Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Xetheral" data-source="post: 8390145" data-attributes="member: 6802765">Let's look at the text again:[excerpt]A long rest is a period of ex-tended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps for at least 6 hours and performs no more than 2 hours of light activity, such as reading, talking, eating, or standing watch. If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity—at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity—the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it.[/excerpt]The first sentence explicitly establishes a requirement that to get a long rest one must spend at least 8 hours on downtime. That sentence also says what a character does during downtime: a character sleeps or performs light activity. Thus, anything that is neither sleep nor light activity is not downtime. (See my response to [USER=67]@Rune[/USER], below, for an expanded analysis.) You can indeed lie there and look up at the night sky for two hours, if your DM rules that it counts as only light activity (which I hope every DM would). The first sentence also establishes that at least six of the eight hours of downtime must be sleep, and no more than two hours of downtime can be light activity. Ergo, the less of your permitted two hours of light activity you use, the more sleep you need, because only sleep and light activity count as downtime.The second sentence establishes the maximum amount of strenuous activity that can be undertaken without losing one's accumulated downtime. It doesn't allow strenuous activity to count as downtime.I didn't say that one must have light activity. I said that downtime (sleep + up to two hours of light activity) must be at least eight hours. If you don't spend any time on light activity then you'd have to sleep for eight hours to meet the downtime requirement.Yes it does. Look at the entire first sentence rather than just the part you highlighted. The rule tells you what characters do during downtime: sleep and light activity. Even if one read sleep and light activity as merely examples of downtime (and I don't know why one would, given the absence of language indicating such) strenuous activity is not of the same character as sleep or light activity and thus should not qualify as downtime.Note that the definition of light activity does include language ("such as") indicating that what follows are examples of light activity. The absence of such indicators in the list of what a character does during downtime (in the same sentence, no less!) shows that sleep and light activity are not merely examples of downtime, but are instead an exclusive list.</blockquote>

Verification