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Message: <blockquote data-quote="clearstream" data-source="post: 7944226" data-attributes="member: 71699">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 this1. 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 rests4. 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 encounters5. 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.</blockquote>

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