D&D 5E What interupts a long rest?

[Ancalagon]

I agree. It is a technical writing failure to have this sentence be so ambiguous.

This is a side bar but... I am disappointed by the number of ambiguous sentences in 5e...

 

[sable_twilight]

Something no one every thinks about, but the average long rest is more than 12 hours, rather than just 8 hours. You can travel/adventure for 8 hours without making saves to avoid exhaustion. Lets add in two 1 hour short rests, putting us to 10 hours. Hell, let's give an extra hour at the beginning and end of the day for waking up and winding down. That's 12 hours, tops. If a long rest is 8 hours, where did the rest of the time go? This means that realistically even if you have an encounter ruin a long rest, there's certainly enough time to restart it. If it happens late enough, well the 8 hours has passed, so they already got it. Even if you drop it in the middle of the night, that just delays their start by 2 hours... which will take away from extra downtime at the end of the day without causing any timeframe issues.

This is why in future campaigns I'm house ruling long rests require a downtime day.

 

[Charlaquin]

I admire your gambit here

It’s not a gambit, it’s an earnest counter-argument to your position. I am trying to express that I see no reason 600 rounds of combat need be ruled out as something that can break a long rest, unless your goal is for 600 rounds of combat to not break a long rest.

As I said, we have been here before. The reason I feel the words as written cannot support the mixture view as desired is fairly simple. Here I am focusing on your claim, which is "what the words written in the book actually say".

1. Foremost, the words are strictly ambiguous: they do admit of more than one possible meaning.
2. Taken to mean a mixture, we agree that 600 rounds of combat is included. As would be for instance 59 minutes and 54 seconds of walking and 1 round of combat.
3. It is absurd to suppose that the intent actually is 600 rounds of combat, because (among other reasons) an adventurer could level from 1-10 or more while resting, were that so.

I believe that 600 rounds of combat ought to break a long rest, so I don’t see why it’s absurd to suppose the intent is for 600 rounds of combat to be among the things that can potentially break a long rest.

4. Therefore there must be something about our reading that excludes 600 rounds of combat while including every mixture that we find acceptable.

Why? I don’t understand your desire to exclude this. In my opinion, it should be included.

5.But there is nothing in the words - nothing in what the words actually say - that rules out 600 rounds of combat.

Indeed, which is precisely why I’m convinced that 600 rounds of combat is intended to be something that breaks a long rest. Otherwise, they would probably have written some words that actually said to rule it out.

Therefore it is totally fine - in fact I believe reasonable - to suppose that whatever mixtures we feel okay about are what was intended. We could say it is just a problem of a designer making a mistake with the wording. What we cannot say is that what the words actually say is that some mixtures are in and some - like 600 rounds of combat - are out. We have to add words in our act of interpretation to get there.

Right, and the fact that we have to add words on our act of interpretation in order to arrive at your position is precisely why I think it’s the weaker interpretation.

 

[Mannahnin]

Something I've noticed in debates about ambiguous rules in this and other game systems is that they are typified by one group finding one reading simply the most intuitive, and the other group finding the other reading simply the most intuitive.

I moot that you find yourself on the side of the debate that comports with your intuitions, whichever side those fall on.

In my case my intuitions are informed by the context of the various editions of the rules I've read before, and the rest and healing rules therein.

Reading these ones, it seems clear to me that 5E is intended to be much more forgiving of interrupted sleep than some earlier editions.

I think Rune has it right; the consequences of reading it one way or the other are that either...

A ) Long Rests will be interrupted rarely. PCs will be able to fight off an attacker in the night and then resume their rest, and be none the worse for wear except having had to face an encounter potentially low on resources after a full day's adventuring, and with some members likely not in armor.

B ) Long Rests will be interrupted ALL THE TIME. Whenever an encounter occurs at night, most casters will be unable to recover spell slots and everyone will miss out on recovered HP, HD, and reset-on-a-long-rest abilities.

That observation reinforces my conclusion that the 5E designers intended exactly what Jeremy ruled. That it takes a whole hour of adventuring activity in total to ruin a Long Rest.

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That all being said, I do find that the rest and recovery rules in 5E are a bit tricky; working well for dungeon crawls but not very well for wilderness or urban adventuring where one can often expect to only get one or two encounters in a day. I'm still trying to find the perfect set of house rules for this.

 

[clearstream]

Why? I don’t understand your desire to exclude this. In my opinion, it should be included.

Exactly. You grasp the horn of the dilemma and accept that 600 rounds of combat is included. That sustains the reading, and means that you can't argue for a mixture. You've accepted that 1 hour of fighting means 1 hour of fighting.

 

[MarkB]

Exactly. You grasp the horn of the dilemma and accept that 600 rounds of combat is included. That sustains the reading, and means that you can't argue for a mixture. You've accepted that 1 hour of fighting means 1 hour of fighting.

You seem to feel like this proves some larger point. I'm not sure why you feel that.

 

[clearstream]

I think Rune has it right; the consequences of reading it one way or the other are that either...

A ) Long Rests will be interrupted rarely. PCs will be able to fight off an attacker in the night and then resume their rest, and be none the worse for wear except having had to face an encounter potentially low on resources after a full day's adventuring, and with some members likely not in armor.

B ) Long Rests will be interrupted ALL THE TIME. Whenever an encounter occurs at night, most casters will be unable to recover spell slots and everyone will miss out on recovered HP, HD, and reset-on-a-long-rest abilities.

The implication for me is that adventurers should not attempt to rest in places they could easily be attacked. Any fighting interrupts a rest - according to the words written on the page* - moving the focus onto whether a fight will occur in the first place. Not how long the fight will be.



*ambiguity conceded!

 

[clearstream]

You seem to feel like this proves some larger point. I'm not sure why you feel that.

It means accepting something that based on my experience of D&D is intuitively absurd.

 

[tetrasodium]

Except that they will eventually run out of things to use. Especially if the main reason they were resting in the first place is because they were running out of things to use.

No it really does not because it links back to a deck wotc stacked with the choice that wotc made to target 6-8 encounters instead of something that fits normal gameplay, the extreme lack of lethality, the unstable balance of short rest & long rest classes being foisted onto the gm, & sheer suspension of disbelief straining amounts of interruptions needed to reach that point. The deck is stacked too high in order for the party to run out of resources while trying to rest on anything but the grindiest grindfest adventures. "Yea you can't expect to finish a long rest in the middle of the battle of helms deep on the battlefield" hardly changes the fact thatinterrupting a long rest under normal circumstances is an event that never happens due to the players being able to just take another

 

[MarkB]

It means accepting something that based on my experience of D&D is intuitively absurd.

How so? Two separate examples have been given of "fighting" (not necessarily round-by-round D&D skirmish-based combat) that could last for an hour or more. You didn't express that you found those examples absurd. So, if it's not the mere existence of such combats that is absurd, then what is it?