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I have a Circle of the Land druid who regains spell slots by meditation during a short rest. Short rest also resets Wild Shape uses and some other abilities.
Does meditating to regain spell slots count as resting, or do I have to choose to rest properly to regain Wild Shape transformations?
I assume it counts since rest is "sleeping or light physical activity", but I want to make sure before this becomes relevant in the game.
Or more accurately, you can meditate whilst resting.
From PHB, p. 68:
Natural Recovery
Starting at 2nd level, you can regain some of your magical energy by sitting in meditation and communing with nature. During a short rest, you choose expended spell slots to recover. [...]
The meditation is called out as being something you do "during a short rest", not something you do instead of a short rest, so when you take a short rest, assuming you choose to do this meditation, you can regain expended spell slots and expended uses of Wild Shape.
This is also consistent with the monk with regards to regaining ki through meditation; on PHB, p. 78:
Ki
[...]
When you spend a ki point, it is unavailable until you finish a short or long rest, at the end of which you draw all of your expended ki back into yourself. You must spend at least 30 minutes of the rest meditating to regain your ki points.
The wording is slightly different here, because they wanted to specify 30 minutes specifically, but at the same time you only get the ki points back after completing the rest, but it still describes that you can meditate during the rest, not as a separate event.
You might be looking a bit too deeply at how some features are outlined instead of how they work in game. The Circle of the Land druid regains spell slots during a Short Rest by meditating using their Natural Recovery feature:
Starting at 2nd level, you can regain some of your magical energy by sitting in meditation and communing with nature. During a short rest, you choose expended spell slots to recover. The spell slots can have a combined level that is equal to or less than half your druid level (rounded up), and none of the slots can be 6th level or higher. You can’t use this feature again until you finish a long rest.
Nothing mentioned here stops you from recovering your wild shape transformations (which recover on short rests), thus you would recover your wild shape transformations during any short rest (regardless of whether you used Natural Recovery or not).
