I play a warlock in a campaign who has Aspect of the Moon and who is soon to take Visions of Distant Realms.
Aspect of the Moon. You no longer need to sleep and can't be forced to sleep by any means. To gain the benefits of a long rest, you can spend all 8 hours doing light activity, such as reading your Book of Shadows and keeping watch.
Visions of Distant Realms. You can cast arcane eye at will, without expending a spell slot.
Also relevant:
Long Rest. A long rest is a period of extended downtime, at least 8 hours long, during which a character sleeps or performs light activity: reading, talking, eating, or standing watch for no more than 2 hours. If the rest is interrupted by a period of strenuous activity—at least 1 hour of walking, fighting, casting spells, or similar adventuring activity—the characters must begin the rest again to gain any benefit from it.
There are many relevant questions about how these two features work individually. However, the rules interpretation isn't part of this question; assume we're interpreting the rules as follows:
- The PC can concentrate during the long rest without interrupting it.
- The PC can spend up to 60 minutes casting spells before interrupting the long rest (but Arcane Eye is a 1 action spell with a duration of 1 hour, so this is not really a limitation).
In other words, we assume that the wording about "8 hours doing light activity" in Aspect of the Moon preempts the long rest rule about how you spend your 8 hours but doesn't preempt the next sentence of the long rest rule allowing limited interruptions. - TL;DR—nothing in this interpretation of the rules prevents the warlock from spending the entire night every night using arcane eye.
Given that the warlock can spend all night every night using arcane eye, how can the DM make the ability both fun and painless for everyone?
The DM and I both heartily agree that we do not want every (or any) long rest to become the arcane eye show where everyone sits around and waits while I drag a token across the map. Realistically, we don't even want to spend more than a few minutes per long rest on whatever scrying occurs (unless there is some compelling narrative reason to).
I recall reading somewhere (perhaps a duplicate question I was unable to find? or perhaps another forum) that a DM handled a similar situation by just giving the player a map of the dungeon rather than play it out. This seems pretty smart to me and is exactly the kind of suggestion I'm looking for for. I'm looking for good subjective answers to the question of how the DM can balance fun and time/spotlight for everyone when the warlock uses this combination of abilities.
Some relevant upper bounds on what arcane eye can do:
- The arcane eye can move 30 feet when the warlock spends their action. This works out to a little over 3.4 miles per hour (the duration of the spell). This puts an absolute limit on how far away the warlock can ever see using arcane eye, assuming they had a known path to a target and spent all their actions for an hour moving the eye there. During daylight, sending 8 eyes in 8 directions for almost 3.5 miles each gives you sight over a lot of space (assuming you're looking for something big and easy to spot like an army or a giant).
- The arcane eye has normal vision and 30 feet of darkvision. This puts an upper limit on the area the eye can sweep out (see) in an hour with its darkvision. If the eye moves in a straight line for the full 3.4 miles, it will have swept out a little under 25 acres (about 10 ha or 13 soccer fields) of space.
- A warlock in a dark field who wanted to scry as much of the area near them as possible could theoretically take the following strategy: divide the field into octants then spend 1 hour of the long rest sweeping out each of the octants starting from near to far. Using this strategy they could sweep out all of the space within almost 1660 feet over the course of 8 hours with their darkvision. (Corrected: this previously said 600 feet, but that would have been from just 1 hour not 8.)
- The scaling here is unintuitive, but, for example, you could alternatively spend the first 53 minutes of each hour moving the eye to a location 3 miles away then the last 7 minutes sweeping out the area around that remote point. You'd be able to sweep out the whole area within about 575 feet of that point.
What do I consider fun (for the warlock) in this situation?
Since I'm playing the warlock it's relevant what I would consider fun or not fun. My main concern here is that, since this is a major feature of the character that is tied into their whole concept, I don't want this feature to feel like it's been substantially downgraded or made trivial. The character chose this set of abilities in lieu of other choices that would have been much more mechanically powerful/effective in most game scenarios, so treating this as a sideshow would be disappointing (in-world, this is the character's main thing, even if in terms of game mechanics, the most substantive thing they do is throw around eldritch blasts).
That said, I don't need (or want) the events to take up much game time. I would be fine with reducing the ability to a set of checks or questions so long as the result doesn't feel like a way of squashing the ability's outcomes into a much simpler box. Substituting a free casting of clairvoyance for every hour scrying, for example, would be disappointing as it eliminates my ability to react in the moment while scrying and substantially downgrades the ability. Substituting a skill check whose failure results in no information would be disappointing as well since that's not how the ability works.
Of course, there might be consequences to scrying—by level 15, lots of creatures have truesight and will see the eye, and I expect that sometimes that will matter and have to be played out. That's all great by me.
