D&D 5E Warlocks and Hex and the "daily morning short rest"

[Arial Black]

Its not how the world works. The rules of the game of DnD are not a reflection of the objective reality of some alternate universe. Plus; 'DM'. You can spend all day 'short resting' as much as you want, but you dont get back squat unless the DM says so.

There are many things wrong with this.

In the past I have admired many aspects of your DMing skills, but this is not one of those times.

It is the way the world works. Although our characters have no direct conception of 5E game mechanics like hit points or spell slots, they certainly know about injury and healing, the limits of spellcasting, and the benefits of resting. The world of the PCs really does work such that resting heals you and refreshes casting ability.

The 5E rules are what controls the objective reality of our imaginary worlds. The inhabitants of those worlds cannot know about game mechanics directly, but the consequences of those rules impact their daily lives.

As for the idea that things in the game world only happen if the DM says so is misleading. If the expected outcome does not occur, there must be an in-game reason. If I rest for 8 hours, I get my full hit points back. If I don't, then something in-game must have prevented it. What? A curse from that necromancer we bothered? Those mushrooms we ate? What? The DM can come up with an in-game reason, sure, but D&D is not a game of 'Simon Says'! "Simon didn't say you got your hit points back!"

Come into my game and try and game the rest mechanic (or any other mechanic), and you'll find it doesnt work.

Oh, you mean, you cheat.

"Try and play chess in my house and see if your knight can jump over those pawns!"

Whatever the reality of the real world or the reality of or made up game world, it is what it is. If you regain Pact Magic slots by refraining from activity for 1 hour, then that's how Pact Magic works. It doesn't stop working just because you've adapted your behaviour to take advantage of reality!

This is true of any world, real or imagined. In the real world creatures evolve to take advantage of how their world works. They evolve their forms and they evolve their behaviour.

Most liquids expand as their temperature rises and contract when their temperature drops. One consequence of this is that when liquids start to freeze then it gets solid at the bottom first. Water is different: it contracts as it gets cooler, but at 4 degrees Celsius it expands instead. This results in ice forming at the top, creating ice sheets floating on liquid water. It is what it is. We can take advantage of that (by skating) even as we suffer from that (by ice damaging roads). But we can't pretend it doesn't work simply because we can use the reality to our advantage, or evolve our behaviour to adapt to this reality by inventing hotels in iceburgs.

In the 5E rules, and in the imaginary worlds governed by those rules, the reality is that pact magic is refreshed after 1 hour's inactivity. Therefore, smart creatures adapt their behaviour to take advantage of this reality. This is not cheating! This is not 'metagaming'!

If you stand too close to a fire it burns you. If you stand too far away then you are too cold. It is not cheating or metagaming to deliberately move to the Goldilocks zone of 'warm but not too hot'!

If you rest for an hour you regain your Pact Magic slots. It is not cheating or metagaming to rest for 1 hour in order to regain spent slots!

It can, and should, have realistic consequences for delaying for an hour when time is a factor. That is part of the resource management of the game. You make your decisions, factoring in time versus expedience. Nothing has gone wrong.

But it shouldn't have unrealistic consequences! The world works like it works. Resting for 1 hour does what it does, and cannot spontaneously fail, nor fail because the creatures in the game world adapt their behaviour to take advantage of how the world works.

 

[Arial Black]

Yes, we are.

Because casting a spell does not interrupt a long rest, it cannot be used as a marker for the long rest ending and thus another rest being capable of starting. Do some non-rest activity for an hour, which is what the game says is necessary to count as interrupting a rest - a thing I am counting as necessary because the character in question is intending to stay at rest, and thus cannot possibly be voluntarily ending their own rest - and you can start a different rest.

There is no such thing as 'taking a short rest' really. The reality is simply that if you haven't done anything strenuous for an hour then the consequences are the benefits of a short rest.

Refraining from stressful activity for 1 hour refreshes Pact Magic. End of. That's how Pact Magic works. The lack of stressful activity refreshes those slots. What came before - long rest or not - has no impact on how Pact Magic slots refresh.

And your example about cutting yourself while preparing rabbits is a nonfunctional one - hit points are not so granular that an injury the character is going to bandage up and move on with their day registers as any loss of hit points, and are not representative of the character's physical condition to such a degree that the character being at full hit points precludes the character from having numerous injuries that still require bandages and care because they take days/weeks to heal despite hp returning to full after a single long rest.

....What?!?

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

There is no such thing as 'taking a short rest' really. The reality is simply that if you haven't done anything strenuous for an hour then the consequences are the benefits of a short rest.

Yep... and that is exactly why there is no difference between what happens if you do nothing strenuous for 9 hours, and what happens if you do nothing strenuous for 8 hours cast a spell and then do nothing strenuous for 1 hour.

In both cases you've only made one extra length long rest, because there is no such thing as "taking a short rest", really.

What came before - long rest or not - has no impact on how Pact Magic slots refresh.

No impact on how pact magic slots needs to be made - it's entirely contained in the resting rules that whether you rest for 8 hours or 9 hours, that's just a long rest - unless you actually do something besides what you can do during a long rest to split those hours up into distinct resting periods.

 

[Arial Black]

Yep... and that is exactly why there is no difference between what happens if you do nothing strenuous for 9 hours, and what happens if you do nothing strenuous for 8 hours cast a spell and then do nothing strenuous for 1 hour.

In both cases you've only made one extra length long rest, because there is no such thing as "taking a short rest", really.

No impact on how pact magic slots needs to be made - it's entirely contained in the resting rules that whether you rest for 8 hours or 9 hours, that's just a long rest - unless you actually do something besides what you can do during a long rest to split those hours up into distinct resting periods.

Pact Magic slots are refreshed after an hour of inactivity. This would be true even within an 8 hour rest!

You stop to rest straight after combat. After one hour you gain the benefits of a short rest, because you've done nothing stressful for 1 hour. Seven hours after that, you gain the benefit of a long rest because you haven't done anything stressful for eight hours!

'Long rest' and 'short rest' are not real things in themselves. They are simply convenient labels. You don't really consciously decide to 'take a rest' and if you failed to declare that in advance then you fail to benefit! No, what happens is that you refresh some things if it's been at least an hour since your last activity, and refresh other things if it's been 8 hours since your last activity. You don't need to declare it in advance to gain the benefit. If you rest for one hour, then you don't have to start again at zero to gain a full rest; seven more hours means that you've had a long rest. Every long rest contains 8 short rests. It's rarely relevant because a long rest does everything a short rest does and more.

At any point in the day, if it has been 1 hour since you last did something stressful then you gain the benefits of a short rest. The fact that this may also be part of an even longer rest does not prevent you gaining those short rest benefits.

 

[ThePolarBear]

Yep... and that is exactly why there is no difference between what happens if you do nothing strenuous for 9 hours, and what happens if you do nothing strenuous for 8 hours cast a spell and then do nothing strenuous for 1 hour.

There' s a mechanical difference actually. You only regain resources at the end of a long rest. If the long rest does not have a clear and definite "end" then things gets messy and possibly narratively strange.

 

[Krachek]

There are many things wrong with this.

This is true of any world, real or imagined. In the real world creatures evolve to take advantage of how their world works. They evolve their forms and they evolve their behaviour.

In the 5E rules, and in the imaginary worlds governed by those rules, the reality is that pact magic is refreshed after 1 hour's inactivity. Therefore, smart creatures adapt their behaviour to take advantage of this reality. This is not cheating! This is not 'metagaming'!

You seem to believe that the reality of DnD as immovable, and completely described by the rules.
In fact there is a lot of holes in the rules to describe DnD reality, and in DnD reality rules are also there to balance game play, which is a kind of metagaming.
If the DM assume that the reality is bugged, with a snap of fingers, he can call that you cant use a rat to keep on your Hex, and recover your spell slot.
You can quote philosophers, scientists, to argue, but the DM can change the realityat will.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

This would be true even within an 8 hour rest!

Find me one thing in the rules, or that a designer of the game has said, which indicates that's the case. Because, without you pointing me to something supporting your position, the layout of the book, the phrase "Adventurers can take short rests in the midst of an adventuring day and a long rest to end the day," (found on page 186), and that the book defines both types of rest by their minimum time required - not the exact amount of time they take - and only provides benefits when the rest ends, are all saying loud and clear that this statement of yours is entirely incorrect.

'Long rest' and 'short rest' are not real things in themselves. They are simply convenient labels. You don't really consciously decide to 'take a rest'

Again, that is exactly why you can't consciously decide to end one rest and then start another - which means resting longer stretches out how long the one rest takes, rather than making it 2 (or more) rests that have happened.

 

[Plaguescarred]

While the rules seems to allow this, the DM isn't under any obligations to allow it in his game and i'm glad the warlock in my GREYHAWK campaign doesn't exploit it.

A sleeping character is not unconscious. This is true in real life and the game

FYI you're unconscious while asleep as per Jeremy Crawford https://twitter.com/JeremyECrawford/status/515869124057378817?ref_src=twsrc^tfw


@BrailSays I cant imagine that sleep would NOT be unconscious,but someone insists "its not in the book!"
‏@JeremyECrawford Conditions are meant to be intuitive for the DM to apply. Lack consciousness, as when asleep? Yep, you're unconscious.


Yan
D&D Playtester

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

There' s a mechanical difference actually.

Not according to anything I can find in the game rules. To make a mechanical difference, it would have to be an hour of casting spells, not just casting a single spell, to negate the possibility of considering the entire time as a single rest of extended length.

If the long rest does not have a clear and definite "end" then things gets messy and possibly narratively strange.

Despite that a long rest isn't a specifically defined length, it still has a clear and definite end - it's when the characters are actually done resting and are ready to do something else (or when they weren't done resting, but were sufficiently interrupted to satisfy the game rules).

 

[ThePolarBear]

Not according to anything I can find in the game rules. To make a mechanical difference, it would have to be an hour of casting spells, not just casting a single spell, to negate the possibility of considering the entire time as a single rest of extended length.

Only if you consider the fact that i meant that casting a spell interrupted a long rest and that's not what i intended to mean. What i meant is that there's a definite end to a long rest and there has to be. The first example you made was a clear 9 hour long rest. The second you just posed as being a 9 hour long rest with a spell cast in the middle while it could have been an 8 hour long rest, then a spell cast, then an hour of relaxation.

The topic is about Warlock casting AFTER A LONG REST. Those 8 hours are a long rest that HAS ENDED.
In this case you CANNOT consider the following hour as "part of the long rest". It's not part of the problem.

You can't even think that this can be used as an universal solution. You regain more thing than just spell slot at the end of a long rest that you do not regain at the end of a short one. There's a difference there. A mechanical one.

Despite that a long rest isn't a specifically defined length, it still has a clear and definite end - it's when the characters are actually done resting and are ready to do something else (or when they weren't done resting, but were sufficiently interrupted to satisfy the game rules).

Yes. And never claimed otherwise. That is exactly why a player has to know WHEN a long rest ends, and why you and Arial Black are talking about 2 different things. If the Warlock player has reached the END of the rest he mechanically has some benefits and limitations to take care of.

Rulewise there's nothing preventing the player ("adventurers can take") to rest, except for the 24 h limit on long ones.