resting and spellcasting

[Droogie]

Ok, I understand that clerics need to meditate for their spells at the same time every day so they can only regain spells once every 24 hours. No problem there.

PHB says arcane casters need 8 hours rest before preparing new spells. Any spells cast in the last 8 hours count against their total, so that slot remains empty until the next time they can rest for 8 hours and blah blah blah.

My question is this- how often can the party rest realistically? I'm a n00b DM and I'm running into the problem of my players resting, blowing all their spells, then wanting to rest almost immediately after. So far I've been ruling it this way- you need about 4 hours of active adventuring before you need to rest again. Is this fair?

What do you guys do?

And if you'll allow a small rant, since pnp RPG games are not run in realtime but "virtual time" (and turn-based time on occasion), I find it funny that so many things in the game- spell durations and whatnot- rely on minutes and hours. Pain.

 

[Dursk Starkfire]

resting

What I've experienced to be a playable solution to this is:

all spellcasters get their spells back at dawn, provided they rest the prescribed minimum amount of time. This means that a cleric would have to pray for the 1 hour before dawn (could be the night before, whenever the PC wishes to do so), elves would have to 'trance' for four hours, and most other magic users (psions included) would have to rest for 8 hours.

IF the party does not have the necessary amount of time to rest before dawn, they can still get their spells back for the day provided that they rest their minimum required amount of time in a continuous rest. (ie: if the party spent the past 32 hours in combat, etc. and are swamped, they can then rest for 8 hours and have access to spells for the last 8 hours of the day (as well as the next day so long as they don't cast all of their spells).



Also, if your PC's are fighting top-heavy and using all of their spells in one encounter, then I'd be certain that people would hear of the battle and interrupt their slumber. Nothing worse than being interrupted mid-sleep with no spells and having to battle with unexpected villains.


Dursk.

 

[Tar-Edhel]

PHB says arcane casters need 8 hours rest before preparing new spells. Any spells cast in the last 8 hours count against their total, so that slot remains empty until the next time they can rest for 8 hours and blah blah blah.

My question is this- how often can the party rest realistically? I'm a n00b DM and I'm running into the problem of my players resting, blowing all their spells, then wanting to rest almost immediately after. So far I've been ruling it this way- you need about 4 hours of active adventuring before you need to rest again. Is this fair?

What do you guys do?

There was a thread about this a few days or weeks ago. You might want to search for it, although I can't remember the title or anything.

Our arcane spell casters get to rest as often as they want but we rarely get the chance to rest more than once. In hostile territory, staying in one spot for too long will bring disaster, especially if there are organized foes around.

Basically, it helps us identify items faster when we are in town for a few days.

 

[Hypersmurf]

And if you'll allow a small rant, since pnp RPG games are not run in realtime but "virtual time" (and turn-based time on occasion), I find it funny that so many things in the game- spell durations and whatnot- rely on minutes and hours. Pain.

I'm not sure I understand your point...

The spell durations are in 'virtual' minutes and hours too...

-Hyp.

 

[Droogie]

Re: Re: resting and spellcasting

There was a thread about this a few days or weeks ago. You might want to search for it, although I can't remember the title or anything.

I don't have access to the search feature because I'm not registered as a community supporter. I'm more of a lurker.

I guess I could take the plunge, but I use paypal. We'll see.

 

[Droogie]

Re: Re: resting and spellcasting

I'm not sure I understand your point...

The spell durations are in 'virtual' minutes and hours too...

-Hyp.

I guess what I mean is that I have difficulty deciding how much virtual time has passed. Sometimes I don't know what to tell the sorcerer when he asks if his mage armor spell is still on. Its an acquired skill I suppose.

And thanks for the posts, BTW.

 

[Hypersmurf]

Re: Re: Re: resting and spellcasting

I guess what I mean is that I have difficulty deciding how much virtual time has passed. Sometimes I don't know what to tell the sorcerer when he asks if his mage armor spell is still on. Its an acquired skill I suppose.

And an important one for things other than spell durations - like people asking "Is it dark yet?"



-Hyp.

 

[DiFier]

I can think of one occasion where my current charachter (a fighter/wizard/spellsword) rested more than once a day. In the morning we got up as usualy did some investigating and had some allies do some investigating. at noon one ally didn't come back. so we went and found him. using locate object. We found him had a pretty big battle where I used up a lot of spells. Then a little more work and some planning and then 8 hours of sleep begining at 5pm. at 1am I got up memorized new spells we all met and began our raid at 3am. during the raid i again used most of my spells after the raid I was unable to return home and was subsguesnetlly (sp) arested. with like 5 or 6 spells remaining and only 2 or 3 that didn't require material components.

Now here is an interisting question. While I was being held in the dungeon I got 8 hour of sleep. when I escaped I went to where an ally had moved my spell books. would I be able to spen an hour and memorize new spells then and there or would I have to rest first? It wasn't a problem luckily.

 

[Droogie]

I can think of one occasion where my current charachter (a fighter/wizard/spellsword) rested more than once a day. In the morning we got up as usualy did some investigating and had some allies do some investigating. at noon one ally didn't come back. so we went and found him. using locate object. We found him had a pretty big battle where I used up a lot of spells. Then a little more work and some planning and then 8 hours of sleep begining at 5pm. at 1am I got up memorized new spells we all met and began our raid at 3am. during the raid i again used most of my spells after the raid I was unable to return home and was subsguesnetlly (sp) arested. with like 5 or 6 spells remaining and only 2 or 3 that didn't require material components.

Now here is an interisting question. While I was being held in the dungeon I got 8 hour of sleep. when I escaped I went to where an ally had moved my spell books. would I be able to spen an hour and memorize new spells then and there or would I have to rest first? It wasn't a problem luckily.

Hmmm. I guess not. Even tho you only had about two hours of intense adventure action, the 8 hours of quiet time you had in your cell probably would have done the trick. From the PHB, it sounds like all you need are 8 hours of uninterrupted rest. Thats all. You don't even have to be asleep the whole time.
Like I said in my above post, I've been using 4 hours of 'awake' time as a rule of thumb to keep the PCs from abusing the system....but judging from the thrashing they got last nite, maybe i could allow a little bendy-bendy.

 

[dkilgo]

Are you sure that you are required to have 8 hours of uniinterupted rest in order to memorize spells? Because I have always played that as long as you received a total of 8 hours of rest, with minimal interuptions, you would still be able to memorize yours spells. Could you please post a passage to support your claim here? Thanks.