D&D 5E Assaying Immersive Rest Rules

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I would do it as simply as this:

"features that refresh at the end of a “long rest”, with the exception of Hit Dice and Hitpoints, do so"

That also eloquently explains the motive for needing it (i.e., that ordinarily, HP/HD are features that refresh). Thanks!

EDIT Got any text for the sleep/trance thing? (Ideally, that covers Aspect of the Moon.)

 

[Rabulias]

EDIT Note that to some extent I agree with you. Still Leomund might have been thinking of facilitating safe breathers, sleeps and short rests, and perhaps 24 hours lies beyond the power the spell can muster.

Maybe Leomund's tiny hut can only do so much, but I am sure your players will try to find or create a higher level spell with a longer duration.

 

[Stalker0]

EDIT Got any text for the sleep/trance thing? (Ideally, that covers Aspect of the Moon.)

Depending on how rigid you want Trance to be (aka how you fall on the "semi-conscious" spectrum).

Version 1: (more natural language)
Sleep Alternatives
Creatures that do not require sleep can perform 4 hours of light activity and gain 8 hours of sleep. Creatures with the Trance ability remain conscious, but must perform no activity.

Version 2 (more exact mechanics)
Creatures that do not require sleep can perform 4 hours of light activity and gain 8 hours of sleep. Creatures with the Trance ability are instead stunned for 4 hours or until they end the trance.


Stunned gives you teh majority of unconscious penalties but not all of them, so its a reasonable interpretation for "semi-conscious" if you want to be more exact and rigid. Or you can leave it more in natural language with the first version.

 

[clearstream]

Depending on how rigid you want Trance to be (aka how you fall on the "semi-conscious" spectrum).

Version 1: (more natural language)
Sleep Alternatives
Creatures that do not require sleep can perform 4 hours of light activity and gain 8 hours of sleep. Creatures with the Trance ability remain conscious, but must perform no activity.

Version 2 (more exact mechanics)
Creatures that do not require sleep can perform 4 hours of light activity and gain 8 hours of sleep. Creatures with the Trance ability are instead stunned for 4 hours or until they end the trance.


Stunned gives you teh majority of unconscious penalties but not all of them, so its a reasonable interpretation for "semi-conscious" if you want to be more exact and rigid. Or you can leave it more in natural language with the first version.

The use of stunned is great! Two supporting data points -

1) Eldritch Adept in TCoE establishes that Aspect of the Moon costs about a feat. Aspect should allow a warlock to perform lowkey (aka light) activity instead of sleeping. A needed piece of mechanical finesse is to make that whatever duration would have been required (so that an elven warlock with Aspect doesn't need to hang around for 8 hours while her cousins need only 4!) To my mind, conscious trance shouldn't be worth anywhere near a feat. It should be closer to 1/4. So applying the stunned condition feels right. Aspect should be considerably better than trance.

2) The design approach - the supposed 'why' of why it works - is to put hard costs on rests. A character benefiting from anything more than a breather must not be able to do so safely, and it must be 100% clear that they are vulnerable and non-participating by default. So trance cannot be conscious: it has to be unconscious or similar. Stunned gains no auto-crit and no prone (also no dropping things, but that is not relevant to voluntary unconsciousness). Avoiding auto-crit and prone during something you are forced to do (rest), is worth about a 1/4 feat (trance is 2pts in 'detect balance', versus 8pts for an ASI).

 

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Maybe Leomund's tiny hut can only do so much, but I am sure your players will try to find or create a higher level spell with a longer duration.

Mordenkainen's Magnificent Mansion - 7th level - could fit the bill! Another route is to take Metamagic Adept and choose Extended Spell. That gives you 16 hours of Hut or 48 hours of Mansion.

Using those as anchors for relative power, I'd be okay if players wanted to invest some downtime to research a spell that offered them some protection during rests. For me, such options feel better than going with the base rules. And at the tiers involved, an NPC dispel magic or monstrous antimagic field doesn't seem entirely out of the question.

My party's bards are already making strong use of catnap, which grants an instant short meditation to a few characters.