Long rest clarification

[heyzoms]

So looking at the rules for travel, camping and longrest.

You can only spend 8 hours traveling and 7 hours of free time. Because after that you get hit with fatigue after 16 hours without rest.

Wait you might ask thats only 15 hours but every morning you wake up you have to do 1 hour of daily preparation.

Is that right?

If so after 7 hours of free time. Would you start the sleeping process and have fatigue the entire time you do a Long Rest? Until you wake up?

Also usually you will have to have 4-5 players watch or be lookouts for about 2 hours (rounded down for ease of calculations)

So really players have 5 hours of free time before fatigue hits then they gotta rest.

I'm I doing this right? I am a GM and i like to do things Raw as possible with confusing my players. So any clarification would be great!

[breithauptclan]

I'm not entirely sure how much help I am going to be for this... None of the games I have ever been in or run have ever tracked hours in a day to that level of detail.

Though to be fair, most of them don't bother to track mundane ammunition or rations either. And bulk is only calculated if someone is packing around a lot of stuff.

But to answer the question, (Rest and Daily Preparations and Resting rules) yes - you need 8 hours of rest, though even for spellcasters it does not have to be uninterrupted. If you go more than 16 hours without rest you will become fatigued. And the 1 hour of daily preparations are part of those 16 hours of adventuring day - leaving 15 left for doing other productive things. Things like traveling, exploring, crafting, learning spells, fighting, treating wounds, and so on.

Once you start resting, then you are no longer at risk of fatigue. Even if your rest is interrupted and resumed. So traveling for 8 hours, doing some other things for 7 hours, and then going to bed will be fine. You won't be fatigued during a battle that breaks out during the night.

There is also a table that calculates how long the rest and standing watch cycles need to be for various party sizes.