requires spending several hours sleeping, which if you’re not in a safe location, I’d very likely to result in you being killed.

One reason I liked your approach of encouraging abandonment is that it can address the ineffectiveness of the Crawford RAI for interruption. Notwithstanding, it operates unchanged even if there were no such rules. Thus it has to be analysed as a work-around, not a proof that the Crawford RAI makes any sense.

It was never meant as proof of my interpretation, but nor would I call it a work-around. It’s just what I would do to discourage a party from attempting to take a long rest in a dangerous place.

From a system mechanics perspective, I think a generous reading of the Crawford RAI goes something like this

1. The rule admits of two meanings, but under an appeal to authority we can decide on one of them (what I am calling the Crawford RAI)
2. Read literally considering all cases, the Crawford RAI has absurd consequences;

You haven’t demonstrated this to be true. 600 rounds of combat interrupting a long rest is not absurd to me. Of course fighting for a whole hour would ruin your night’s sleep! Just because it’s an unlikely event to happen doesn’t make it an absurd consequence.

but we ought to assume that the design intent was not absurd, therefore we ought to assume that such consequences are just a result of poor wording and ignore them as edge cases (it's hardly uncommon for designs to have problematic edge cases!)

It is neither poor wording nor problematic. The wording communicates the intended meaning, and it is intended that, if the players do manage to spend an hour in combat (or less than an hour in combat and the rest of the one hour period doing other adventuring activity), that break the rest.

3. Seeing as now long rests aren't interrupted by an adventuring day (per the DMG) of encounters, we might have to live with parties who nest their adventuring days inside long rests

No, you won’t, because adventuring days involve adventuring activity other than just combat, an hour of which in total will not result in accomplishing much of anything. Not to mention, PCs can only benefit from one long rest in a 24 hour period, so even if you somehow do pull this trick off once, you won’t be able to again without spending nor just 8, but 31 hours in the adventure location.

4. Seeing as that also sounds absurd, we might say that it is precluded by the DMG: parties can't nest their adventuring days inside long rests because adventuring days happen between long rests... but we're not guided as to how to forestall that because, once we accept the Crawford RAI, we're not permitted to stop a rest just because a party take on an adventuring day of encounters

You really haven’t demonstrated this to be necessary.

5. Given 4. we might feel like authoring some house rules to fix the problem, and those might be tacit - our players just know that it's suspension-of-disbelief-breaking to speculatively start long rests and do their adventuring inside them so they refrain from doing that - this will leave the problem of correctly distinguishing between long rests that are illicitly started, and those that are legally started, so we will need a collection of filters to judge that.

Again, you haven’t effectively proven 4, so this argument is built on a shaky foundation. As well, you’re suggesting banning your nested-adventuring-day tactic as part of the social contract, as if it were some kind of first order optimal strategy that needs curtailing lest it ruin the game, instead of the hairbrained scheme likely to result in a TPK that it actually is.

Under a generous reading the Crawford RAI is insufficiently specified. To the extent that authoring rules and filters to complete the specification is justified, it is equally justified to decide on the alternate reading instead, which has none of the problems.

Except none of these things are problems for the RAI interpretation. At all.

Now here as you probably appreciate I am taking a very strict approach to the meaning of rules. I'm speaking very specifically about the system that the rules constitute, which I am expecting to be robust and avoid absurdities, lacunae, paradoxes and so on. A DM can make anything work, but I am saying that when choosing between RAIs there are good motives for favouring the one with the least technical problems, assuming we don't have any preferences for how we want it to play. The thing is of course, that we usually do have such preferences. The challenge is to separate our preferences from our analysis, do the analysis, and then reconstruct our preferences with a clear view of the alternatives.

Again, I don’t agree that the things you claim to be technical problems with the RAI are problems at all, and you haven’t really demonstrated that they are. Furthermore, your analysis disregards the realities of play, assuming that the players will just be able to decide to rest for 7 hours, have 6-8 encounters, rest for 1 hour, and repeat. This ignores the fact that it is the DM who is in control of when and where encounters happen, that adventuring involves more than just combat, and that resting in or near an adventure location will likely result in many attacks that will deplete the party’s resources, making this tactic not the least bit viable in a real game.

 

[clearstream]

Ahh, I see the problem. You’ve mistaken the number of recommenced encounters in an adventuring day for the definition of an adventuring day. This is incorrect. An adventuring day is meant to contain 6-8 encounters, but it could contain more or fewer, and 6-8 encounters do not necessarily constitute an adventuring day.

That is at right-angles to the concern and overlooks the full text. It seems to be envisioning that the designers did not relate their recommendation to their expectation. Take a look at Adventuring Day XP (DMG 84). At 1st level, a character is expected to earn 300 XP in a day. Referring back to the XP thresholds per encounter chart, one can see that the range per character per encounter is expected to be 25 to 100 XP. Dividing 300/25 = 12, which suggests the plausible upper bound. Ergo, the number of combats required to interrupt a long rest is as much as fifty times or more the number expected for a typical adventuring day!

Except for the part where there’s no way you’ll fit it within an hour. Adventuring involves more than just combat. Other things will happen between these encounters, which will take time.

That is moot: the case made is that a party is permitted under Crawford RAI to start a rest, and fit their adventuring day into that. I think you might mistake the nature of this argument. It is not about the plausibility of doing so, it is about the absurdity of the possibility of doing so!

It was never meant as proof of my interpretation, but nor would I call it a work-around. It’s just what I would do to discourage a party from attempting to take a long rest in a dangerous place.

It seems on so much as is material, we agree here.

You haven’t demonstrated this to be true. 600 rounds of combat interrupting a long rest is not absurd to me. Of course fighting for a whole hour would ruin your night’s sleep! Just because it’s an unlikely event to happen doesn’t make it an absurd consequence.

There are at least two problems with that. One is that you seem to be saying that it is perfectly plausible that fighting enough combats to make up several adventuring days and advance characters through multiple levels is still yet not enough to interrupt a long rest. If you don't think that is absurd, then it may be we lack sufficient common ground to make further progress, however, the other is that you fail to appreciate that it is also absurd as a test condition, because it cannot occur. If pigs did fly, you seem to be saying, then perforce it would not be absurd to dub them creatures of the air. Indeed, but it remains absurd to envision them flying.

You begin your latest with "I see the problem", but I think I must have skipped some steps because you roundly failed to see it. The plausibility of performing adventuring days inside a long rest isn't the contention. It might or might not be plausible - for some dungeons it certainly is - but the contention is that it is absurd to create space in the system for it. Likewise, whether it is absurd for 600 combats to interrupt a long rest isn't the contention, it is absurd for many typical adventuring days worth of combats to not do so. And it is absurd to use it as a test case for interruption.

 

[Garthanos]

The time it takes a pandemic to resolve itself?

OK probably not funny

 

[Charlaquin]

That is at right-angles to the concern and overlooks the full text. It seems to be envisioning that the designers did not relate their recommendation to their expectation. Assuming that anyone was reading in such bad faith, they should take a look at Adventuring Day XP (DMG 84). At 1st level, a character is expected to earn 300 XP in a day. Referring back to the XP thresholds per encounter chart, one can see that the range per character per encounter is expected to be 25 to 100 XP. Dividing 300/25 = 12, which suggests the plausible upper bound. Ergo, the number of combats required to interrupt a long rest is as much as fifty times or more the number expected for a typical adventuring day!

The number of encounters recommended or expected within an adventuring day is immaterial. An adventuring day is a day of adventure, not a series of encounters. Yes, the the design expects 6-8 encounters to occur during a day of adventure, but 6-8 encounters in sequence with nothing else occurring in the mean time is not a day of adventure per se.

That is moot: the case made is that a party is permitted under Crawford RAI to start a rest, and fit their adventuring day into that. I think you might mistake the nature of this argument. It is not about the plausibility of doing so, it is about the absurdity of the possibility of doing so!

No, you cannot fit an adventuring day into 1 hour. You can fit 6-8 encounters into one hour, but that’s not an adventuring day if that’s all you’re doing.

Furthermore, I don’t think it’s absurd for 6-8 encounters that occur over less than 1 hour to not interrupt a long rest. Let’s suppose that a party starts a long rest, spends 4 hours resting, then gets attacked by wild animals. The combat takes 4 rounds. 5 minutes later, another 4-round animal attack occurs. Repeat until there have been 8 such combats. This party has now spend 4 hours resting, 3 minutes and 12 minutes fending off Wild animals, and 40 minutes trying to get back to sleep between animal attacks. It is not absurd to me that if they go back to bed for 4 hours, they’ll still have gotten a full night’s rest. It is absurd to me to describe what they experienced as an “adventuring day.”

There are at least two problems with that. One is that you seem to be saying that it is perfectly plausible that fighting enough combats to make up several adventuring days and advance characters through multiple levels is still yet not enough to interrupt a long rest. If you don't think that is absurd, then it may be we lack sufficient common ground to make further progress, however, the other is that you fail to appreciate that it is also absurd as a test condition, because it cannot occur. If pigs did fly, you seem to be saying, then perforce it would not be absurd to dub them creatures of the air. Indeed, but it remains absurd to envision them flying.

You begin your latest with "I see the problem", but I think I must have skipped some steps because you roundly failed to see it. The plausibility of performing adventuring days inside a long rest isn't the contention. It might or might not be plausible - for some dungeons it certainly is - but the contention is that it is absurd to create space in the system for it. Likewise, whether it is absurd for 600 combats to interrupt a long rest isn't the contention, it is absurd for many typical adventuring days worth of combats to not do so!

I agree that 600 rounds of combat occurring in the middle of a long rest isn’t going to happen. I disagree that this is the least bit of a problem with the rule, because combat is an adventuring activity, and one hour of adventuring activity breaks a long rest. It doesn’t have to be a full hour of a single adventuring activity, but the rule has to account for the possibility of any combination of adventuring activities that total one hour.

 

[Charlaquin]

The time it takes a pandemic to resolve itself?

OK probably not funny

I think it’s funny, but I have a pretty grim sense of humor.

 

[Garthanos]

I think it’s funny, but I have a pretty grim sense of humor.

ironically I do not have a grim sense of humor... it makes that popping to mind all the more poignant

 

[Hriston]

Oh right. That understanding is incorrect. To clarify -

A = period of (strenuous activity (1 hour of (walking, fighting, casting spells, similar adventuring activity)))

B = period of (strenuous activity (1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, similar adventuring activity))

1. Both cases concern periods of activity
2. Such activity is strenuous
3. Under B, casting spells is strenuous
4. Under B, fighting is strenuous
5. Under B, 1 hour of walking is strenuous

One way of thinking about the difference between A and B is that under B, the similarity referred to is just that of being strenuous; whereas under A the similarity is either just that of duration, or that of duration plus being strenuous.

So B implicitly substitutes each list item in for "strenuous activity" - so that one reads "a period of fighting".

Ah, okay, I missed that. I think it might be worthwhile to write out a fully expanded form of each of our readings of the conditional because I feel like some nuances of meaning are lost in the parsings you’ve given above. As I stated up thread, I certainly don’t feel that your A captures my interpretation adequately, mainly because of your omission of the word “or”.

First I’ll give a full rendering of my current understanding of your interpretation as you have elucidated above:

If the rest is interrupted by a period of at least 1 hour of walking, a period of fighting, a period of casting spells, or a period of similar adventuring activity, the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it.​

Now here’s my interpretation given the same treatment:

If the rest is interrupted by 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.​

​

I hope I’ve gotten your intended meaning correctly this time and helped to clarify any misconceptions you might have had about mine.

 

[robus]

Ahh, I see the problem. You’ve mistaken the number of recommenced encounters in an adventuring day for the definition of an adventuring day. This is incorrect. An adventuring day is meant to contain 6-8 encounters, but it could contain more or fewer, and 6-8 encounters do not necessarily constitute an adventuring day.

There is no other definition of an adventuring day , it is used to describe a 5e design objective, i.e. that a party of 4 PCs can reasonably expect to survive 6-8 combat encounters of the specified difficulties (difficulties derived from the CR of the monsters which measures their lethality in combat). Whatever non-combat activity goes on in that day is irrelevant as far as that design objective is concerned. Let’s not muddy the term with “everything‘s part of the adventure, so every day is an adventuring day!”

And long rests are meant to complement that. And I would also say that because of the slow regen of hit dice, adventuring days are not meant to be consecutive

 

[Charlaquin]

There is no other definition of an adventuring day ,

That’s because it isn’t mechanical jargon. It’s a plain-English phrase. An adventuring day is a day of adventuring, and the game is designed around the assumption of 6-8 encounters (not necessarily combat encounters) occurring on each such day. But 6-8 encounters do not define an adventuring day, otherwise a day on which the players had fewer than 6 encounters would not be considered an adventuring day, and the adventuring day would have to end after 8 encounters.

it is used to describe a 5e design objective, i.e. that a party of 4 PCs can reasonably expect to survive 6-8 combat encounters of the specified difficulties

Correct.

(difficulties derived from the CR of the monsters which measures their lethality in combat).

Technically correct, but the DMG also recommends assigning such a difficulty to non-combat challenges and awarding the same amount of XP for them as for a combat encounter of the same difficulty, so we can assume these are meant to be included in the 6-8 encounter day. And in truth, the encounter difficulty scale is derived not from the CR of the monsters involved, but from how much HP the encounter is expected to cause the PCs to lose. Monster CR just happens to be derived from how much damage the monster is expected to deal over the course of the encounter.

Whatever non-combat activity goes on in that day is irrelevant as far as that design objective is concerned.

Incorrect, as demonstrated above.

Let’s not muddy the term with “everything‘s part of the adventure, so every day is an adventuring day!”

Not every day is an adventuring day. Some days are downtime days. That said, not every adventuring day meets the 6-8 encounter guideline.

And long rests are meant to complement that.

Sure, but that doesn’t mean 6-8 encounters are an adventuring day per se.

And I would also say that because of the slow regen of hit dice, adventuring days are not meant to be consecutive

You’d be wrong about that, but this is pretty orthogonal to the topic of discussion.