Rules on Sleep Deprevation

[priscilla0079]

I am a relatively new player with no DM experience. I am going to be taking over the DM's seat and will be running an adventure that involves a great deal of sleep deprevation and really have no idea how to go about setting up rules for it. Can anyone help?

 

[shilsen]

If you want suggestions about penalties, you can just use the already existing fatigue and exhaustion rules. Check Pg.84 of the DMG for the results of each condition.

 

[priscilla0079]

Thank you. I'll have to look there. The players will be losing sleep over the coarse of a few months....gradually. Should I do any thing not listed in the DMG?

 

[Khorod]

Hm. I don't think you'd use exhaustion unless they were doing heavy labor/fightning/etc a lot.

Instead, you'd stick to fatigue. I would have compounding penalties- like -2 to Wisdom and -1 to Int and Cha per day 72 hours. If you become exhausted, you can 'rest' and get back your physical stats to fatigue.

After a 3 + 1/2 Wisdom score in days, you should be unconscious. And that makes sense. After 5 or 6 days, a typical person will have no attention span and actual start to hallucinate.

 

[Khorod]

Over the course of a few months- A REM cycle is 2.5 hours or so (IIRC). Your average human needs 2.5 to three of these per night.

So as you drop REM cycles, the character should take damage at 1/3 the rate for losing one cycle, 2/3 rate for losing two, etc.

 

[Piratecat]

Priscilla, welcome to the boards, and congratulations for taking up DMing! A couple of things to think about:

- a few penalties go a long way. You might be better off describing awful dreams than removing sleep. Players hate penalties that they can do nothing to resist.
- elves will likely be immune.
- Arcane spellcasters are going to get boofed, while divine casters will remain relatively unaffected.
- Expect for people to try things like sleeping in a rope trick, in case sleeping in an extra-planar space helps. Let them try clever things to avoid penalties, and let these succeed unless there's a good reason why they don't.

Can you tell us your plot? Or do your players come here too?

Over the course of a few months- A REM cycle is 2.5 hours or so (IIRC). Your average human needs 2.5 to three of these per night.

So as you drop REM cycles, the character should take damage at 1/3 the rate for losing one cycle, 2/3 rate for losing two, etc.

That's not actually how it works, Khorod. A sleep cycle is approximately 90 minutes long. As a result, most people go through 4-5 per night. Each sleep cycle consists of 5 stages of sleep: stage 1 and 2 (light sleep), stage 3 and 4 (deep, recuperative sleep), and REM sleep (when you mostly dream). Deep sleep happens most in the first 4 hours, and is important in terms of physical health. REM sleep occurs in a greater proportion in the latter half of the sleeping period, and helps deal with mental fatigue.

The average person needs 8 hours of sleep to remain fully unaffected. Most people can get by for one or two days on very short sleep with few side effects. After that, though, fatigue begins to take its toll. In terms of reaction time and the ability to reason logically, being awake for 24 hours is equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Yup, really tired people act similar to folks who are drunk. Also expect irritability and poor judgment.

If you want to be accurate, penalties for sleepiness should be magnified between the hours of 11pm and 6am (or halve penalties during the waking hours.) It is much harder to stay awake and function during this stretch of the night than it is during the day. It's also very, very difficult under normal circumstances for people in the real world to stay awake for more than two days. Even a day and a half is tough.

Heh - can you tell what I do for a living?

I really like your ideas for for ability loss, though. For maximum realism I think I'd change them a bit to add an additional -1 dex and -1 con penalty. Sleep deprived individuals become both clumsier and slower. In addition, your body's immune system takes a serious hit when you're sleep deprived. This means that per full 24 hours without sleep, non-elves would suffer temporary damage of (-2 wis, -1 int, -1 cha, -1 dex, -1 con). I'd also rule that you'd fall asleep instead of dying if your con hits 0, and that ability damage heals at 1 point (in each ability) per hour spent sleeping. One good night's sleep can undo most damage from sleep deprivation.

 

[Nail]

(Speaking of sleep deprivation...I'm hangin' by a thread!.....)

As a player, I'd be paying pretty close attention to those penalties. Even a -1 would illict loud complaints. So you may want to keep such things to a minimum, just enough to gain the effect you need. No sense in going overboard, unless the players are pretty blaise about the first -1.

I'd be tempted to try other ways to get th' point across (whatever the point is...you do have a point fer this, right?), like dreams or some physical phenomena during the night.

And like P-kitty said, the lack of sleep problem does not affect all classes and races equally. An elf gets by scott-free.......whereas a human wizard is hosed.

 

[Khorod]

I come back to second guess some of my numbers, and Piratecat has already fixed me. Thanks there

I was assuming the ability loss on top of permanent fatigue, so everything would be a little slowed down. Leaving the physical ability scores out of further loss allows the players to still act, but not with much intelligence, which could make for some really funny scenes...

I suppose you might simplify the math by saying -1 to every roll for each day w/out sleep. I'm still inclined to say that once this number equals half your Wisdom score you're out, or if this number equals Con, can't think of how to simplify that sensibly.

Given a scenario where each night, the characters gain a little (10 min, half hour, something like that) less sleep than the one before... I would go through a game-week where they have those nightmares, and take particularly long in the morning to wake up. Every week or so I would impose penalties. Because loss of sleep affects you with sharp peaks and plateaus when you suddenly cut into a new REM cycle.

However, if the slow loss of sleep is not natural, but more of a sinister, sleep-stealing curse, you can probably assign penalties as the Stealer of Dreams arrives, rather than figuring all these numbers.

 

[Drawmack]

Hey guys, I am stepping down from DM for a while and priscilla is filling my shoes (woohoo I get to play 3e).

To answer one of PCs questions for her, she's borrowing heavily from Insomnia (which I know only because I haven't read the book).

I would like to play an elvin cleric so if you guys could give her some ideas on how an elf's meditation could be affected by this that would be great, I don't want to munchkin I just like elves.

I will now bow out of this thread and IM the other players on the boards and ask them to do the same.

 

[Piratecat]

Heh - if I read this thread after my DM posted it, I'd want to play an elven cleric, too - but only because the possibilities of those penalties are fairly frightening. Yikes.

I think the trick will be to penalize everyone equally, while making sure that no one is getting crippled and unplayable. Maybe you could require a concentration roll before any caster casts spells, to simulate the effects of trying to cast while fatigued. I dunno; I tend to prefer story-heavy and rules-light games when it comes to this sort of thing, just because it always seems creepier to me to be discussing feelings and not game mechanics. Your mileage may vary.

It might be interesting to have something disturb an elf's reverie long before other races find their sleep disturbed. Good possibilities there. I can see the racial memories of the elves being disturbed by something horrible, like a boulder dropped into a placid pond. That could make for a neat adventure.

When all is said and done, I'll be interested to learn more about the game concept. It sounds cool.

EDIT - Drawmack, in case you're still scanning this thread, my apologies if my comment made it sound like you picked your character concept just to avoid penalties. I was speaking solely of myself, but I'm not sure that was entirely clear.