D&D 5E When does your group take their daily long rest?

[Sword of Spirit]

I see posting every so often that talk about the party choosing when to take a long rest.

According to the rules, while you can technically choose when to take a long rest, you can't benefit from more than 1 in a 24 hour period. It's pretty clearly intended primarily to represent your night's rest.

Are some groups disregarding (or not seeing) that rule and letting the party take multiple long rests in the day?

Are some groups regularly putting everything on pause at 10 am and waiting until the next day to go adventuring?

Are some people squeezing their long rests in so that they might have a tough fight in the morning, take a long rest and then go out adventuring later in the day, and staying on such a wacky schedule until after an adventuring period is over?

If the party gets too hammered in the morning to continue the fight, my assumption has always been to take the rest of the day off (sometimes this is harder than other times), have your long rest overnight, and then resume whatever you were doing in the morning (if possible). Of course, if you wanted to do night adventuring, you'd shift your schedule to working on a "night shift" but it would work the same way.

So are there actually differences in play from the way I'm doing it?

 

[iserith]

I follow the rules on this score: The characters can only benefit from a long rest once in a 24-hour period. What they do before or after that long rest is up to them. If they finish their long rest with daylight to spare and want to continue to adventure, that's cool. If they want to take the rest of the day off, that's cool too. Of course, my adventures usually have time pressures in them, so loafing costs something.

 

[S_Dalsgaard]

Yeah, we only do one long rest per 24 hours and it is (or has so far) always been at night. As you mention, they are free to stop earlier and take the rest of the day off, but the long rest will not have its effect before early morning (I work night shift, so I know it isn't that easy to haphazardly change your daily rhythm).

 

[Shiroiken]

As a DM, I only allow the Long Rest as part of the nights rest. If the group gets hammered early in the day, they can either retreat to a safe spot or truck on. The world doesn't stop just because the PCs need to.

As a player, I wouldn't enjoy Long Rests as being anything other than part of the night's rest. It seems like a natural part of the daily cycle, and keeps me thinking in character, rather than about mechanics.

 

[DaveDash]

I see posting every so often that talk about the party choosing when to take a long rest.

According to the rules, while you can technically choose when to take a long rest, you can't benefit from more than 1 in a 24 hour period. It's pretty clearly intended primarily to represent your night's rest.

Are some groups disregarding (or not seeing) that rule and letting the party take multiple long rests in the day?

Are some groups regularly putting everything on pause at 10 am and waiting until the next day to go adventuring?

Are some people squeezing their long rests in so that they might have a tough fight in the morning, take a long rest and then go out adventuring later in the day, and staying on such a wacky schedule until after an adventuring period is over?

If the party gets too hammered in the morning to continue the fight, my assumption has always been to take the rest of the day off (sometimes this is harder than other times), have your long rest overnight, and then resume whatever you were doing in the morning (if possible). Of course, if you wanted to do night adventuring, you'd shift your schedule to working on a "night shift" but it would work the same way.

So are there actually differences in play from the way I'm doing it?

I take note when the party has had their last long rest, they cannot get the benefit of the long rest until that time. Usually it's around night time. At low level they generally chill out somewhere until that time, then start their long rest. At high level they have spells like magnificent mansion available and such, so it doesn't matter so much.

This rule really screwed us over though in Hoard of the Dragon Queen, given the NPC's kept pushing us to do this and that, and our first long rest only started at around 2:00am. This meant we had to find time to basically waste a day to reset our body clocks back to a "normal" time, which wasn't easy at the start of that adventure.