Sleeping in a bedroll

[RealMarkP]

I can't seem to find the information. Does sleeping in a bedroll give you the extra healing ability of bed rest?

From SRD:

With a full night’s rest (8 hours of sleep or more), you recover 1 hit point per character level. Any significant interruption during your rest prevents you from healing that night.

If you undergo complete bed rest for an entire day and night, you recover twice your character level in hit points.

So, does bedroll = bed?

[AuraTwilight]

yea, that's basically what a bedroll is. Think sleeping bag.

[prufock]

Yes. "Bed rest" does not necessitate an actual bed. Any DM who claims otherwise shall be tied up in a bedroll for 8 hours.

[Hirax]

Personally, I sleep just as well in a sleeping bag as in a bed. That's not the case for everyone, though. If you wanted to be crazy mean, you could make someone sleeping in a bedroll roll some kind of check to see whether they slept well, but that's not a course of action I'd encourage.

[Gadora]

I see no reason that you'd even require a bedroll for bed rest, though you could certainly do bed rest in one. That said, bed rest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed_rest) is a little more than just sleeping in a bed.

[Diarmuid]

I think the question at hand isnt whether you can "rest" in a bedroll, it's whether 8 hours of resting in a bedroll will get you 2x char level as opposed to only getting 1x from normal 8 hours of rest.

Answer to that is no, "complete bed rest" per your quote requires an entire day be spent "in bed" to get the double bonus.

Now, this makes absolutely no sense to me as I would rather just go for 3 separate 8 hour rest periods and get 1x CL per 8 hour period.

The "bed rest" thing seems pretty silly by comparison.

[Sgt. Cookie]

Yeah, you are. The rules are weird like that. But, hey. RAW is RAW.

[Slipperychicken]

"Bed rest" may be sanely interpreted to mean lying on something at least as comfortable as a very poor bed, and otherwise satisfying the conditions under which a spellcaster achieves rest to regain spells. Lying naked on sharp rocks while exposed to the elements, for example, would not allow you to gain the benefits of complete bed rest. Having a layer or two of something soft between you and hard earth (and covering yourself from the elements), however, would allow you to gain those benefits.

[Acanous]

I must be tired, I read this thread as "Sleeping in a Beedrill".

Which would not be complete bed rest.

[BowStreetRunner]

When RAW overrides all common sense, this ceases to be a role-playing game and just becomes a miniatures game with really complicated rules.

Not all of the items available to purchase in the equipment section of the Player's Handbook need to have rules mechanics firmly stapled to the front of their containers at time of purchase. The DM is capable of using good judgement to determine if something is reasonable - and if he isn't capable of doing so he probably shouldn't be a DM.

[lunar2]

nah, the "bed" in bed rest is completely optional. i can tell you from experience that once you get use to it, sleeping on concrete is no less comfortable than sleeping in a bed. in fact, once you get used to the concrete, it's the bed that you have trouble sleeping in.

[Chilingsworth]

For what it's worth, my dm usually makes us roll saves versus fatigue if we don't have some sort of sleeping arangement (either an inn or other bed, or a bedroll.)

[Kelb_Panthera]

I think the question at hand isnt whether you can "rest" in a bedroll, it's whether 8 hours of resting in a bedroll will get you 2x char level as opposed to only getting 1x from normal 8 hours of rest.

Answer to that is no, "complete bed rest" per your quote requires an entire day be spent "in bed" to get the double bonus.

Now, this makes absolutely no sense to me as I would rather just go for 3 separate 8 hour rest periods and get 1x CL per 8 hour period.

The "bed rest" thing seems pretty silly by comparison.

A DM could and probably would say that resting for three consecutive 8 hour periods is functionally equivalent to simply resting for one 24 hour period unless something substantial happened in between them.

On the bedroll = bed question; I would certainly say not. There's a world of difference between having a few layers of cloth, intended to do no more than keep you warm and dry, between you and the ground and being in a bed, which is a structure designed to cradle you off of the ground and provide a comfortable rest.

Especially in regards to recuperating from injuries the two aren't even remotely equivalent.

[Hirax]

On the bedroll = bed question; I would certainly say not. There's a world of difference between having a few layers of cloth, intended to do no more than keep you warm and dry, between you and the ground and being in a bed, which is a structure designed to cradle you off of the ground and provide a comfortable rest.

Especially in regards to recuperating from injuries the two aren't even remotely equivalent.

Speaking from experience, you are completely and utterly wrong.

[lianightdemon]

Even in a sleeping bag you'd want something more comfy to lie on.
Ground is sure hard and uncomfortable and you typically are sore the next morning from just being on the ground with only the sleeping bag. The sleeping bag helps keep you warm and keep the dew off you.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Speaking from experience, you are completely and utterly wrong.

Care to be more specific on how?

I've slept in both beds and sleeping bags too. A bed-roll is -not- equivalent to a modern sleeping bag and beds have supported their occupants at least a few inches off the ground, even if they're composed of nothing but padding on the ground, since their earliest incarnation which was nothing but a pile of straw in a cave with tanned animal hides for blankets.

Also, you've spent time recuperating from serious injury while lying in a sleeping bag on the ground?

[lunar2]

i have to ask everyone who is complaining about the hard ground: have you actually slept on the ground before for more than one or two nights?

flat concrete and no padding at all is perfectly fine to sleep on once you get over being spoiled by a mattress. humans existed just fine for thousands of years without beds, and i bet our ancestors weren't sore in the morning.

[Gavinfoxx]

I must be tired, I read this thread as "Sleeping in a Beedrill".

And I thought they smelled bad from the outside!

[doc neon]

As to the RAW discussion, it doesn't say this in the section about Death and Dying, but in the Heal skill description from the SRD, it specifies that a successful heal check heals, "2 hit points per level for a full 8 hours of rest in a day." I think that it might be intended that the 8 hour healing cannot be taken more than once in a day.

[Kelb_Panthera]

i have to ask everyone who is complaining about the hard ground: have you actually slept on the ground before for more than one or two nights?

flat concrete and no padding at all is perfectly fine to sleep on once you get over being spoiled by a mattress. humans existed just fine for thousands of years without beds, and i bet our ancestors weren't sore in the morning.

I lived in a tent for an entire summer during the year I was homeless. So yeah. I've slept on the ground more than one or two nights in my life. Considerably more than one or two nights in a row, even. :smallannoyed:

As for our ancestors being sore, why would you assume they weren't? After all, they only generally lived to about 40 on average not that long ago. Nevermind that if you're talking about nothing resembling a bed you're talking ancient pre-history when they'd be lucky to make it to 30 most of the time.

At no point in all of human history, since the first hunter-gatherers settled down and started farming, have beds been a non-thing. They haven't always been spring mattresses on box-springs but they have been there. Even relatively simple plains natives from before the american civil war piled several animal pelts atop one another to serve as a primitive bed, for pete's sake.

Also, just a stab in the dark here; you're under 25, aren't you?

[Hirax]

Care to be more specific on how?

I've slept in both beds and sleeping bags too. A bed-roll is -not- equivalent to a modern sleeping bag and beds have supported their occupants at least a few inches off the ground, even if they're composed of nothing but padding on the ground, since their earliest incarnation which was nothing but a pile of straw in a cave with tanned animal hides for blankets.

Also, you've spent time recuperating from serious injury while lying in a sleeping bag on the ground?

You are assuming that others experience rest the same way that you do I'm guessing, and as myself and others have pointed out, this is simply not the case at all. A mattress and additional blankets do not offer any additional comfort for a lot of people, a wood or concrete floor with must a sheet does just fine, with a thin blanket added if outdoors and you're not sleeping near a fire. Some people are just hardier specimens than others, whether you want to admit it or not.

I've treated multiple severe wounds in the outdoors (mostly burns and severe lacerations requiring stitches). The only difference in recovery between being outdoors and indoors is that you're likely to access to better medical equipment and nutrition in an indoor situation, but that's not really relevant here. Wounds don't heal differently depending on whether you're in a bed or on a tarp, I've stitched people up, and later removed the stitches without them ever having returned to civilization. they recovered just the same as cityfolk do.

[Kelb_Panthera]

It's well documented that how quickly wounds heal is influenced by the subject's mental state. Being more comfortable -does- improve the rate at which wounds heal.

The kind of wounds you're talking about and the wounds recieved from battling monsters and spellcasters are not only different in general nature (I doubt you've ever had the pleasure of treating shattered bone or the ragged lacerations of a claw-inflicted wound) and scope (a sword does a helluva lot more damage than a jagged rock, especially when the former was the result of an intentional attack and the latter a slip of the hand.)

As for comfort in general; I realize that the minimums at which individuals find themselves acceptably comfortable varies considerably from person to person but short-term comfort and long-term comfort are two different animals and laying in a position that places minimal stress on the body's muscular and skeletal structures can be something else altogether as well. The third of these is the one most important to how a person recovers from injury, especially injury to those biological structures.

The rest from sleeping is represented by the removal of the fatigued condition. The HP recovery represents recovering from injury. These are not the same thing and they have definite and documented differences in what's required. There's a reason that even the cheapest of hospitals puts you on something more comfortable than a wooden exam table when you're admitted.

[Hirax]

You entire argument hinges on the assumption that beds are inherently more comfortable than wood (edit: rather, that line of thinking, bed vs. wood was just an example), and that's just not the case. What you are saying makes zero sense physiologically.

[Flickerdart]

As for our ancestors being sore, why would you assume they weren't? After all, they only generally lived to about 40 on average not that long ago. Nevermind that if you're talking about nothing resembling a bed you're talking ancient pre-history when they'd be lucky to make it to 30 most of the time.
You're contradicting yourself right there - if 40 was the average age, then how were they "lucky to make it to 30"? The answer is that both of those figures are misleading. The 40-year average life span accounts for massive infant mortality rates, but if you made it out of that, you were likely to enjoy a fairly long life.

In any case, the comfort level of the bed has nothing to do with recovering HP. The point is that you're resting, and not lifting weights or chasing goblins around. Whether or not you do it on a slab of rock or the entire inventory of a Bed, Bath and Beyond has nothing to do with how quickly wounds mend.

[Kelb_Panthera]

You entire argument hinges on the assumption that beds are inherently more comfortable than wood (edit: rather, that line of thinking, bed vs. wood was just an example), and that's just not the case. What you are saying makes zero sense physiologically.

No, my argument hinges on the fact that a properly supported body is under less resting stress and better able to recover.

Resting stress being the stress the body is under due to the interaction between its position, what it's resting against, and the pull of gravity at the anlge it's resting. Ideal resting-stress is a result of laying flat on the back with good lumbar and neck support on a surface that applies pressure uniformly accross the entire surface of the body atop it. This puts the entire skeletal structure in its natural alignment and under no strain, the muscular system in its neutral position and under no strain and doesn't constrict any of the superficial blood-vessels of the vascular system. I personally find it to be a deuced uncomfortable position to lie in, laying flat on my back just feels wrong to me psychologically, but medically it's the best position to lie in to recover from injury.

I do have some idea what I'm talking about here.

All of that is coupled with the fact that if the person is more comfortable or otherwise in a positive state of mind, he will recover more quickly.

[Kelb_Panthera]

You're contradicting yourself right there - if 40 was the average age, then how were they "lucky to make it to 30"? The answer is that both of those figures are misleading. The 40-year average life span accounts for massive infant mortality rates, but if you made it out of that, you were likely to enjoy a fairly long life.

In any case, the comfort level of the bed has nothing to do with recovering HP. The point is that you're resting, and not lifting weights or chasing goblins around. Whether or not you do it on a slab of rock or the entire inventory of a Bed, Bath and Beyond has nothing to do with how quickly wounds mend.

It's not a contradiction. Those two numbers are in reference to dramatically different time periods. Re-read it. 40 for some unspecified but historically recent time. Let's ball-park it in the neighborhood of somewhere in the last couple of centuries. 30 was in reference to pre-agrarian society not long after man discovered how to use fire. That average is quite a bit more tenuous, being founded on archeological evidence surrounding positively ancient and fairly rare human remains but it's necessary to go that far back since humanity has always had something resembling a bed since some cave-man discovered it was more comfortable to sleep on a pile of straw or a few animal hides than on the floor of a cave or the ground under a tree.

[Hirax]

I remain unconvinced by what looks entirely to be armchair anecdata, at best.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Don't take my word for it if you don't believe me. Look it up and see for yourself.

Your argument certainly doesn't have any more sourced data than mine. It's predicated on the shaky assumption that comfort has -no- impact on a person's recovery from injury when even the vast majority of anecdotal evidence would contradict that position.

[Hirax]

I'm not saying that comfort doesn't help people recover more quickly, that is a foolish reading of my posts. What I'm saying is that the optimal level of comfort is dynamic, and that what you assume to be the minimum necessary level of comfort is unambiguously false, and even foolish.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Then you've completely misread me.

Comfort is incidental. It's the better support that a bed offers that makes it a necessary part of the "bed-rest."

For pete's sake man, it's even in the name of the practice; Bed-Rest.

Also, you can't say that being more comfortable helps you recover faster and being less comfortable doesn't make you recover slower because those are contradictory statments.

If being comfortable helps you recover faster than you would if you were less comfortable then being less comfortable means that you'll recover slower.

Your side of this argument fails on basic logic, nevermind the lack of data.

[Incorrect]

I would say yes, if you set up a nice camp, with a good fire, shielded from the elements, maybe a soft spot on the ground, and with plenty food and drink; then you can have complete bed rest in a bedroll.

Because, why not?
It's a game, people want their HP back, move the plot along..

[Kelb_Panthera]

I would say yes, if you set up a nice camp, with a good fire, shielded from the elements, maybe a soft spot on the ground, and with plenty food and drink; then you can have complete bed rest in a bedroll.

Because, why not?
It's a game, people want their HP back, move the plot along..

I'm not saying you can't pile up some moss and pine-needles and call it a bed. It doesn't have to be a king-sized four-poster with silk sheets to count but some effort needs to be put toward making the person recovering as comfortable as possible under the circumstances.

Just wrapping him in a single bed-roll and having him lay on a hard surface doesn't cut it.

Reality check though; we're discussing what is probably the least common means for a D&D character to recover HP in anything less than a no-magic campaign.

[Ashtagon]

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/combat/injuryandDeath.htm#healing

Way I play it, you get 1 hp/level if you rest for 8 hours in something that approximates a poor quality bed or better. This can be as basic as a bedroll on a stone surface. In comfortable weather, it could even be from sleeping clothed on a grassy riverbank or beach (above the high tide mark!).

You get 2 hp/level if you are confined to your bed for an entire day and night. The key point here is that you're spending an entire game day as downtime in a "bed".

If your rest is broken significantly (including standing watch for half the night or being roused halfway through), by RAW you don't get any hp from the rest.

Slightly to my surprise, the elven trancing ability isn't in the SRD. I don't think I'd allow it to speed up natural healing though; it applies primarily to mental fatigue effects.

Also, an actual bed-roll is more involved than just a sleeping bag. Sleeping bags are all about the thermal qualities these days, but pay no particular attention to padding to ensure a reasonably soft surface, because modern campers tend to prefer grassy areas to pitch their tents, plus ground canvas for the tent floor, and probably a few other home comforts at hand.

An actual bed-roll (such as the one I used when I went outback in Australia) has enough padding that you could sleep in it on concrete under an open sky and not feel too put out. In the technology of the typical campaign, it's be like having a couple of rolled up blankets to lie on, plus another one or two (depending on local culture) to wrap up in.

[Incorrect]

I'm not saying you can't pile up some moss and pine-needles and call it a bed. It doesn't have to be a king-sized four-poster with silk sheets to count but some effort needs to be put toward making the person recovering as comfortable as possible under the circumstances.

Just wrapping him in a single bed-roll and having him lay on a hard surface doesn't cut it.

Reality check though; we're discussing what is probably the least common means for a D&D character to recover HP in anything less than a no-magic campaign.

I agree on both counts.
If the players make a real effort to make it comfortable, it will be enough for me to rule complete rest. It's even a nice tool to make them describe how they set up camp and a bit about how they relax. Its nice fluff.

Resting is for puny men with spell slots

[shaikujin]

In game terms, I would totally consider sleeping in a bedroll to be equivalent to sleeping in a bed.

IMO, complete bed rest simply means no strenuous exertions like adventuring.


I mean, how much more cushy/comfortable can an unfamiliar bed in a run-of-the-mill medieval inn be, compared to a familiar bedroll that a character regularly sleeps in?

I doubt anyone would find any issue with considering sleeping in the inn as proper bed rest.

In DnD, a character can sleep on a hard pallet in the common room of an inn and not receive any less natural healing. After all, we're talking about hardened heroic adventurers that fights monsters.


Edit: Left out a sentence - Neither of the above is that different from sleeping on a bedroll.


The only penalty that I can think of which applies to sleeping is for sleeping in medium/heavy armor. And even then, you still heal normally, you just become fatigued.



P/S: Regarding the hard ground thingy - I used to trek a lot, spending weeks in rainforests at a time... Sleeping bags and bedrolls mean different things to me.

Sleeping bag is the soft, comfy, down-filled bag I sleep in, that keeps me warm during cold nights.

Bedroll is a lightweight foam mattress that I lay on top of rocky ground/boulders, that cushions and insulates the cold/hard/damp ground from my sleeping bag and me.

While I can't attest to healing from grievous injuries in this setup, it's otherwise quite comfortable. When you camp outdoors a lot, you learn little tricks to make life comfortable :smallsmile:

Edit: Swordsaged

[BowStreetRunner]

I'm surprised how much emphasis seems to be placed on the comfort-providing qualities of ancient and medieval 'beds', particularly since the modern concept of a bed is not anything like what most primitive hunter-gatherers, medieval serfs and peasants, Roman slaves, and so forth had to sleep on. Yet these people did in fact recuperate from illness and injury by resting.

I believe the emphasis on 'bed-rest' in the game mechanics was meant to stress that no other activities could be performed at the same time. So no spell research or casting, no negotiating of treaties or planning of military campaigns, and so forth. No other activities could be performed besides resting. What sort of bed you are lying in was most likely less of a concern to the game developers than what sorts of activities your character could be performing at the same time.

[lunar2]

i'm telling you. any flat surface is perfectly comfortable once you get used to it. a concrete slab, a steel bunk, whatever. hard flat surface + arm for pillow is just as good as mattress + feather pillow. if it's particularly hot weather, the concrete/steel is significantly more comfortable than any fabric could hope to be.

[Kelb_Panthera]

i'm telling you. any flat surface is perfectly comfortable once you get used to it. a concrete slab, a steel bunk, whatever. hard flat surface + arm for pillow is just as good as mattress + feather pillow. if it's particularly hot weather, the concrete/steel is significantly more comfortable than any fabric could hope to be.

That may or may not be true depending on the individual.

The flat ground or concrete or steel slab unquestionably does -not- offer any kind of proper support to back or neck. It applies uneven pressure to the body laying on it and in less hosptiable weather actually draws heat away from the person laying on it. For sleeping through 8 hours to recover from the exertions of the day, sure, no problem. For laying mostly immobile for 24 hours while trying to recover from serious injury, not so much.