simple question: Is the first hour of a longrest considered a short rest? In other words, if you get ambushed after 3 hours, do you get the shortrest bonuses?
our party have started to always take short rest before a longrest, just to be sure (total 9 hours), but we are curious if there are actually rules covering it.
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.
A character can spend one or more Hit Dice at the end of a short rest, up to the character’s maximum number of Hit Dice, which is equal to the character’s level. For each Hit Die spent in this way, the player rolls the die and adds the character’s Constitution modifier to it. The character regains Hit Points equal to the total. The player can decide to spend an additional Hit Die after each roll. A character regains some spent Hit Dice upon finishing a long rest, as explained below.
RAW, no. It is more of a game balance thing than a logic thing. Talk to your DM about it, but really, an hour of camping for dinner etc in addition to 8 hours of sleeping/watch makes sense.
Per Sage Advice, no, it does not count. An interrupted long rest (even after at least one hour of downtime) gets you nothing.
That's patently ridiculous. If you have completed 1 hour of the requirements for a long rest, you have completed ALL of the requirements for a short rest. If the rest of that long rest is interrupted for any reason, you have still completed a short rest.
Crawford & Mearls said that they intended for short/long rests to be mutually exclusive activities, but nothing in the RAW really indicates that in the slightest. Further, when you actually complete a long rest, you get all the benefits of a short rest too. Abilities/resources that refresh on short rest also refresh on long rest, which directly implies that a short & long rest can/do happen at the same time.
Neither of them offer any explanation at all as to why they feel a short rest cannot be accomplished during the process of attempting to complete a long rest, nor do they point to any particular language in the descriptions as the source of "misinterpretation".
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You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
Per Sage Advice, no, it does not count. An interrupted long rest (even after at least one hour of downtime) gets you nothing.
I read the Sage Advice and the question that they responded to makes no sense to me.
The questioner said one of his players was “abusing” the fighter ability Second Wind in order to avoid using hit dice to heal. Unless the DM was constantly interrupting the party’s long rests, I don’t see how this is possible. A completed long rest heals all hit points so why would it matter if the fighter is saying after every hour of a long rest “I use my second wind”.
If you have completed 1 hour of the requirements for a long rest, you have completed ALL of the requirements for a short rest.
Not always. You're allowed to do strenuous activity that would instantly ruin your short rest for up to an hour during a long rest. You could conceivably get interrupted by a battle 30 minutes into your long rest. But yeah, usually you'll meet the requirements for both, and I think it's pretty silly to screw over players on a technicality like that.
Crawford & Mearls said that they intended for short/long rests to be mutually exclusive activities, but nothing in the RAW really indicates that in the slightest.
Heroic though they might be, adventurers can't spend every hour of the day in the thick of exploration, social interaction, and combat. They need rest--time to sleep and eat, tend their wounds, refresh their minds and spirits for spellcasting, and brace themselves for further adventure.
Adventurers, as well as other creatures, can take short rests in the midst of a day and a long rest to end it.
Further, when you actually complete a long rest, you get all the benefits of a short rest too. Abilities/resources that refresh on short rest also refresh on long rest, which directly implies that a short & long rest can/do happen at the same time.
No, it doesn't. It just implies that the designers consider a long rest at least as beneficial as a short rest. There's nothing about the sentence "You recover your uses of this ability when you finish a short or long rest" that implies both types of rest happen simultaneously.
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.
A character can spend one or more Hit Dice at the end of a short rest, up to the character’s maximum number of Hit Dice, which is equal to the character’s level. For each Hit Die spent in this way, the player rolls the die and adds the character’s Constitution modifier to it. The character regains Hit Points equal to the total. The player can decide to spend an additional Hit Die after each roll. A character regains some spent Hit Dice upon finishing a long rest, as explained below.
If you have completed 1 hour of the requirements for a long rest, you have completed ALL of the requirements for a short rest.
Not always. You're allowed to do strenuous activity that would instantly ruin your short rest for up to an hour during a long rest. You could conceivably get interrupted by a battle 30 minutes into your long rest. But yeah, usually you'll meet the requirements for both, and I think it's pretty silly to screw over players on a technicality like that.
Right, and that would obviously mean you didn't complete the requirements for the short rest. I don't think anyone is arguing in favor of the exceptions to long rest requirements being filtered down to the short rest too. It is pretty silly.
Further, when you actually complete a long rest, you get all the benefits of a short rest too. Abilities/resources that refresh on short rest also refresh on long rest, which directly implies that a short & long rest can/do happen at the same time.
No, it doesn't. It just implies that the designers consider a long rest at least as beneficial as a short rest. There's nothing about the sentence "You recover your uses of this ability when you finish a short or long rest" that implies both types of rest happen simultaneously.
Yes, that is literally the implication I'm talking about. If a long rest provides all the benefits of a short rest (plus its own), and if a long rest has all the requirements of a short rest (plus its own), then a short rest is a subset of a long rest.
Yes, absolutely, and frankly this is what grinds my gears about how Crawford/Mearls have handled issues like this. The initial tweet where they said you can't benefit from a short rest while attempting to complete a long rest is a knee-jerk response to a player that was clearly abusing short rests by chaining them back to back. They could've just stated the DM has final say on how frequently you can rest (because duh! 🤣) rather than going straight to an illogical extreme without presenting any actual explanation or reasoning.
I think the best way of describing an interruption to a long rest that's supported by RAW, logic, and DM discretion would be:
"If the rest is interrupted, and a character has fulfilled the requirements of a short rest, the character can gain the benefit of having taken a short rest."
If I go to fill up an 8 gallon gas tank, and the pump runs dry after 1 gallon, I still get the benefit of that 1 gallon.
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You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
Per Sage Advice, no, it does not count. An interrupted long rest (even after at least one hour of downtime) gets you nothing.
Once again Sage Advice clearly and directly contradicts the Rules As Published.
If you rest for one hour and meet all the requirements for a short rest during that hour of rest there is nothing in the published in print rules to say that you do not gain the benefits of a short rest, the fact that you where planning on attempting a long rest has absolutely no relevance to meeting the criteria for a short rest. Sorry Jeremy, but go back and reread the book the actually got published. You should have put what you claim to have meant in that actual, physical book the first time around. It makes it harder to take the game and the designers seriously when they keep contradicting themselves and the rules books they published. /rant.
Does it really matter? Other than the night ambush thing, I can't find any benefit (or exploit) to having 8 short rests per night. Identify and attuning multiple magic items maybe?
Either way, as I said previously, an hour of camping (short rest) before going to sleep for 8 hours (long rest) just makes sense. And you can only travel for 8 hours a day anyway.
I would certainly rule that if you've completed the requirements for a short rest, then you get the benefits of a short rest, regardless of whether you "declared" your rest type properly.
Does it really matter? Other than the night ambush thing, I can't find any benefit (or exploit) to having 8 short rests per night. Identify and attuning multiple magic items maybe?
Either way, as I said previously, an hour of camping (short rest) before going to sleep for 8 hours (long rest) just makes sense. And you can only travel for 8 hours a day anyway.
At least one exploit I can think of is what Trirhabda mentioned about the fighter using Second Wind repetitively on the hour to heal rather than spending hit dice or taking a long rest.
It comes with the risk, however, of the ambush: the fighter's health hasn't been fully restored compared to others who spent hit dice.
If you don't allow people in the middle of a Long Rest to gain the benefits of a Short Rest, they can (and should, mechanically) just take a Short Rest before their Long Rest every evening before they retire unless in a desperate hurry.
Having to state this is enforced metagaming of the worst sort and super dumb, so you should count them as getting the Short Rest stuff an hour in. You should only do that once, even if they're four hours in, obviously, but you should do it.
Does it really matter? Other than the night ambush thing, I can't find any benefit (or exploit) to having 8 short rests per night. Identify and attuning multiple magic items maybe?
Either way, as I said previously, an hour of camping (short rest) before going to sleep for 8 hours (long rest) just makes sense. And you can only travel for 8 hours a day anyway.
At least one exploit I can think of is what Trirhabda mentioned about the fighter using Second Wind repetitively on the hour to heal rather than spending hit dice or taking a long rest.
It comes with the risk, however, of the ambush: the fighter's health hasn't been fully restored compared to others who spent hit dice.
The fighter can use hit dice in addition to second winds. A warlock multiclass to get healing spells can heal the party over a long rest. But in both of thoae cases, the party will heal at the and of rhe rest anyway, so it only helps in the night ambush scenario.
If you don't allow people in the middle of a Long Rest to gain the benefits of a Short Rest, they can (and should, mechanically) just take a Short Rest before their Long Rest every evening before they retire unless in a desperate hurry.
Exactly.
Having to state this is enforced metagaming of the worst sort and super dumb, so you should count them as getting the Short Rest stuff an hour in. You should only do that once, even if they're four hours in, obviously, but you should do it.
I've already pointed out twice how this make sense in terms of role play, so it is not "enforced metagaming of the worst sort and super dumb," it is mechanically encouraged metagaming creatively executed.
And if you are arguing that RAW allows the first hour of a long rest to count as a short rest, then you are arguing that every hour of a long rest counts as a short rest. Otherwise, you are house ruling, which is fine and not the argument.
simple question: Is the first hour of a longrest considered a short rest? In other words, if you get ambushed after 3 hours, do you get the shortrest bonuses?
our party have started to always take short rest before a longrest, just to be sure (total 9 hours), but we are curious if there are actually rules covering it.
Since the rules of interrupting a Long Rest requires at least 1 hour of interruption, an ambush that is over in a matter of minutes does not impact the Long rest.
And if you are arguing that RAW allows the first hour of a long rest to count as a short rest, then you are arguing that every hour of a long rest counts as a short rest. Otherwise, you are house ruling, which is fine and not the argument.
There is a sentence in the description of long rest that has great significance for whether or not a portion of a long rest can count as a short rest.
If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity - at least one hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity - the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it. (Emphasis mine)
The question becomes did the night ambush interrupt the rest for an hour? So, you could rest for 7 hours, 59 minutes then have to fight, etc for an hour and you would get nothing for your rest. Is there a rule establishing the minimum amount of time combat or other activity is assumed to take? In some previous editions combat was assumed to take a minimum of one full ten minute turn, the balance of time being spent in tending to wounds, caring for arms and armor, etc, even if only a round or two were spent in actual fighting.
Still, nothing in that sentence says that the portion of the long rest before the interruption can't count as a short rest. It actually leads to a sort of nightmare time travel scenario for the DM. First, the requirements for one or more short rests having been met the interruption is gamed out. Then, if the interruption consumes more than an hour of the intended long rest no benefit is gained from the resting, so the interruption must be gamed out again, this time without the benefits of the short rest(s).
It would have been much better rules writing for the designers to simply state "A long rest does not include a sort rest," if they intended the two to be mutually exclusive.
I've already pointed out twice how this make sense in terms of role play, so it is not "enforced metagaming of the worst sort and super dumb," it is mechanically encouraged metagaming creatively executed.
And if you are arguing that RAW allows the first hour of a long rest to count as a short rest, then you are arguing that every hour of a long rest counts as a short rest. Otherwise, you are house ruling, which is fine and not the argument.
Taking a short rest and then a long rest every night is silly, thematically. I am thus suggesting a House Rule to fix that problem, yes. I'm aware that's what I'm suggesting, and the whole point of my post was to note that going by the seemingly intended rules things get odd and annoying, especially for newer players (ie: 'Wait, so because we declared it a Long Rest we don't get benefits even though the activities we've been engaged in are identical to what we do during Short Rests? That's metagamey as hell.').
As for not being the argument...I think saying 'It works this way, but that's kinda dumb, you should probably house rule it.' is an entirely acceptable point to make in any rules argument. The first half seemed to be covered, so I was stating the second. Sorry if that was unclear.
At least one exploit I can think of is what Trirhabda mentioned about the fighter using Second Wind repetitively on the hour to heal rather than spending hit dice or taking a long rest.
It comes with the risk, however, of the ambush: the fighter's health hasn't been fully restored compared to others who spent hit dice.
The fighter can use hit dice in addition to second winds. A warlock multiclass to get healing spells can heal the party over a long rest. But in both of thoae cases, the party will heal at the and of rhe rest anyway, so it only helps in the night ambush scenario.
The circumstance he mentioned--if I'm fairly describing it--was the fighter trying to conserve hit dice by using Second Wind every hour instead of spending the dice to heal. I imagine this would be beneficial if the party were low on hit dice and had some reason to believe they wouldn't be able to complete the long rest.
Truthfully, the more I read the RAW on resting, I don't see a reason to forbid the practice. If the fighter completes a short rest, I can't find anything that explicitly prohibits the time from counting toward a long rest as well.
DxJxC, I think you're right about the consistency of it. If the first hour counts as a short rest, then every uninterrupted hour should count as well as another short rest. I'm also not really seeing anything all that awful about it.
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simple question: Is the first hour of a longrest considered a short rest? In other words, if you get ambushed after 3 hours, do you get the shortrest bonuses?
our party have started to always take short rest before a longrest, just to be sure (total 9 hours), but we are curious if there are actually rules covering it.
Short Rest
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.
A character can spend one or more Hit Dice at the end of a short rest, up to the character’s maximum number of Hit Dice, which is equal to the character’s level. For each Hit Die spent in this way, the player rolls the die and adds the character’s Constitution modifier to it. The character regains Hit Points equal to the total. The player can decide to spend an additional Hit Die after each roll. A character regains some spent Hit Dice upon finishing a long rest, as explained below.
As such, I would rule yes.
Per Sage Advice, no, it does not count. An interrupted long rest (even after at least one hour of downtime) gets you nothing.
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RAW, no. It is more of a game balance thing than a logic thing. Talk to your DM about it, but really, an hour of camping for dinner etc in addition to 8 hours of sleeping/watch makes sense.
That's patently ridiculous. If you have completed 1 hour of the requirements for a long rest, you have completed ALL of the requirements for a short rest. If the rest of that long rest is interrupted for any reason, you have still completed a short rest.
Crawford & Mearls said that they intended for short/long rests to be mutually exclusive activities, but nothing in the RAW really indicates that in the slightest. Further, when you actually complete a long rest, you get all the benefits of a short rest too. Abilities/resources that refresh on short rest also refresh on long rest, which directly implies that a short & long rest can/do happen at the same time.
Neither of them offer any explanation at all as to why they feel a short rest cannot be accomplished during the process of attempting to complete a long rest, nor do they point to any particular language in the descriptions as the source of "misinterpretation".
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
One example of RAW getting weird. I'd homerule it for sure.
I read the Sage Advice and the question that they responded to makes no sense to me.
The questioner said one of his players was “abusing” the fighter ability Second Wind in order to avoid using hit dice to heal. Unless the DM was constantly interrupting the party’s long rests, I don’t see how this is possible. A completed long rest heals all hit points so why would it matter if the fighter is saying after every hour of a long rest “I use my second wind”.
Not always. You're allowed to do strenuous activity that would instantly ruin your short rest for up to an hour during a long rest. You could conceivably get interrupted by a battle 30 minutes into your long rest. But yeah, usually you'll meet the requirements for both, and I think it's pretty silly to screw over players on a technicality like that.
"Short and long rests have different places in the game's narrative, as described in sentence 3 of "Resting" (PH, 186). Many features are refreshed by a short or long rest. If a long rest included a short rest (it doesn't), such features would refer only to a short rest."
This tweet is also relevant: "After a short rest, the DM decides how much time must elapse or how much activity must occur before another short rest can start. Maybe 0 minutes, 1 minute, 10 minutes, or 1 hour. The key is that rests aren't meant to be a button you press. They're a narrative pause."
No, it doesn't. It just implies that the designers consider a long rest at least as beneficial as a short rest. There's nothing about the sentence "You recover your uses of this ability when you finish a short or long rest" that implies both types of rest happen simultaneously.
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Yes I agrree
Right, and that would obviously mean you didn't complete the requirements for the short rest. I don't think anyone is arguing in favor of the exceptions to long rest requirements being filtered down to the short rest too. It is pretty silly.
Yes, that is literally the implication I'm talking about. If a long rest provides all the benefits of a short rest (plus its own), and if a long rest has all the requirements of a short rest (plus its own), then a short rest is a subset of a long rest.
Yes, absolutely, and frankly this is what grinds my gears about how Crawford/Mearls have handled issues like this. The initial tweet where they said you can't benefit from a short rest while attempting to complete a long rest is a knee-jerk response to a player that was clearly abusing short rests by chaining them back to back. They could've just stated the DM has final say on how frequently you can rest (because duh! 🤣) rather than going straight to an illogical extreme without presenting any actual explanation or reasoning.
I think the best way of describing an interruption to a long rest that's supported by RAW, logic, and DM discretion would be:
If I go to fill up an 8 gallon gas tank, and the pump runs dry after 1 gallon, I still get the benefit of that 1 gallon.
You don't know what fear is until you've witnessed a drunk bird divebombing you while carrying a screaming Kobold throwing fire anywhere and everywhere.
Once again Sage Advice clearly and directly contradicts the Rules As Published.
If you rest for one hour and meet all the requirements for a short rest during that hour of rest there is nothing in the published in print rules to say that you do not gain the benefits of a short rest, the fact that you where planning on attempting a long rest has absolutely no relevance to meeting the criteria for a short rest. Sorry Jeremy, but go back and reread the book the actually got published. You should have put what you claim to have meant in that actual, physical book the first time around. It makes it harder to take the game and the designers seriously when they keep contradicting themselves and the rules books they published. /rant.
TLDR I would allow a short rest at that point.
Does it really matter? Other than the night ambush thing, I can't find any benefit (or exploit) to having 8 short rests per night. Identify and attuning multiple magic items maybe?
Either way, as I said previously, an hour of camping (short rest) before going to sleep for 8 hours (long rest) just makes sense. And you can only travel for 8 hours a day anyway.
I would certainly rule that if you've completed the requirements for a short rest, then you get the benefits of a short rest, regardless of whether you "declared" your rest type properly.
At least one exploit I can think of is what Trirhabda mentioned about the fighter using Second Wind repetitively on the hour to heal rather than spending hit dice or taking a long rest.
It comes with the risk, however, of the ambush: the fighter's health hasn't been fully restored compared to others who spent hit dice.
If you don't allow people in the middle of a Long Rest to gain the benefits of a Short Rest, they can (and should, mechanically) just take a Short Rest before their Long Rest every evening before they retire unless in a desperate hurry.
Having to state this is enforced metagaming of the worst sort and super dumb, so you should count them as getting the Short Rest stuff an hour in. You should only do that once, even if they're four hours in, obviously, but you should do it.
The fighter can use hit dice in addition to second winds. A warlock multiclass to get healing spells can heal the party over a long rest. But in both of thoae cases, the party will heal at the and of rhe rest anyway, so it only helps in the night ambush scenario.
Exactly.
I've already pointed out twice how this make sense in terms of role play, so it is not "enforced metagaming of the worst sort and super dumb," it is mechanically encouraged metagaming creatively executed.
And if you are arguing that RAW allows the first hour of a long rest to count as a short rest, then you are arguing that every hour of a long rest counts as a short rest. Otherwise, you are house ruling, which is fine and not the argument.
Since the rules of interrupting a Long Rest requires at least 1 hour of interruption, an ambush that is over in a matter of minutes does not impact the Long rest.
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There is a sentence in the description of long rest that has great significance for whether or not a portion of a long rest can count as a short rest.
The question becomes did the night ambush interrupt the rest for an hour? So, you could rest for 7 hours, 59 minutes then have to fight, etc for an hour and you would get nothing for your rest. Is there a rule establishing the minimum amount of time combat or other activity is assumed to take? In some previous editions combat was assumed to take a minimum of one full ten minute turn, the balance of time being spent in tending to wounds, caring for arms and armor, etc, even if only a round or two were spent in actual fighting.
Still, nothing in that sentence says that the portion of the long rest before the interruption can't count as a short rest. It actually leads to a sort of nightmare time travel scenario for the DM. First, the requirements for one or more short rests having been met the interruption is gamed out. Then, if the interruption consumes more than an hour of the intended long rest no benefit is gained from the resting, so the interruption must be gamed out again, this time without the benefits of the short rest(s).
It would have been much better rules writing for the designers to simply state "A long rest does not include a sort rest," if they intended the two to be mutually exclusive.
Taking a short rest and then a long rest every night is silly, thematically. I am thus suggesting a House Rule to fix that problem, yes. I'm aware that's what I'm suggesting, and the whole point of my post was to note that going by the seemingly intended rules things get odd and annoying, especially for newer players (ie: 'Wait, so because we declared it a Long Rest we don't get benefits even though the activities we've been engaged in are identical to what we do during Short Rests? That's metagamey as hell.').
As for not being the argument...I think saying 'It works this way, but that's kinda dumb, you should probably house rule it.' is an entirely acceptable point to make in any rules argument. The first half seemed to be covered, so I was stating the second. Sorry if that was unclear.
The circumstance he mentioned--if I'm fairly describing it--was the fighter trying to conserve hit dice by using Second Wind every hour instead of spending the dice to heal. I imagine this would be beneficial if the party were low on hit dice and had some reason to believe they wouldn't be able to complete the long rest.
Truthfully, the more I read the RAW on resting, I don't see a reason to forbid the practice. If the fighter completes a short rest, I can't find anything that explicitly prohibits the time from counting toward a long rest as well.
DxJxC, I think you're right about the consistency of it. If the first hour counts as a short rest, then every uninterrupted hour should count as well as another short rest. I'm also not really seeing anything all that awful about it.