FAQ: Humans don't sleep.

[Borlon]

Q: My human character was recently part of an adventure where I took watch for the entire night, every night, for a week. The other players had their characters sleep every night. By the sixth day, the DM told me my character fell asleep on watch, and then had a bunch of monsters attack us and kill my character. I felt totally cheated! Was my DM wrong?

Answer...: Your DM is, of course, completely wrong.

Careful examination of the Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Guide will reveal that there are only a few specific references to sleeping:

• Certain spells (sleep, deep slumber) can cause a condition called “sleeping”. This is apparently a status condition that is defined within the sleep spell description, rather than in the Glossary. The spell claims that, “Sleeping creatures are helpless.”
• Wizards require 8 hours of rest to prepare spells, but specifically do NOT need to sleep.
• Characters sleeping in medium or heavy armor are automatically fatigued. Characters sleeping in light armor are not.
• Sleeping is required to remove the effects of the fatigued or exhausted condition statuses.
• Sleeping inflicts a –10 penalty to Listen checks.
• Elves do not need to sleep. However, it is not specified that other player races DO need to sleep.

Therefore, we can conclude that while there may be some specific reasons your character might want to sleep—and a few magically induced situations when sleep is forced upon you—there is absolutely no rules support for sleep being required. Indeed, chances are you will want your character to never sleep again, since it leaves you open to being the recipient of a coup de grace due to helplessness. If you are having your character sleep every night, then you are deliberately exposing yourself to whatever traps your DM is setting for you in the night.

If your DM is having you fall asleep naturally because you have stayed awake for 168 hours, then he is clearly abusing his powers as DM, and you should feel free to quote the relevant rules passages. In particular, ask him to show you the section where it says that characters are capable of inflicting the “sleeping” status upon themselves without magical assistance.

The rest of the column may be found here:

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=rpga/hq/poly4b&dcmp=DDPR-0004

Other issues are here

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=rpga/hq/poly6a&dcmp=DDPR-0006
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=rpga/hq/poly8c&dcmp=DDPR-0008
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=rpga/hq/poly9d&dcmp=DDPR-0009

 

[Thanee]

Humanoids breathe, eat, and sleep.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Dog Moon]

Okay, whew. I thought this was a serious thing and was like 'what the?' I felt much better when looking at the link and saw 'Foolishly Answered Questions' at the top of screen.

That is funny though. I wish I could get away with not sleeping for 168 hours at a time. Me, not my characters.

 

[Iku Rex]

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=rpga/hq/poly9d&dcmp=DDPR-0009

Q. Your answers are completely wrong! In the first installment of this series, you told some poor guy that his character didn’t ever need to sleep, because there were no rules telling him that he needed to and no rules allowing him to inflict the “sleeping” status on himself. But if you look in the Appendix to the Monster Manual, it states “Humanoids need to eat, breathe, and sleep.”

Zaid the Powergamer: To which I respond, “Or what?” They need to sleep, or what? There are no penalties given whatsoever, other than failing to recover from the fatigued or exhausted states. A character that fails to eat starves and a character that fails to eat dies of thirst, the details of which are clearly spelled out in the Dungeon Master’s Guide. The fact that no such rules exist for sleeping is indisputable evidence that the design intent of the game’s writers is that sleep is not necessary. If they thought it was, they would have written rules for it.

Further, even if we accept that humanoids must sleep, it doesn’t say how OFTEN they must sleep. So the original questioner merely needs to write into his character’s backstory that one day, as a youth, his character slept for 12 full hours. At which point no one can say he hasn’t fulfilled his textually mandated obligation that he “must sleep”. At any rate, since we’ve conclusively proven above that humans are not humanoids, human characters won’t need to sleep regardless, because that text you quoted doesn’t apply to them. Remember: Zaid is NEVER wrong, because nowhere in the books does it actually ever say that I am wrong.

From earlier in the same FAQ article:

“Humanoid” is defined in the Monster Manual as a creature type; “A humanoid usually has two arms, two legs, and one head, or a humanlike torso, arms, and a head.” Looking through the rest of the book, we find several examples of creatures with the humanoid type: elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs, goblins, kobolds, and a few others. However, there is NO entry for humans. Therefore, we cannot say with any certainty that humans have the humanoid type; we must assume that humans, unlike every other creature in the game, have no type whatsoever. This makes humans immune to a wide variety of spells, including the dreaded charm person. Now, in case your Dungeon Master argues that a human must by necessity be a humanoid, you can always point out that the word “humanoid” implies in its very construction that the subject is NOT human—otherwise, wouldn’t they be called humans, instead of humanOIDs?

 

[Coredump]

First: This is crazy

Second: Those links look real... this is real...and that is crazy

Third: This is a farce...and that is crazy funny.

Fourth: This is written by Rich "order of the stick" Burlew... that is the first thing that makes sense!

 

[Coredump]

Hey,
I can change the URL to find other FAQ entries, but how can I find them on the website?

I am just missing the link or something.

Thanks

 

[Borlon]

The only FAQs I could find are linked to in the first post.

According to the RAW, is Zaid right? (Note the rejoinder to the "humanoids need to eat, breathe and sleep" that Iku Rex quotes.)

 

[Pielorinho]

Rich is an awesome guy. These answers say, more eloquently than I ever have, why I don't adopt RAW as the sole valid perspective for answering rules questions, in this forum or elsewhere. I figure that at the very least, a RAW approach must be tempered by a common-sense approach.

Daniel

 

[RigaMortus2]

Rich is an awesome guy. These answers say, more eloquently than I ever have, why I don't adopt RAW as the sole valid perspective for answering rules questions, in this forum or elsewhere. I figure that at the very least, a RAW approach must be tempered by a common-sense approach.

Daniel

You should never solely rely on RAW. RAW is just something for rules-lawyers to argue amongst themselves about.

 

[Camarath]

The closest thing to a rule requiring a character to sleep is the example of how to make a rule for situation for which no rules are given on page 33 of the DMG in the Ability Check section.

""There are no rules for trying to stay awake through the night, .....

Using the example situations above, staying awake might be a Constitution check (DC 12, +4 for every previous night without sleep), with an elf character gaining a +2 bonus because an efl is only giving up 4 hours of trance instead of 8 of sleep."