Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Actually no. RAW, it takes an hour of activity to interrupt a long rest.
"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."
I realize that it can be read as either (at least 1 hour of walking), fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity or ( at least 1 hour) of (walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity). However, the addition of "similar adventuring activity" at the end of the list leads me to interpret it as an hour of exertion/activity will interrupt a rest.
The One D&D play test rules use wording that somewhat clarifies this by separating fighting from the list but leaving everything else with an hour duration which could be interpreted to give some insight of the intent of the current rules.
"INTERRUPTING THE REST If a Long Rest is interrupted by combat or by 1 hour of walking, casting Spells, or similar activity, the rest confers no benefit and must be restarted; however, if the rest was at least 1 hour long before the interruption, you gain the benefits of a Short Rest"
Lol, no. It's poorly worded, but when 1 hour of walking is said, it means 1 hour of walking and the other activities are not an hour.
DMing:
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle
Playing:
None sadly.
Optimization Guides:
Literally Too Angry to Die - A Guide to Optimizing a Barbarian
To end a short rest the character needs only to do something more strenuous than sitting, eating, etc. Just doing the more strenuous activity is enough to break the short rest without any set period of time for the activity being required. So doing a couple dozen pushups or situps at the end of each hour will end the short rest, making it possible for them to start another. Per the rules as written a character can get at least 7 short rests into an 8hr period of time, and if the group spends an hour packing up and eating breakfast, the character who doesn't need to pack up because of not having set up a tent, bag, etc, has an additional short rest while the others are working.
The Coffeelock is theorycraft not because of the chaining short rests. It's theorycrafting because of the high level you have to reach for it to be fully online. Currently there's two ways to create an actually sustainable coffeelock.
You can take 10 levels in Ranger to remove Exhaustion on a short rest without needing a Greater Restoration. Then your Sorcerer level determines how high level slots you can create, and your Warlock level determines how many of those slots you can create each day.
Or you can have 5 levels of College of Creation Bard to create the needed diamond dust for Greater Restoration with a L2 slot, have at least 9 levels of Sorcerer able to cast Greater Restoration (choose from Divine Soul bloodline, having the Witherbloom Student Background, or the Mark of Healing Halfling race, each of which gives the Sorcerer the ability to learn Greater Restoration as an arcane spell). Then the character needs enough levels of Warlock to generate enough spell slots to get you through the day from short rests, probably 5 (so you have Two L3 Warlock spell slots to convert to Sorcerer Spell Slots).
Either way, the sustainable Coffeelock isn't online until well after 15th character level, which is long after most campaigns end. That's why it's theorycrafting,
I put little faith in the statements of Jeremy Crawford, the game designer. Take them for whatever you like. However, in this case he disagrees with you.
https://twitter.com/jeremyecrawford/status/764150520646742016?lang=en
"Any amount of fighting breaks a short rest. A long rest can withstand an interruption of up to 1 hour. #DnD"
Another designer of 5e also appears to disagree with your point of view.
https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/42123/does-a-short-combat-or-casting-one-spell-interrupt-a-long-rest
Mike Mearls: "Interruption needs to be a full hour. Testers: "We rest 7 hours, a kobold knocks on the door, and now we have to start over?"
So, personally, I'll go with how I read it which seems to be the same as others out there. I'd also say that RAI in this case is that it takes an hour of any activity to interrupt a long rest.
P.S. I'd also suggest that it is very unrealistic for any brief interruption to prevent earning long rest benefits. Why would a character that sleeps for six hours, rests while cooking breakfast for an hour then has to fight a couple of wolves also looking for breakfast lose all the benefits of their 6 hours of sleep and fortifying breakfast due to a brief skirmish at the end of the rest. OR Characters camping out get attacked by something in the night after resting for 3 to 4 hours, it takes a few minutes to fight and then clean up the mess, are these adventurers so fragile that a few minutes of exercise or even casting a single spell means that they have to start resting all over again? So the wizard wakes up in the morning and decides a nice fire would be good for the party, they forget and cast prestidigitation to make a nice little fire for breakfast then has to say to the party "Ooops guys, I was nicely rested after 7 hours of sleep but I wanted to make a fire and forgot that casting a spell would take away all my benefits of sleeping - I have to spend the whole day sleeping again - sorry about that"
Personally, the interpretation that anything at all with a short duration interrupts a long rest just doesn't make any sense to me - but feel free to play as you like, the wording IS ambiguous.
ok, fair. In that case, just punch something at the end of 1 hour.
DMing:
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle
Playing:
None sadly.
Optimization Guides:
Literally Too Angry to Die - A Guide to Optimizing a Barbarian
Agreed,
there is a comma there for that purpose.
Surely using the sorcerors ability to convert spell slots into sorcery points is akin to using the spell slots in other ways, like casting spells such that that action alone breaks the rest cycle, and renders the coffeelock a hypothetical thing.
Y'all do what y'all like, but I'd use that last stanza "or similar adventuring activity" to lock it down to normality. No sleep is fine, elves don't sleep but still need a long rest. Aspect of the Moon or whatever angle you got that negates sleep notwithstanding, a long rest would still be required to avoid exhaustion for me.
EDIT - ok I just read through some more of this thread and saw the post from David42 linking the posts by JC and MM ... ok so wow, didn't see that coming.
Life's hard - get a helmet!
To end a short rest the character needs only to do something more strenuous than sitting, eating, etc. Just doing the more strenuous activity is enough to break the short rest without any set period of time for the activity being required.
It doesn’t matter how you end the short rest. You simply can’t string 8 1hr short rests back to back in a long rest. It’s just a combination of pure common sense, and not trying to be a munchkin. You do you at your table, at my table I will still be laughing at the suggestion the following day.
sorlock: I end my short rest by slapping myself in the face. I stand up, sit down and start a mew short rest.
me (dm): nope you just had a short rest, now you have to spend a few hours doing adventurer stuff.
sorlock player: 😭
You're conflating your opinion with the rules. DMs can homebrew whatever they like, but it doesn't mean what makes the most sense to them is what the official rules are.
It's been shown that mechanically, chaining short-rests works. If you need flavor for how this differs from a long rest:
The party settles into a long rest. The Sorlock focuses on refreshing the magical wellspring of energy his patron taught him how to access, and after about an hour, when he feels enough built-up energy there, he molds the magic into a new form and draws it back into his natural pool of energy he was born with. He takes a few moments to allow residual magical energies dissipate, and to clear his head, then he settles down to repeat the process. Eight hours later, his party wakes up and they tackle the chellenges of the new day, the Sorlock exhausted from the long night of harnessing magic, yet buzzing with his inflated pool of magical energy.
Where? What canon source?
I showed on this forum that it mechanically works with the rules for short rests found in the Player's Handbook.
PHB 186: "A short rest is a period of downtime, at least 1 hour long, during which a character does nothing more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, and tending to wounds."
There is no rule limiting the number of short rests that can be completed in a day. Not a total number, nor including a cooldown time between short rests.
Thus, to chain short rests, all that needs to be done is some activity marginally "more strenuous than eating, drinking, reading, or tending to wounds", such as doing a couple dozen pushups or sit-ups. That definitively ends one short rest enabling the character to begin another one.
This is what the rules are. If you don't like it, you can house-rule it away at your table, and that's fine, but have no delusions that your way is what the official rules are. You're creating limitations that don't exist in the official rules.
If the dm allows for optional class features, you could always put a single level in ranger for deft explorer then going for the tireless option which reduces exhaustion by one level for every short rest that way you don't need greater restoration or long rests if I'm understanding the benefits of tireless correctly. You can also get a free fighting style on top of not needing long rests. Also you get a few minor buffs or something that I didn't really want to read.
This is coming from someone who doesn't really know that much about dnd but just took a look at the ******* page for ranger, so if I'm wrong about something please don't bully me about it.
Tireless is an ability that a level 10 ranger gets, not a 1st level ranger.
Ok, don't want to be opposing a community who respects this, but there is no way for the coffeelock to work. You see, sorcerers can only have a number of sorcery points equal to their level. This means that they are not as useful as many would expect them to be. Now, a character who doesn't need sleep, huge. A character who gets everything back after a short rest, huge. A character who has 3 different spell lists to choose from with only two classes, huge!
actually....
sorcerer places a limit on the number of sorcery points you have, not the number of spell slots you have.
heh heh.
DMing:
Dragons of Stormwreck Isle
Playing:
None sadly.
Optimization Guides:
Literally Too Angry to Die - A Guide to Optimizing a Barbarian
You're mistaken. I have an Elf, who can complete a long rest in 4 hours, which leaves 4 hours that become 4 short rests. I convert Sorcery Points to Sorcerer Spell Slots, which opens the available potential for more Sorcery Points, which I fill by converting Warlock Spell Slots to Sorcery Points, and then from there to Sorcerer Spell Slots. That way I never break any rules about limits on Sorcery Points, and my character effectively starts every day with a few extra spells, which can be huge, especially if you're a utility caster who uses spells for resolving tricky situations that would have otherwise resulted in damage or impairment to the party. There's not actually any rules in the game against creating more spell slots via Sorcery Points than your normal maximum, rather it just specifies that all created spell slots go away when you take a long rest. I'd consider this character online at L7, with 2 levels of Warlock to generate one L1 bonus slot per short rest, and the 5 levels needed for L3 spells like Fireball or Counterspell.
If you want a TRUE Coffeelock, you must be able to remove your own exhaustion without any expenditure of material resources, and there are currently two R.A.W. ways in the game of doing that.
You can take 10 levels of Ranger, which gives you the ability to remove a level of Exhaustion on a Short Rest. That means you can take your other 10 levels in your prefferred ballance of Sorcerer and Warlock spells. This will most likely cap out at L3 spell slots, having 5 levels each of Sorcerer and Warlock, to maximize your benefit from each short rest. This comes online around L14.
You could also take 5+ levels of Creation Bard, gaining the ability to create the needed Diamond Dust for Greater Restoration by expending a L2 spell slot (If a DM is a stickler for the limit on creating a single item, and doesn't consider a pile to be a single item, make a pre-fractured diamond that just needs a tap to crumble into the needed pile of dust) You'll also need a minimum of 9 levels in Sorcerer to be able to create the L5 spell slots needed to cast Greater Restoration, and a feature that adds Greater Restoration to your Sorcerer Spell List (such as the Divine Soul Sorcerer Bloodline, the Witherbloom Student Background, or the Mark of Healing Halfling Race). That leaves up to 6 levels of Warlock that you'll use to for generating spell slots for your Coffeelock. This will cap at L5 spell slots, but it doesn't really come online until around the 17th character level.
I think you could also take The Celestial as your warlock patron to gain access to the Cleric spell list.
Good point, but that requires a minimum of 9 levels of Warlock for the L5 slots, which with the 5 levels of Creation Bard, leaves you only six levels for Sorcerer, so all of your created spell slots are no higher than Level 3. It's good, but I personally prefer having access to some of the L4 and 5 spells that this build wouldn't be able to access.
I’m slightly confused by the whole concept of a coffelock. Surely the line ‘You can never have more sorcery points than shown in the table for your class’ (ie maximum of 5 for a fifth-level sorcerer at any point) makes the class just above the verge of broken, just being able to regain some sorcerer spell slots on a short rest - a feat which wizards are already capable of doing through Arcane Recovery. Am I missing something, or is this just not as good as it seems?
The value of a Coffeelock is in creating a lot of extra spell slots by chaining short rests instead of taking a long rest. If your first level is in Sorcerer, you'll be proficient in Constitution saves, so if you also have a good Constitution score, you can normally take long rests, then for the entire day before a boss fight, or a dungeon crawl, you can chain short rests to begin the next day for a lot of extra spell slots, and with your Constitution Save Modifier, you have a very good chance of passing the DC10 Constitution Save to avoid any negative effects for skipping the night's rest.
You can also play as a race that long rests in 4 hours, so sort of like a mini-coffeelock, you can chain 4 short rests every day, after completing a long rest, giving you a few extra spell slots every day.
Sorcery points are limited to the number in the table. However, spell slots are NOT. This is the key rule that leads to a coffeelock.
A warlock has spell slots that refresh on a short rest. These can be converted into sorcery points, limited to the maximum number in the sorcerer table. These sorcery points can then be converted to spell slots. Spell slots only reset to the number in the table after a long rest when resources are restored.
A coffeelock works by taking 8 short rests instead of a long rest and not long resting at all, ever, if possible. Not taking a long rest could result in increasing levels of exhaustion. However, greater restoration can be used to cure a level of exhaustion (there are probably other ways to avoid the exhaustion issue).
So by the time a coffeelock (3 warlock/9 divine soul sorcerer) reaches 12th level they can cast greater restoration on themselves every day to avoid the exhaustion consequences of not taking a long rest. (Divine soul also has access to the healing spells needed to restore hit points without using hit die). This particular build will generate 4 sorcery points every short rest by using the warlock short rest spell slots. They can have a maximum of 9 sorcery points stored. A 5th level spell slot costs 7 sorcery points. After two short rests, the coffeelock has recovered the 5th level slot needed for greater restoration.
8 short rests generates 32 sorcery points. This could be 4x 5th level spell slots and maybe 2x 1st level slots - which are in addition to any other spell slots the character has. As long as the character doesn't take a long rest, the spell slots keep building up. After a week (7 days) of downtime, the coffeelock could have 28 extra 5th level slots and 14 extra 1st level slots. Unlike any other caster, the coffeelock could cast a 5th level spell, every round of every combat, pretty much every day and not run out. This is why it becomes a potential balance issue. A 12th level wizard has at most 2 x 5th level spell slots each day, a coffeelock that takes a few weeks off will have a practically unlimited number of 1st to 5th level spell slots. Luckily, the sorcerer can't replace 6th to 9th level spell slots this way. (Note: The extra spell slots can be cycled BACK to sorcery points whenever needed so that the sorcerer also has an effectively unlimited number of sorcery points for meta magic).
At lower levels, exhaustion may put a practical limit on how many long rests can be missed before it becomes an issue. In addition, the coffeelock-lite which combines a 4 hour long rest with 4 short rests could still generate 8 (for 2 levels of warlock) or 16 (for 3 levels of warlock) extra sorcery points for spell slots each day. Depending on the sorcerer level, it could be a few extra 3rd and 4th level spell slots or 8 extra 1st level spell slots. Probably not game breaking, especially since they had to multiclass to do this and thus sacrifice at least 2 levels of spell slot progression compared to a single class.
Finally, since the DM is always in charge of their game, whether a DM allows a player to take multiple short rests in a row instead of a long rest is entirely up to the DM. They don't have to do so. So, if you want to build a character around this concept then it is worthwhile chatting to the DM to see what they think and if they would allow it to work.