I actually have a post in mind for tomorrow... Will try to post an Armand/ healing/ moving on / setting watch post up on the morrow.

If I sleep/trance for multiple hours, does it count has full rests for me?

If I am guessing correctly your meaning, no. You can sleep for more hours than you need, but you do not gain any benefits for that; you still must rest 1 hour per 24 hour period. You cannot rest 2 hours then go 48 hours straight without resting.

Never thought about it that way. I was thinking more, if I take more than 1 full rest state, do I gain the benefits of having rested again (I.e. healing, spells, daily use abilities, etc.).

Depends... for the purposes of healing and being able to recover spells, yes. But for 'daily use abilities', no. Those still hold the same restriction as I've placed above.

Coo. Thanks.

EDIT: And by 'Daily Use Abilities', I mean class abilities like wild shape or my ghost step. I would take Magical Items that are usable N/day to refresh on 24 hours.

For Daily Abilities, it is not necessarily the rest that recharges them, but the fact that they've been regenerating over a certain amount of time (hence, 24 hours between uses) Though as for that, some abilities may require not only 24 hours down time, but that your body and mental state are entirely refreshed (by, say, a nap)

I wonder if I annoy my dungeon/game masters when I interperet rules for them? *musing*

Here's what makes sense to me:

Daily use magic items: Refresh 24 hours from use. They need to "recharge" by drawing magic from anywhere and they do so over a day.

Daily use class abilities: These refresh from energy in the body. That means the body has to get that energy from somewhere. I.e. we have to eat, drink and then rest. My interpretation would be, specifically for Dusk: The Ring of Sustenance provides enough "food, water and rest" to heal and refresh me for each day. If I want to heal or refresh more, I would need to eat and drink more and then rest.

I would still think that Daily use class abilities could be refreshed within 24 hours, but I would need to eat and drink a meal or two before resting.

The special abilities that one uses by class are indeed used from within, but I do not believe that merely resting restores the energy required for their use. Ambient energy, that is, energy passageways otherwise imperceivable and generally too weak to be drawn upon at once, aid in the restoration of the ability. They are like ripples upon the surface of the world, where separately they are weak, but together and over time their effects are considerable. Like the tides, the moon also has an influence over this, although it waxes and wanes over a smaller time frame (the course of the day). Generally speaking, at the time of midnight, the ambient energy is always enough to completely restore the use of the ability. But during the day, which is the sun's domain, generally the energy emitted by the sun often smooths out the ripples like a strong wind displaces water. Twilight is the turning point. Well, I could continue, but I believe that should be enough.

You can, manually, restore the ability by concentrating on drawing the ambient energy, but that takes more time. For gameplay purposes, consider resting for the purpose to do so to take twice as long, and you only heal as though it were a single rest length; the concentration takes away from normal benefits of resting in order to draw in enough energy.

lul, I don't mean to argue but I do like to be precise.

So, technically:

Where n is the hours of rest required for "complete bedrest", a manual recharge of (su, sp) abilities requires a*(n^2)*1/(cos(h*pi/24)) hours of rest where h is the time on a 24-hour clock in hours and a is the (amount of rest periods + 1) that you have taken in that 24-hour cycle. At least that is how much you would need if you gained energy at a constant rate equal to that of which you start resting at, which wouldn't be true. But in order to account for that I think we'd have to find the integral of that expression wrt h but that gets terribly complicated.

EX: Say Dusk rests from Midnight to 1 AM and then over the next 5 hours decides to recharge his daily use abilities.

a = 2, Dusk has rested once already
n = 1, Dusk needs 1 hour of rest normally
h = 6, it is 6 AM.

2*(1^2)*min(1/(cos(pi/4)),4) = 2*1*(2^(1/2)) = 2^(3/2) hours rest needed.
Obviously it doesn't really make sense to rest for an irrational amount of time, so it would just round to the next 1/2 hour. Since 2^(3/2) is approx. 2.83 he would need 3 hours of rest.

This would also imply that it would take an infinite amount of time to recharge at 12 noon. We could assume that it levels off 4 times a*n^2.

To my knowledge, that is the correct formula, however, what you have substituted has errors. The number of rests one has taken in the day is not a factor. It would be easier to develop a sine curve based on the time of day that would be a multiple of how long you have to rest.

If you truly wish to be precise, you will have to take into consideration the meaning of the word 'midnight'. For my purposes, it will be simply the mid point between dawn and dusk. You also have to take into consideration the time of the year, which alters the length of time in which it is 'day' and in which it is 'night'.

In other words, what you are trying to do is rather impractical, and a level of detail not required of me under normal circumstances. For simplicity, even if it does not follow exactly what the formula would be, Dusk will have to rest 3 hours. If you want to know why I have chosen three rather than two as I have stated above, it is because your persistence in this matter has shown that I do need to consider the maximum amount of time that Dusk would need to rest based on the amount of time. Besides which... how would Dusk know that he is capable of doing the ability again? It isn't like a lightbulb where if it's on that means you can do it and if it's off you can't. If one considers a variance of reality, you don't know that you can do the ability until you try. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. It is through trial and error that one perceives how much one is capable of, and if one has restored their ability to do so again.

If this is unacceptable to you, then I'm sorry to say but that's too bad, because I do not wish to go through the foundations of Tiancann's reality, which furthermore raises the question of exactly where it is in its solar system and whether it has more than one moon, but you only perceive one, etc.

Oh I don't think I would be doing this every day. It just presented an interesting conundrum.

I used a factor because I assumed that to "manually recharge" it would become more difficult each to you do it, e.g. I rested twice today, the third time would be 3 times as hard as the first, though you might consider it to be a squared factor.

It would be an interesting intellectual pursuit, nonetheless, given that you can set the boundaries to whatever you want and fiddle with it and such.

Lets stick with 3 hours for an additional rest time but I propose it can't be taken within 4 hours of high noon (i.e. nothing substantial can be siphoned from the universe between 10 AM and 2 PM). Furthermore, I propose that if I do find it necessary to take additional rest time, anytime I choose to use more than half of my "charges" for daily use abilities you apply a % fail chance.

I think that would make it fair. I assumed that using an (Su, Sp) ability would be draining, just as if you or I sprinted 100 meters in reality. After so many times, we wouldn't be able to run 100 meters full on sprint.

Well, break out the technical details why don't ya? I have to admit, this discussion almost registers in the area of amusing (well, I suppose that's because I don't need to argue anything)

I would just like to mention that even creatures with abilities that function once/day (or etc.) are not relying on bodily rest, but for the energies that control this function of theirs to replenish after however long it takes.

Most specifically I refer to Spell-Like abilities, because those are the most common things you see in non-player creatures that take effect #/day times. What I learned of this topic I derived from a series of articles;

http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=dnd/rg/20040413a

If you wish to view the other 3 parts of the article, scroll to the bottom. When you see a box labeled "Recent Rules of the Game" seek the 'MORE' button in the bottom right-hand corner. Near the bottom of the resulting list on the next page you will find "All About Spell-Like Abilities (Part ~)"

I hope my comments, like so many pairs of pennies has given you a worthy two-cents. ^-^

There is a fail % chance; I had that thought out before you mentioned it, Vilyamar.

Lulz. I like math.