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Experienced DM, new to 5e. Dealing with a party that includes two Elves. Party did not establish a night watch. Dice dictated an overnight raid of the party's provisions. Seems fair to give the Elves a chance of hearing the activity, although being situated 50' away, it would not be great. However, having two of them should boost the math a little.
What is fair to do here, given 5e rules?
Jeremy Crawford was asked about sleeping perceptions, where Crawford said that sleeping people are unconscious. Elves, as far as I see, don't have an answered tweet from the authors. So, the PHB has the only passage about the trance available; On page 23 it says:
...remaining semiconscious, for 4 hours a day.
So the player is slightly aware of their surroundings. It is up to the DM to decide what DC penalties or disadvantage might be incurred by the distance and trance. It might make more sense to avoid the roll, and use the character's passive perception, possibly minus some penalty, to see if the characters notice the stealthy raiders.
I'd likely do contested roll at disadvantage for each elf trance-ing. Or take their passive and subtract 5, and compare that to the stealth roll.
There are a few easy options:
Elves only need 4 hours of meditation (trance) in a long rest. Since long rests are at least 8 hours, it is natural for elves to stagger their meditation so one elf is always on watch, negating the need to specify.
In the event that, as the DM, you decide the elves did not stagger their meditation, you need to adjust for the chance that the raid came while one or both of the elves was not meditating. To make things easy, I would roll a d4 and if a 1 is rolled then both were meditating (25%).
You could try to logic it out if they were both meditating based on what they did in the past and the fact that a raid will likely come during the darkest night or early in the morning (when it is most likely that one watch fell asleep and did not wake the next).
I personally would go with #1 unless extenuating circumstances in dictated otherwise.
In the event you take option 2 or 3 and determine that both elves were meditating, you would need a system for determining if one or both of the elves are conscious enough to detect the raiders. The DM has many options, allowing the elves to roll perception with disadvantage vs the raider's stealth rolls, raiders roll a DC 10 stealth check, the elves' passive perception minus 5 is the DC for the raiders stealth check, etc. If the raiders take something off the elf, a similar check could be made using the raiders' slight of hand.
Let's look at the actual requirements of a long rest...
A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps or performs light activity: reading, talking, eating, or standing watch for no more than 2 hours. If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity-at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activitythe characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it. (PHB, 186)
And...
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. Afler resting it this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep. (PHB, 23.)
Noting that trance allows dreaming... during the 4 hours of trance, it's fair to say that they are pretty far out of it. If the sleepers get a roll to wake, the elf probably should get advantage on that roll, but still should need to roll.
During the other 4 hours, they're awake. Note that other races only need 6 hours of sleep, but 8 hours of rest.
And standing watch is explicitly allowed as a resting activity.
Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes chapter 2, Elves, states under the "Living in Reverie" heading (p. 37):
From birth, elves don’t sleep but instead enter a trance when they need to rest. In this state, elves remain aware of their surroundings while immersing themselves in memories.
The exact level of awareness of surroundings might be up for interpretation, but absolutely, they should be able to perceive things while in a trance.
I know I'm late to the party on this answer, but I thought I'd add this Jeremy Crawford tweet to the answers for future googlers:
Trance doesn't suspend an elf's passive Perception. A DM could treat the elf as distracted and impose disadvantage.
