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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6960505" data-attributes="member: 6775031">You seem to be implying that any sort of light activity, up-to-and-including the application of bandages, can be performed at any point - even while performing the sorts of strenuous activity that would normally make resting impossible. That makes sense for drinking from a canteen, or even eating a trail ration, but you can't apply bandages to a moving target; and I'm pretty sure that whatever arcane ritual is required to consciously recover specific spell slots is a little too complex to perform while jogging.Remember that, officially in 5E, damage is described differently by different DMs. In some games, including many of those governed by the default healing/resting options, you're not even bloodied until you're down to half, and damage between half and zero is mostly cosmetic. If a given DM describes damage more physically, such as would generally be the case for anyone requiring a medkit in order to spend Hit Dice, then that's not something you can hand-wave healing as a side-effect of having not done anything strenuous recently; you actually need to lie down and have someone apply whatever poultices are involved during that period.The tricky part comes when you start talking about retroactive continuity, because while we can generally assume that most non-heroic activity takes places off-screen, we never know when that assumption might stop applying. Let's go with food as an example. If you wander into the Swamp of Rotting, where mischievous fey cast a curse over all food in order to make it instantly rot, then suddenly it matters when the last time you ate was; if you ate right before entering the swamp, then you're better off than if you were planning to eat along the way. And the DM, preparing for this possibility, may have made a surreptitious inquiry into your eating habits before this point in order to avoid the possibility of bias in interpreting the outcome.As another example, imagine you've found a cave in which to wait out a thunderstorm, and you've been in there for three hours before a dire bear wanders in. It suddenly matters whether you've spent some of that time in applying bandages and recovering spells from your spellbook. You may have consciously chosen to not spend Hit Dice and activate Arcane Recovery, because you expected to meet a healer later in the day and you weren't sure which spell slots you would need; and giving the players the option to now declare that they had previously performed those activities would be... bad in some way... the exact word escapes me at the moment (inauthentic?).Of course, then you have some abilities that recharge after a short rest, and there's no real decision involved. I think pact spells and superiority dice fall into that category, where there's not really ever a reason to not recover those. In those cases, it's generally a pretty safe assumption that they'll always be performing those activities whenever they get a chance (unless the in-game reality of recovering pact spells involves reading your unholy book, in which case you may choose to not do that unless you have sufficient privacy against worried townsfolk).</blockquote>

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