I'm currently working on a personal revision to traveling in the wilderness in Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, and I've hit a roadblock with encounter design. Let me summarize my system and the problem at hand.

My system works on dividing days up into 4 six-hour blocks. Long rests now only take 6 hours. If players wish to long rest in the wilderness, they must appoint 2 guards to stand watch, both taking a 3 hour shift.

The trick is that the characters on watch do not gain a long rest, [however they don't gain any exhaustion either](https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/rules-game-mechanics/98509-sleep).

The problem I'm having specifically is rolling combat encounters with a party that's resting.
Assume that a party are resting and 3 goblins have found their camp and are stealthily approaching, 1 player is on guard, and 3 are sleeping.

Assuming the goblins succeed their stealth checks, they get a surprise round and the drop on the party. Roll initiative and here are the results *(here's a bad case scenario, to illustrate my point)*:

| Creature | Initiative Roll |
| --- | --- |
| Goblins | 15 |
| Sleeping Players | 10 |
| Guard | 5 |

*It's not looking good for the party.*

Because in this instance, combat would play out in the following way:

Surprise round

* Goblin 1 (advantage)
* Goblin 2 (advantage)
* Goblin 3 (advantage)

Round 1

* Goblin 1
* Goblin 2
* Goblin 3
* Player 1 (Asleep, With the unconscious condition)
* Player 2 (Asleep, With the unconscious condition)
* Player 3 (Asleep, With the unconscious condition)
* Guard, Now can yell to wake players up.

Round 1

* Goblin 1
* Goblin 2
* Goblin 3
* Player 1 (Awake, but prone)
* Player 2 (Awake, but prone)
* Player 3 (Awake, but prone)
* Guard

That's a lot of free attacks on the party, not to mention the unconscious condition is pretty nasty. Adversaries having essentially 3 free attacks against a low-level party could in all likelihood wipe them out, all because of 1 good roll (for the goblins) and 1 bad roll (for the guard).

**How can I remedy this? I'm designing this system to not make wilderness long resting a death sentence, just impractical enough that the party wants to sleep in the nearest tavern or plan more carefully before adventuring.**

I'll also post [the link](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1WJpFWYkTJakQ8y-OLu_3oTyeZ0DqQL-nL5k9N6ry-T0/edit?usp=sharing) to the whole document if people would like to comment. This is only one part of an overhaul I'm working on so any suggestions would be appreciated.