D&D 5e Rest Rules Reference (Short and Long Rest)

Short rest vs long rest

How a short rest works

A short rest is at least an hour of downtime doing nothing more strenuous than eating, reading, or tending wounds. Its main benefit is Hit Dice. You may spend one or more of your Hit Dice, roll each die, add your Constitution modifier to each, and regain that total in hit points. You choose how many to spend after each roll, so you can stop once you feel topped up.

Many class features also recharge on a short rest, such as the Fighter’s Second Wind and the Warlock’s Pact Magic spell slots. Because Warlocks get their slots back this way, they play very differently from other casters across a long day.

How a long rest works

A long rest is at least 8 hours, most of it spent sleeping (at least 6 hours) with the remainder light activity. Finishing one restores all lost hit points and all expended spell slots. You also recover spent Hit Dice, but only up to half your total number rounded down, with a minimum of one die. If your exhaustion level is 1 or higher, a long rest reduces it by one, assuming you had food and water.

The limits that matter

Two constraints keep rest from being free. You can only gain the benefit of one long rest per 24-hour period, and you must have at least 1 hit point when it begins. A long rest is also fragile: more than 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, or other strenuous effort interrupts it, and you must start the 8 hours over to get any benefit.

How Adventure Codex handles it

Adventure Codex builds rests into the tracker directly. A short rest resets every feature and consumable you have marked as short-rest recovery, and a long rest resets both short-rest and long-rest items, refills spell slots, and restores HP in one tap. Each rest snapshots your state first, so a mistaken tap is a single undo away.