Is 4 hours long enough for a long rest for Elves?

Question

The Long Rest rules read:

A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which you sleep or perform light activity: reading, talking, eating, or standing watch for no more than 2 hours of the rest period. If the rest is interrupted by a strenuous activity—such as attacking, taking damage, or casting a spell—you must start the rest over to gain any benefit from it, unless the interruption takes less than an hour. You must have at least 1 hit point to take a long rest. At the end of the rest, you regain all your hit points and half of your maximum number of Hit Dice (round up). You cannot benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period.

The elven Trance racial trait reads as:

Trance: Elves do not need to sleep. Instead, they meditate deeply for 4 hours a day. (The Common word for such meditation is “trance.”) While meditating, you can dream after a fashion; such dreams are actually mental exercises that have become reflexive through years of practice. After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep.

I have heard two views regarding these rules:

• An Elf can get the benefit of a Long Rest in only 4 hours.
• The 4 hours only applies to not being exhausted, 8 hours is still required get the benefits of a Long Rest.

Which is it? Please provide supporting information, possibly from previous versions.

Answer 1

An elf receives the benefits of a long rest in 4 hours while using the "Trance" trait.

According to Sage Advice Compendium (2020):

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.

This ruling reverses guidance in the earlier version of the SAC, due to errata changing the rules for long rests.

Interactions between the "Trance" trait and long rests

A long rest is defined as:

... a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps for at least 6 hours and performs no more than 2 hours of light activity, such as reading, talking, eating, or standing watch.

The elf's Trance trait is defined as:

Elves don’t need to sleep. Instead, they meditate deeply, remaining semiconscious, for 4 hours a day. (The Common word for such meditation is “trance.”) While meditating, you can dream after a fashion; such dreams are actually mental exercises that have become reflexive through years of practice. After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep.

Since the "Trance" trait replaces the need for sleep (which most races need in order to complete a long rest), the elf is able to satisfy the requirements of the long rest while in a semiconscious trance for four hours.

Answer 2

I wrote my original answer in April 2015. More than 2 years later, the rules changed. While I am annoyed, I actually prefer the new rules as they sidestep the issue and just make sense.

To summarize: Now a long rest means 8 hours without exertion, of which 6 must be spent sleeping. And a completed 4-hour elvish trance explicitly counts as a long rest.

(Original answer follows.)

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Resting is not the same as sleeping. The rules make no effort to encourage that distinction, but they're unambiguous on it.

A rest is a period of downtime. When you reach 8 hours, you get the many benefits of a long rest. You're limited to a single one every 24 hours, though.

For humans and most player races, the benefits of 8 hours of sleep are as follow:

• resetting the countdown to exhaustion from lack of sleep

That's all. Elves get that "same benefit" in 4 hours of trance (and Warforged in their 4-hour "sleep-like state"). If they're gonna trance as part of a long rest, they can stay fully alert the other 4 hours.

The source of the (widespread) confusion is clear: for most races, both sleeping and resting take 8 hours of downtime and are once-a-day things. Since 8 hours of sleep also fulfil long rest requirements, you might as well always combine the two.

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There's almost no official information about sleep in the books. As stated by the question asker, you can sleep during a long rest and a handful of races can fake a night of sleep in half the normal time. There's also the sleep status effect, irrelevant here. And funnily, a tent has stats even though sleep itself doesn't. So we have to induce the designers' intentions from almost nothing.

Lack of sleep "might" call for a constitution check:

Constitution checks: [...] The DM might call for a Constitution check when you try to accomplish tasks like the following: hold your breath; march or labor for hours without rest; go without sleep; survive without food or water; [...].

Most of the other problems on that list cause exhaustion:

Forced March: The Travel Pace table assumes that characters travel for 8 hours in day. They can push on beyond that limit, at the risk of exhaustion. For each additional hour of travel beyond 8 hours, [...] each character must make a Constitution saving throw at the end of the hour. [...] On a failed saving throw, a character suffers one level of exhaustion.

Food and Water: Characters who don’t eat or drink suffer the effects of exhaustion. Exhaustion caused by lack of food or water can’t be removed until the character eats and drinks the full required amount.

The designers' intention is probably that the DM call for constitution checks when he feels players have gone without sleep "long enough". We can infer from exhaustion from lack of food or water that exhaustion from lack of sleep can only be remedied by sleeping off the sleep deficit.

The fourth edition of D&D had similar sleep and rest rules, but they were slightly more specific, so let's check them out:

Rest and Recovery: [...] At least 6 hours long, an extended rest includes relaxation, sometimes a meal, and usually sleep.

Sleeping and Waking Up: You need at least 6 hours of sleep every day to keep functioning at your best. If, at the end of an extended rest, you haven’t slept at least 6 hours in the last 24, you gain no benefit from that extended rest.

Interruptions: If anything interrupts your extended rest, such as an attack, add the time spent dealing with the interruption to the total time you need to spend in the extended rest.

Keeping Watch: Adventurers typically take turns keeping watch while their companions sleep. If five characters are in your group, each of you can take a turn on watch duty for 1½ hours and sleep for 6 hours, so that you spend a total of 7½ hours resting.

Clearly, even though they were easy to combine, sleep and extended rests were distinct! Sleep could even be split up, unlike rest, and its lack had no penalty other than preventing extended rests. Still, eladrin (high elves) seem to contradict those rules:

Trance: Rather than sleep, eladrin enter a meditative state known as trance. You need to spend 4 hours in this state to gain the same benefits other races gain from taking a 6-hour extended rest.

It appears the (widespread) confusion is much older than we thought!

As for earlier editions, I think they had sleep itself as the standard long-term recovery mechanic.

Answer 3

Yes, elves can complete a long rest in 4 hours.

Errata has shed further light on the issue.

The PHB errata from 08/31/2017 updated the description of a long rest:

Long Rest (p. 186). The first sentence of the rule now reads, “A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps for at least 6 hours and performs no more than 2 hours of light activity, such as reading, talking, eating, or standing watch.”

In addition, you regain at least one Hit Die when you finish a long rest.

Additionally, while not errata, the Sage Advice Compendium has updated its guidance on the Trance trait to account for the new wording of the Long Rest rules:

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. [This answer has been altered as a result of a tweak to the rules for a long rest, which appears in newer printings of the Player’s Handbook.]

If you follow this official ruling, then elves can complete a long rest in 4 hours if they spend it in a trance, with all the other normal rules for long rest applying (except needing to sleep for 6 hours).

Answer 4

A human benefits from a long rest after 8 hours of sleep, and an elf gets the same benefits as an 8-hours-sleeping human with 4 hours of Trance.

Let's focus on this portion of Trance:

After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep.

The rules for long rests state:

A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps for at least 6 hours and performs no more than 2 hours of light activity, such as reading, talking, eating, or standing watch.

Thus, if a human sleeps for 8 hours, then they benefit from a long rest (8 is at least 6, and 0 hours of activity is less than 2). 8 hours of sleep is in no uncertain terms a sufficient condition for benefiting from a long rest. Here is an incomplete list of benefits a human gets from sleeping 8 hours:

• a long rest

Now, Trance states that an elf gets the same benefits from meditating for only 4 hours. So the list of benefits is the same for a human sleeping 8 hours and an elf meditating for 4 hours. So here is an incomplete list of benefits an elf gets from meditating for 4 hours:

• a long rest

This conclusion is easily accessible from a plain reading of Trance and the rules for a long rest. There is no need to get Jeremy Crawford involved.

Answer 5

It can be interpreted either way. Choose whichever way you think works best for your game. One of the great things, and worst things, about 5e is its ambiguous approach to most rules.

Personally, I stick with the RAW interpretation of a long rest meaning that a long rest is 8 hours and that sleep, while a part of a long rest, isn't a long rest in and of itself. For me, the 'Trance' simply allows the elf more downtime during a long rest. Whereas another party member can sleep for 6 hours (I use 6 as a minimum to avoid exhaustion) and have 2 hours for low-key activity such as watch, an elf can 'sleep' for 4 hours (during which they're still partially conscious for BTW… in my opinion, a very important and beneficial aspect of Trance) and have 4 hours for low-key activity such as watch. This means that an elf can help fill out watch rotations in a smaller party or can pick up any slack should another party member be unable to take their watch or whatever.

Answer 6

By RAW It is not

Here are the RAW rules related to Resting from the NEW PHB rules (which includes the errata) - Emphasis mine

Trance. Elves don’t need to sleep. Instead, they meditate deeply, remaining semiconscious, for 4 hours a day. (The Common word for such meditation is “trance.”) While meditating, you can dream after a fashion; such dreams are actually mental exercises that have become reflexive through years of practice. After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep.

A long rest “A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps for at least 6 hours and performs no more than 2 hours of light activity, such as reading, talking, eating, or standing watch.”. 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

So based on these RAW rules, there are 4 long rest requirements:

1. MUST LAST at least 8h
2. MUST contain at least 6h of sleep
3. MUST NOT contain more than 2h of light activity
4. MUST NOT be interrupted by more than 1h of strenuous activity

TRANCE traits provides the ONLY BENEFIT as folows. Nowhere it indicates it is changing the long rest duration requirement.

Trance of 4h makes the character as well rested as a human that would have slept 8h

. .

CONCLUSION:

1. ALL characters must take 8h to complete a long rest
2. All but elves must sleep 6h minimum and perform a maximum of 2h of light activity
3. Elves must trance for 4h and perform a maximum of 2h of light activity.