How do you protect your sleeping character?

[Drasmir]

As the subject says, I'm looking for best ways to protect a sleeping character. As I understand it, when sleeping you are considered helpless (and don't get a listen check to detect enemies). I realize that having a group to sleep in shifts is going to be the best option, but what if you are without a group, or you don't trust a group member any more than a common enemy.

Ideas? Suggestions? Tried and True methods?

 

[Darklone]

You do get a listen check to detect enemies, but you suffer a -5 penalty or something like that... IIRC that was how most guys here handled it since there's no rule in the books.

Otherwise: We usually have elf-heavy groups, one of them is always awake and the other one trancing (not even as remote as sleeping).
Alarm spells and high listen skills do the rest, later there are spells such as Rope Trick and Leomunds hut.

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

If you're a wizard or sorceror, you can share watches with your familiar. (If you've an owl familiar, you might even have it keep watch the whole night and let it sleep through the morning while you carry it).

Rangers and wizards can also leave an open first level slot and use it for an alarm spell if they haven't needed to use it for anything else by the end of the day. Theoretically sorcerors could do so too. . . but alarm isn't a very attractive known spell.

 

[Norfleet]

Try sleeping in trees. Sleeping in trees makes it very difficult for other people to find you, let alone attack you, and even if they did, they'd probably cause you to fall out of the tree, which would wake you up.

As a side note, sleeping in trees is a very good RL technique as well.

 

[Terath Ninir]

(You should get a Listen check. Someone suggested having a sleeping character "Take 0" -- ie, you just get your final skill level. If that's high enough, you hear whatever or whoever it is. I have children. Believe me, people have a chance of hearing you when they're asleep. )

Get an iron golem and have him tag around with the party. Have him keep watch from *inside* the fire, so he'll give your foes nasty burns as he pounds them into pulp.

Seek out the inevitable group of bandits, kick their ass using subdual combat, then hire them to do the watch. That goblin rogue might be sneaky, but if you've got 60 people doing the watch, he's *going* to get caught.

Get simulacrums of all the most powerful foes you defeat. They're completely loyal, and 60% of the power of a red dragon or a lich is still a whole lot of power.

If you're a mage, get chain contingency, and have it set to react to anyone disturbing you in your sleep. The spells in your contingency should be ethereal jaunt and meteor swarm. That will take care of things quite nicely.

If you're low level: coffee. Lots of coffee. And get ready to find out about the Exhaustion rules. You might want to take that Endurance feat, after all.

 

[Crothian]

Don't make people mad who would attack you while you sleep

 

[Thanee]

Rope Trick!

Ring of Sustenance to decrease the time needed to sleep.

Gate in a Solar to protect you!

Bye
Thanee

 

[Senior Bobo]

Simple sleep protection

A low level solution help for this is the magic mouth spell. It has a range of 15 ft per level and can loudly report the presence of any intruders who approach through simple means. There are a few ways to get past this. It can't detect invisibility or illusions but it can see through normal darkness just fine which helps at night, especially if you don't have good night vision. Silence is a problem, too but if you're low level and you get hit with any of those you probably have bigger troubles. After 4th level it exceeds most races darkvision so it should give you a nice warning.

I used to always cast it on a dagger and plant it in the middle of the camp with the instructions "If anyone other then the people with me now (the party) comes within the range of this spell and approachs the camp scream 'Fire!' 10 times." You may have to modify it to work any exact wording for your DM.

Then again if you don't trust anyone in your own party you can just make the condition "If anyone comes within 3 feet of me with a weapon drawn" or whatever.

Under 3.5 it costs 10gp to cast but the charge is permament until used so you can always take the dagger and put it in your backpack or in a sack so the visual cues won't be triggered and just reuse it night after night. It's also great for making sure people don't break into your room in town.

Truth be told I copied this idea from some old D&D novel (Azure Bonds, maybe?). The mage in it used to cast the spell on his earring and have it whipser into his ear to warn him if anyone approached the party while they slept.

Hope that helps.

 

[Norfleet]

The other unfortunate problem of sleeping in the outdoors, is the need to leave a light of some kind going, or run a high risk of being devoured in your sleep by a grue. Admittedly, this can happen just as well if you lose your light source and can't see in the dark while you're awake, but it's much worse in your sleep.

This can be reduced somewhat by sleeping in trees, which keeps off a number of other things, and possibly may keep away grues. I don't think grues climb very well.

 

[Cedric]

Don't travel alone unless you are a very skilled woodsman. A very skilled woodsman should be able to hide his camp and his trail to the camp affectively and he should be able to have a reasonable chance of doing well on a listen check at -10 (the penalty for sleeping).

If you are not a skilled woodsman, then travel at least in groups of four. And assign watches through the night. With a group of four, you will probably need to set 3 hour watches and plan for a short bit of overlap between the watches (10 hour night). Any arcane casters should take first watch, any clerics (that pray at dawn) should take last watch. That way they can wake people up for breakfast, then start praying and the wizard who had first watch and has his 8 hours of sleep can start studying his book.

There should never be a time when everyone is asleep at once...you are just asking to die then. If you can't fill the four slots, hire a henchman or two.

Cedric