I think I'd lean towards the long rest hasn't ended. As per RAW the rest period is "at least" that time period, but it can certainly be longer if you wish. The party can sleep for 6 hours, then spend another 6 reading, cooking, making potions or polishing their weapons, and this all fits into the "light activity" category. The long rest wouldn't end until they packed up their camp and continued on their way. The RAW does say "If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity - at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells or similar adventuring activity". Quietly brewing some potions is not going to be strenuous. You couldn't start a short rest because the long rest hasn't ended. If they were travelling long distances then they still have time to brew a pile, but in dungeons or unsafe sleeping locations they may only have the chance to do the one.
An elf finishes a long rest in at least 4 hours, but again there is no reason it cannot be longer if he wants. A lazy elf having a lay in on a Saturday morning who spends 8 hours in bed, has still just had one long rest not two.
An elf finishes a long rest in eight hours. They just can spend four of those hours awake instead of two the way a human would.
You can house rule as you like, but RAW, they finish in 4.
RAW they do not. Sleeping is not the same thing as taking a long rest, only something that they do during a long rest. The description of the Trance ability does not say that it reduces the amount of time needed to take a long rest, and the rules for taking a long rest do not say that you have to spend the whole time sleeping, just that you have to spend eight hours and includes light activities as something you can do while taking a long rest. Again, not even characters who can go entirely without sleep, trance, or any other period of being unconscious are able to complete a long rest in less than 8 hours.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
An elf finishes a long rest in eight hours. They just can spend four of those hours awake instead of two the way a human would.
You can house rule as you like, but RAW, they finish in 4.
RAW they do not. Sleeping is not the same thing as taking a long rest, only something that they do during a long rest. The description of the Trance ability does not say that it reduces the amount of time needed to take a long rest, and the rules for taking a long rest do not say that you have to spend the whole time sleeping, just that you have to spend eight hours and includes light activities as something you can do while taking a long rest. Again, not even characters who can go entirely without sleep, trance, or any other period of being unconscious are able to complete a long rest in less than 8 hours.
From the Sage Advice Compendium:
Does the Trance trait allow an elf to finish a long rest in 4 hours? If an elf meditates during a long rest (as described in the Trance trait), the elf finishes the rest after only 4 hours. A meditating elf otherwise follows all the rules for a long rest; only the duration is changed.
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Sage Advice's (non-RAW) ruling aside, Elves do not complete a short rest in 4 hours. Nothing in the PHB says that they do that, and its a half-baked idea that conflates long resting with sleeping, which are very intentionally NOT the same thing. It's also bad for play, because the last thing a DM wants is the elf splitting the party every night because they're "done" Long Resting 4 hours early and want to get in some bonus adventuring, scouting, or spotlight hogging. It's a useful racial feature, because (1) it lets you have more people awake for standing watch for more of the night, and (2) it makes Elven Wizards able to do their spellbook writing homework without needing to take days off in the adventuring week or with 10+ hour long rests. That's enough, it doesn't need to ALSO break the Long Rest economy in a way that isn't written in the PHB, and which is wholly unlike every other sleep-deprived character like Warforged, Tomelocks, etc.
The Sage advice compendium does make the ruling that an Elf that Trances for 4 hours completes their long rest in 4 hours. However, SAC is not RAW; at most it's RAI.
This is false. The SAC is RAW, exactly as valid as the PHB, MM, or DMG. It's explicitly released as a PDF by WOTC for that purpose, as explained in the SAC itself.
I think the simplest fix for coffeelock and this is to just change the duration of effects created by spending a spell slot from 'until you complete a long rest' to 'until you recover the spell slot'.
Sage Advice's (non-RAW) ruling aside, Elves do not complete a short rest in 4 hours. Nothing in the PHB says that they do that, and its a half-baked idea that conflates long resting with sleeping, which are very intentionally NOT the same thing. It's also bad for play, because the last thing a DM wants is the elf splitting the party every night because they're "done" Long Resting 4 hours early and want to get in some bonus adventuring, scouting, or spotlight hogging. It's a useful racial feature, because (1) it lets you have more people awake for standing watch for more of the night, and (2) it makes Elven Wizards able to do their spellbook writing homework without needing to take days off in the adventuring week or with 10+ hour long rests. That's enough, it doesn't need to ALSO break the Long Rest economy in a way that isn't written in the PHB, and which is wholly unlike every other sleep-deprived character like Warforged, Tomelocks, etc.
There's a second race (or infinite number of races, depending on how you interpret it) now: Reborn have trance but better, as they're conscious during their 4 hours, not semiconscious. The way I hear it - I'm working off internet hearsay, not the book in front of me - it's also explicitly spelled out in-place that it's a 4 hour not-nap, so there can't be any disputing the RAW for Reborn.
You are correct that Reborn explicitly have a 4-hour long rest (as bad and stupid as that is). You are incorrect that that in any way suggest anything about the length of rests for Elves or other non/light-sleepers, which do not have same or similar language in their own racial entry.
You don’t need to sleep, and magic can’t put you to sleep. You can finish a long rest in 4 hours if you spend those hours in an inactive, motionless state, during which you retain consciousness.
You are correct that Reborn explicitly have a 4-hour long rest (as bad and stupid as that is). You are incorrect that that in any way suggest anything about the length of rests for Elves or other non/light-sleepers, which do not have same or similar language in their own racial entry.
You don’t need to sleep, and magic can’t put you to sleep. You can finish a long rest in 4 hours if you spend those hours in an inactive, motionless state, during which you retain consciousness.
Indeed. Elf sleeping has undeniable ambiguity in it, but there's SAC providing more RAW on it. Elves finish a long rest after 4 hours because of this text:
Does the Trance trait allow an elf to finish a long rest in 4 hours?
If an elf meditates during a long rest (as described in the Trance trait), the elf finishes the rest after only 4 hours. A meditating elf otherwise follows all the rules for a long rest; only the duration is changed.
"RAW" means "Rules As Written", and the Rules cannot be Written in anything but an official book or an official errata, and frankly even the latter is sometimes questionable. SAC is the game dev team trying to clarify what they meant when they wrote a given rule, but that is explicitly RAI, i.e. Rules As Intended, Not Rules as Written.
If you want to make elves even more ridiculous and overloaded than they already are by allowing them to get free long rests in four hours, do it up. Have at it and enjoy your partyful of tree-snogging ultrafairies. But even Sage Advice itself explicitly states that the DM can discard Sage Advice rulings at their pleasure. Elves do not need to be able to finish a long rest in four hours, or two hours, or half an hour, or thirty seconds, or whatever else your players are pushing for, in order for elves to be elfy enough or for Trance to be useful. An elf being able to take two watches instead of one, or spend an extra two hours on light-duty things such as transcribing spells, nonmagical low-intensity crafting a'la many of the options in Xanathar's Guide, writing their memoirs, or whatever else the player can devise is absolutely not nothing considering Trance is supposed to be a ribbon ability.
Long rests are already stupidly overpowered as it is. It normally takes ninth-level magic to completely restore all of a character's HP, spells, clear most conditions and diseases, and otherwise hard-reset back to pristine. Your every night's sleep is a casting of Wish as it is. The system does not need to be even easier to cheese.
"RAW" means "Rules As Written", and the Rules cannot be Written in anything but an official book or an official errata, and frankly even the latter is sometimes questionable. SAC is the game dev team trying to clarify what they meant when they wrote a given rule, but that is explicitly RAI, i.e. Rules As Intended, Not Rules as Written.
WOTC, the company publishing the PHB and the SAC, has this to say on the matter:
Official Rulings Official rulings on how to interpret rules are made here in the Sage Advice Compendium. A Dungeon Master adjudicates the game and determines whether to use an official ruling in play. The DM always has the final say on rules questions.
So while the DM can always house rule everything - those two final lines apply to literally everything in the game, including all rules in the PHB - in the absence of such a house rule, the SAC is an official ruling. By definition, they're exactly as RAW as the PHB, which is ordinarily the very definition of RAW.
Put another way: RAI vs RAW is about what is or is not written. If a canonical source writes down the RAI and says the writing is official, that makes it RAW. That's what RAW means. The SAC is just such a document, just like Xanathar's. All rules in the game are ultimately optional because they're all up to your DM. But the terms RAW and RAI are not useful if you claim that written rules directly from the rules source declared by the source to be official aren't RAW. At that point, you may as well throw out any distinction of RAW vs RAI, which is fine for your table, of course, but isn't helpful when an online community is trying to discuss with each other what the rules are.
Put a third way: it's incontrovertibly true that WOTC intends for elves to have a base walking speed of 30 feet. It's also incontrovertibly true that they intend for elves to finish a long rest in 4 hours. They tell you the first thing in the PHB and the second thing in the SAC, and they claim that both documents are official. You can and are encouraged to cherry pick which rules you use at your table. When we discuss these rules online, we use the term "RAW" to refer to both rules (because both are written down), and "RAI" to refer to rules which are not written down.
Please read the very first SAC section, which tells you precisely what “the rule books” are. Hint: SAC isn’t one of them. The following section, helpfully, goes even further, explicitly inviting DMs to entirely disregard SAC. “RAW,” as it’s used on this forum, means RULES (not rulings) as written (in the rule books). But, enough about SAC already.
That would be a more credible argument if SAC had not repeatedly gone back and forth on different "Official Rulings". Shield Master has been flipped around more than once, and I recall Magic Initiate has also been interpreted differently at multiple points in the history of Sage Advice. A DM has every right to tell J-Craw to stick his rulings-of-the-day in his ear, and no amount of "you're free to ignore SAC if you like provided you know you're wrong and admit you're a terrible DM" is going to withdraw that right. J-Craw himself disobeys and breaks the rules of D&D 5e as he pleases when he runs games, and Chris Perkins - D&D's Principle Story Designer and one of its most important development heads, right up there with J-Craw - once played a monster stat block for roughly twenty-five minutes of the most celebrated D&D ever broadcast in flagrant disregard for all the rules of PC generation.
If a DM doesn't want to let elves finish a long rest in four hours because players who do that tend to be dickheads about it one way or another (sorry, Heironymus - you're fine, but this is the sort of thing bad rulesmonkeys love to abuse in bad faith), the DM is well within their rights to do so. They're not playing wrong, no matter what SAC says. Hell, if a DM wants to reimpose the other four hours of a long rest on Reborn for the same reason of "people who complete long rests in four hours tend to be ******** with the other four", complaining "but that's not RAW!" should only happen in Session Zero when the DM announces that rule and players have an opportunity to argue their case. People who say that house rules aren't real rules don't know how D&D works. Or any other tabletop game, for that matter.
back on the original topic, however? Nah. Sage Advice is no more "RAW" than J-Craw's Twitter feed. If people want to treat it as being more 'Official' than it is? Coolio for them, great resource for them to have. At my table, SAC can fly off a cliff and die. I cannot imagine I'm the only one who feels that way, either.
Regardless of all of this, I also like to use story consequences for any build that tries to exploit pact slots.
Your patron gave you a set of spells and they gave you special slots with which to cast them. I think most patrons would be upset to see that power funneled off towards other ends, and they would make this displeasure known.
I think the reason the SAC is changed so much is because there’s less impact financially. Every time WOTC publishes a book they end up having to do several errata changes which costs quite a bit of money. It also pisses me off since I spent money on a real book that apparently doesn’t get proof read. It pisses me off even more when they don’t take advantage of the play testing results to polish up features with issues that were identified by the player base the same day the unearthed arcana is released for testing.
so the SAC is easier to update and doesn’t seem to alienate the community unless you have an interest in the shield master feat.
I wish WOTC stuck to using standardized language for features that have similar triggers. I feel like they get a input from new writers and developers who put things in their own language during development, which is fine, but then the language doesn’t seem to be converted to language were used to seeing with previous features.
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I think I'd lean towards the long rest hasn't ended. As per RAW the rest period is "at least" that time period, but it can certainly be longer if you wish. The party can sleep for 6 hours, then spend another 6 reading, cooking, making potions or polishing their weapons, and this all fits into the "light activity" category. The long rest wouldn't end until they packed up their camp and continued on their way. The RAW does say "If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity - at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells or similar adventuring activity". Quietly brewing some potions is not going to be strenuous. You couldn't start a short rest because the long rest hasn't ended. If they were travelling long distances then they still have time to brew a pile, but in dungeons or unsafe sleeping locations they may only have the chance to do the one.
An elf finishes a long rest in 4 hours.
An elf finishes a long rest in at least 4 hours, but again there is no reason it cannot be longer if he wants. A lazy elf having a lay in on a Saturday morning who spends 8 hours in bed, has still just had one long rest not two.
An elf finishes a long rest in eight hours. They just can spend four of those hours awake instead of two the way a human would.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
You can house rule as you like, but RAW, they finish in 4.
RAW they do not. Sleeping is not the same thing as taking a long rest, only something that they do during a long rest. The description of the Trance ability does not say that it reduces the amount of time needed to take a long rest, and the rules for taking a long rest do not say that you have to spend the whole time sleeping, just that you have to spend eight hours and includes light activities as something you can do while taking a long rest. Again, not even characters who can go entirely without sleep, trance, or any other period of being unconscious are able to complete a long rest in less than 8 hours.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
From the Sage Advice Compendium:
Three-time Judge of the Competition of the Finest Brews! Come join us in making fun, unique homebrew and voting for your favorite entries!
Sage Advice's (non-RAW) ruling aside, Elves do not complete a short rest in 4 hours. Nothing in the PHB says that they do that, and its a half-baked idea that conflates long resting with sleeping, which are very intentionally NOT the same thing. It's also bad for play, because the last thing a DM wants is the elf splitting the party every night because they're "done" Long Resting 4 hours early and want to get in some bonus adventuring, scouting, or spotlight hogging. It's a useful racial feature, because (1) it lets you have more people awake for standing watch for more of the night, and (2) it makes Elven Wizards able to do their spellbook writing homework without needing to take days off in the adventuring week or with 10+ hour long rests. That's enough, it doesn't need to ALSO break the Long Rest economy in a way that isn't written in the PHB, and which is wholly unlike every other sleep-deprived character like Warforged, Tomelocks, etc.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Well I certainly didn't expect Elven Trance to be the major sticking point for this idea. Interesting stuff.
This is false. The SAC is RAW, exactly as valid as the PHB, MM, or DMG. It's explicitly released as a PDF by WOTC for that purpose, as explained in the SAC itself.
I think the simplest fix for coffeelock and this is to just change the duration of effects created by spending a spell slot from 'until you complete a long rest' to 'until you recover the spell slot'.
There's a second race (or infinite number of races, depending on how you interpret it) now: Reborn have trance but better, as they're conscious during their 4 hours, not semiconscious. The way I hear it - I'm working off internet hearsay, not the book in front of me - it's also explicitly spelled out in-place that it's a 4 hour not-nap, so there can't be any disputing the RAW for Reborn.
You are correct that Reborn explicitly have a 4-hour long rest (as bad and stupid as that is). You are incorrect that that in any way suggest anything about the length of rests for Elves or other non/light-sleepers, which do not have same or similar language in their own racial entry.
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I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
Indeed. Elf sleeping has undeniable ambiguity in it, but there's SAC providing more RAW on it. Elves finish a long rest after 4 hours because of this text:
Sage. Advice. Is. Not. RAW.
"RAW" means "Rules As Written", and the Rules cannot be Written in anything but an official book or an official errata, and frankly even the latter is sometimes questionable. SAC is the game dev team trying to clarify what they meant when they wrote a given rule, but that is explicitly RAI, i.e. Rules As Intended, Not Rules as Written.
If you want to make elves even more ridiculous and overloaded than they already are by allowing them to get free long rests in four hours, do it up. Have at it and enjoy your partyful of tree-snogging ultrafairies. But even Sage Advice itself explicitly states that the DM can discard Sage Advice rulings at their pleasure. Elves do not need to be able to finish a long rest in four hours, or two hours, or half an hour, or thirty seconds, or whatever else your players are pushing for, in order for elves to be elfy enough or for Trance to be useful. An elf being able to take two watches instead of one, or spend an extra two hours on light-duty things such as transcribing spells, nonmagical low-intensity crafting a'la many of the options in Xanathar's Guide, writing their memoirs, or whatever else the player can devise is absolutely not nothing considering Trance is supposed to be a ribbon ability.
Long rests are already stupidly overpowered as it is. It normally takes ninth-level magic to completely restore all of a character's HP, spells, clear most conditions and diseases, and otherwise hard-reset back to pristine. Your every night's sleep is a casting of Wish as it is. The system does not need to be even easier to cheese.
Please do not contact or message me.
WOTC, the company publishing the PHB and the SAC, has this to say on the matter:
So while the DM can always house rule everything - those two final lines apply to literally everything in the game, including all rules in the PHB - in the absence of such a house rule, the SAC is an official ruling. By definition, they're exactly as RAW as the PHB, which is ordinarily the very definition of RAW.
Put another way: RAI vs RAW is about what is or is not written. If a canonical source writes down the RAI and says the writing is official, that makes it RAW. That's what RAW means. The SAC is just such a document, just like Xanathar's. All rules in the game are ultimately optional because they're all up to your DM. But the terms RAW and RAI are not useful if you claim that written rules directly from the rules source declared by the source to be official aren't RAW. At that point, you may as well throw out any distinction of RAW vs RAI, which is fine for your table, of course, but isn't helpful when an online community is trying to discuss with each other what the rules are.
Put a third way: it's incontrovertibly true that WOTC intends for elves to have a base walking speed of 30 feet. It's also incontrovertibly true that they intend for elves to finish a long rest in 4 hours. They tell you the first thing in the PHB and the second thing in the SAC, and they claim that both documents are official. You can and are encouraged to cherry pick which rules you use at your table. When we discuss these rules online, we use the term "RAW" to refer to both rules (because both are written down), and "RAI" to refer to rules which are not written down.
Please read the very first SAC section, which tells you precisely what “the rule books” are. Hint: SAC isn’t one of them. The following section, helpfully, goes even further, explicitly inviting DMs to entirely disregard SAC. “RAW,” as it’s used on this forum, means RULES (not rulings) as written (in the rule books). But, enough about SAC already.
dndbeyond.com forum tags
I'm going to make this way harder than it needs to be.
That would be a more credible argument if SAC had not repeatedly gone back and forth on different "Official Rulings". Shield Master has been flipped around more than once, and I recall Magic Initiate has also been interpreted differently at multiple points in the history of Sage Advice. A DM has every right to tell J-Craw to stick his rulings-of-the-day in his ear, and no amount of "you're free to ignore SAC if you like provided you know you're wrong and admit you're a terrible DM" is going to withdraw that right. J-Craw himself disobeys and breaks the rules of D&D 5e as he pleases when he runs games, and Chris Perkins - D&D's Principle Story Designer and one of its most important development heads, right up there with J-Craw - once played a monster stat block for roughly twenty-five minutes of the most celebrated D&D ever broadcast in flagrant disregard for all the rules of PC generation.
If a DM doesn't want to let elves finish a long rest in four hours because players who do that tend to be dickheads about it one way or another (sorry, Heironymus - you're fine, but this is the sort of thing bad rulesmonkeys love to abuse in bad faith), the DM is well within their rights to do so. They're not playing wrong, no matter what SAC says. Hell, if a DM wants to reimpose the other four hours of a long rest on Reborn for the same reason of "people who complete long rests in four hours tend to be ******** with the other four", complaining "but that's not RAW!" should only happen in Session Zero when the DM announces that rule and players have an opportunity to argue their case. People who say that house rules aren't real rules don't know how D&D works. Or any other tabletop game, for that matter.
back on the original topic, however? Nah. Sage Advice is no more "RAW" than J-Craw's Twitter feed. If people want to treat it as being more 'Official' than it is? Coolio for them, great resource for them to have. At my table, SAC can fly off a cliff and die. I cannot imagine I'm the only one who feels that way, either.
Please do not contact or message me.
Regardless of all of this, I also like to use story consequences for any build that tries to exploit pact slots.
Your patron gave you a set of spells and they gave you special slots with which to cast them. I think most patrons would be upset to see that power funneled off towards other ends, and they would make this displeasure known.
My homebrew subclasses (full list here)
(Artificer) Swordmage | Glasswright | (Barbarian) Path of the Savage Embrace
(Bard) College of Dance | (Fighter) Warlord | Cannoneer
(Monk) Way of the Elements | (Ranger) Blade Dancer
(Rogue) DaggerMaster | Inquisitor | (Sorcerer) Riftwalker | Spellfist
(Warlock) The Swarm
I think the reason the SAC is changed so much is because there’s less impact financially. Every time WOTC publishes a book they end up having to do several errata changes which costs quite a bit of money. It also pisses me off since I spent money on a real book that apparently doesn’t get proof read. It pisses me off even more when they don’t take advantage of the play testing results to polish up features with issues that were identified by the player base the same day the unearthed arcana is released for testing.
so the SAC is easier to update and doesn’t seem to alienate the community unless you have an interest in the shield master feat.
I wish WOTC stuck to using standardized language for features that have similar triggers. I feel like they get a input from new writers and developers who put things in their own language during development, which is fine, but then the language doesn’t seem to be converted to language were used to seeing with previous features.