D&D 5E Interrupting rests

[Ovinomancer]

There’s no reason for wounds to cause problems. Your hit points heal, your wounds do not.

Not sure if you're referencing a house rule or the optional wounds system, so I'm unclear if an answer is needed. If the optional system is being referenced, no answer is really needed -- how those occur and work is clearly laid out. If house rule, I'm sure it's a great house rule, but also don't have much to say in response.

Huh, turns out I don't have a response either way. Odd how thinking while typing works out.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Fine until you hit the near-binary divide between 1 h.p. and 0 h.p.; and also dependent on whether one sees a character's current hit points (as a fraction of its full hit points) as an informer of narration as to what condition that character is in.

Put another way, given that it's utterly unrealistic to narrate them as all looking to be in the same state of [health-fatigue-etc.], how do you differently narrate the condition of 5 characters where one's at full h.p., one's at 3/4, one's at half, one's at 1/4 and the fifth is at 1 h.p.

Never mind that this is all an issue the game doesn't even need to have, had they only made hit point recovery via rest a lot slower in the first place.

You can narrate them any way you like. I'd suggest something that's consistent, so players can make meaningful choices, but it's up to you. I don't have a problem with it.

Now, in 5e, you do have a shroedinger's wound at 0 hp. If you drop, and make your death saves, it's not that bad, just a temporarily incapacitating injury, like being knocked out, or having to overcome pain, or being winded and sidelined. If you fail your death saves, then it's a fatal wound. You don't know either way until you get there, so, sure, it does make it hard to narrate in the moment. I usually handle this by not being specific in the narration, like, "the troll appears to stab Bob the Hobbit in the chest, and Bob goes down, unmoving, what do you do?" If Bob makes his death saves, turns out the spear was halted by his chain shirt, but the blow knocked the wind from him and put him down, unable to move. He's got a nasty bruise, but nothing that will really slow him down. If Bob fails, the party turns him over and finds a massive wound in his chest, clearly the cause of death. But, yeah, that's a tricky thing if you're used to narrating in the moment or not having delayed resolution.

A fun thing to do with hitpoints, though, is to actually treat them like the plot points they are. When a goblin stabs Bob, you can say, "Bob, the goblin hits you for 7 damage, and stabs you through the heart, killing you." To which Bob can say, "Um, no, I'm spending 7 hit points to negate that killing blow, instead I turn his blade with a deft parry." This goes on until, "Bob, the troll spears you for 28 damage, thrusting his massive spear straight through your ribcage causing instant death." Bob says, "Um, wow, I only have 14 hitpoints left. Uh..." GM: "Cool, I'll take those, and you're still dead." Bob: "No, wait, I'm going to use Death's Door, and make death saves, so I'm not out yet!" GM: "Okay, it's your turn anyway, so let's see the first save. If you fail three, you're dead. If someone gets to you or you make three, your last 14 hitpoints are enough to save you."

 

[Hriston]

Not sure if you're referencing a house rule or the optional wounds system, so I'm unclear if an answer is needed. If the optional system is being referenced, no answer is really needed -- how those occur and work is clearly laid out. If house rule, I'm sure it's a great house rule, but also don't have much to say in response.

Huh, turns out I don't have a response either way. Odd how thinking while typing works out.

I'm referencing neither. My point is you can describe (some) hit point loss/damage as acquiring wounds without describing hit point recovery/healing as those wounds getting better.

 

[Hriston]

It's interesting to me that some people separate the two, i.e. that they deem the two mechanics categorically different so that what we know about the one does not bear on what we may know about the other. I find that surprising. It feels like a peculiar approach to the design, if that is indeed what the designers intended. Less simple and consistent.

One can generalize about the two types of rest. They're both periods of downtime in which you can sleep and perform light activity. Because a long rest has the added requirement of at least six hours of sleep, that limits the amount of light activity you can perform. Strenuous activity is not resting, and any amount of it interrupts a rest. An interrupted short rest is spoiled and produces no benefit for a character performing strenuous activity. Because a long rest is longer, you can resume a long rest after an interruption as long as the interruption was less than an hour in duration. An hour or more of strenuous activity has the same effect on a long rest as any amount of strenuous activity has on a short rest.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I'm referencing neither. My point is you can describe (some) hit point loss/damage as acquiring wounds without describing hit point recovery/healing as those wounds getting better.

Oh. I didn't expect leaning into even more fiction dissociated with mechanics. Cool, of course you can do this.

 

[Charlaquin]

On this, as on some other things, I just ignore JC. Speculatively, he rules as permissively as possible in order to be inclusive of casual gamers as well as expert. That's how many of his rulings seem to me.

Some of the other commonly complained-about rulings counter-indicate this. It would be more permissive to rule that you can attack before or after making a shove with shield mastery, or to rule that Paladins can smite with unarmed strikes. I think the evidence points to him leaning towards the most literal interpretation of the wording possible.

Where I find the SA very helpful is where it lays out the intent...

I’m not convinced UA rulings indicate design intent. The ruling on magic shields seems to me to favor the letter of the rule over the spirit, and I very much doubt it was the intended interpretation, though it is the most literal one.

but here one finds it implausible that the intent is that 600 continuous rounds of combat are needed to break a long rest! Because, were that true, the mechanic would have to be crafted by someone who had heard of D&D, but never played it...

This disregards the far more likely intent that combat alone is not meant to be able to interrupt long rests at all, but that combat is meant to contribute to the total amount of time spent engaging in strenuous activity. For example, walking for 11 minutes, participating in 10 rounds of combat, and repeating this process 4 more times would break a long rest.

 

[Ovinomancer]

Some of the other commonly complained-about rulings counter-indicate this. It would be more permissive to rule that you can attack before or after making a shove with shield mastery, or to rule that Paladins can smite with unarmed strikes. I think the evidence points to him leaning towards the most literal interpretation of the wording possible.


I’m not convinced UA rulings indicate design intent. The ruling on magic shields seems to me to favor the letter of the rule over the spirit, and I very much doubt it was the intended interpretation, though it is the most literal one.


This disregards the far more likely intent that combat alone is not meant to be able to interrupt long rests at all, but that combat is meant to contribute to the total amount of time spent engaging in strenuous activity. For example, walking for 11 minutes, participating in 10 rounds of combat, and repeating this process 4 more times would break a long rest.

Whoa, that was a ninja edit. You had walk 10 fight 10, but between when I read it and clicked post, you nabbed the difference! Score!

 

[Charlaquin]

The bolded still reads as if the '1 hour' proviso applies to both walking and combat; you're reading an exclusive 'or' where I - and I suspect many others - am reading an inclusive.

What's needed for actual clarity is the insertion of a comma and the word 'any' in the right places, such that it reads: 1 hour of walking, or any combat...

One expects that they would simply make such a change if that was indeed the intent. It would be a trivial errata, and the fact that they haven’t made it seems to me to indicate that such a change would not be consistent with the design intent.

 

[Charlaquin]

Fine until you hit the near-binary divide between 1 h.p. and 0 h.p.; and also dependent on whether one sees a character's current hit points (as a fraction of its full hit points) as an informer of narration as to what condition that character is in.

Put another way, given that it's utterly unrealistic to narrate them as all looking to be in the same state of [health-fatigue-etc.], how do you differently narrate the condition of 5 characters where one's at full h.p., one's at 3/4, one's at half, one's at 1/4 and the fifth is at 1 h.p.

Never mind that this is all an issue the game doesn't even need to have, had they only made hit point recovery via rest a lot slower in the first place.

The rules answer this question, the characters who are at or below half HP have visible signs of wear. Scrapes, cuts, bruises, ragged breathing, etc. The characters above half HP do not.

 

[clearstream]

Were it me I'd make them commit up front before starting the rest, as to which type of rest they're intending to take.

Wrong kind of doing nothing?