Sleep Deprivation rules

[Quickleaf]

The primary effects of sleep deprivation (along with their onset time and severity) are as follows. Note, this is from memory, but for gaming purposes, this should be accurate enough.

Thanks for the awesome post, this will definitely help!

Loss of awareness, Loss of mental acuity, Susceptibility to Suggestion

Maybe instead of a Wisdom-based skill check penalty, list individual skills that are affected? For example: Spot, Listen, Concentration, Sense Motive, and Search.

I don't think an Intelligence check penalty really represents what's going on, do you? I mean, do people sleep-deprived somehow become unable to recall information they know? Then again, they probably do get worse at searching for something (Search is INT modified).

Susceptibility to suggestion

Yeah, I think with the penalty to Sense Motive and the Will save penalty this is covered.

Hallucination

Hard to abjudicate in D&D, you're right. I just listed some spell effects to get a GM thinking.

Highly increased metabolism

Scary. I don't know how I'd implement that into a set of rules/guidelines. Increased food consumption on 3rd day? Starving starts after one week?

A couple other things of note on recovering from sleep deprivation

So, maybe the check to resist micro-sleep *should* be a Will save? Seems more appropriate for it to be a Fortitude save. I could have the -2/day penalty apply to these Fortitude saves too. Your suggestions make it seem like the rules as is don't penalize someone suffering from microsleeps enough. Should a Will save be required to be able to make a Spot check?

You should not allow players (this especially applies to Wizards) to get the effects of sleep by taking four 2 hour naps.

A good point, I'll include that in the rules. Also note that wizards don't *need* to sleep to memorize spells, they just need 8 hours of rest/meditation (as per core rules).

The corollary of this is that you can get as much sleep in two equally spaced 3 hour naps as you can in 8 hours of contiguous sleep. I have tested this theory thoroughly and can tell you from experience that this is indeed the case.

Yeah, I've experienced this too. I might make a sidebar of this in the next revision, just pointing out the phenomenon and letting a GM do what they will.

When you have sleep deprivation, you accrue a "Sleep Debt" (this metaphor is not mine)......As a rule of thumb, you require 2 hours of extra sleep per full day of deprivation to catch up.

So, a person can recover from sleep deprivation by *over-sleeping.* Thanks reanjr!

 

[RandomUsernamehmimo71]

Quickleaf, is there any chance of seeing an updated version of this, with regard to the new imput from reanjr?

 

[Telas]

In my humble experience....

I don't know how much this'll help, but here's some anecdotal information. I was in the Army Infantry, and had a number of friends go though Ranger School.

Among other sleep-deprived moments, one stands out. At one point, I was involved in a week-long live fire exercise (Bradley Table 12, IIRC) simulating an assault and counterattack. My group was the dismounted Infantry section of the exercise, and we filled in for all the other companies who had to run the exercise. We went through it once a day and once a night for five days, the last three with live ammo. We got maybe 2 hours of sleep a night. Yes, it sucked. Technically, the Army can't make you run a live-fire exercise without five hours of sleep, but rules are made to be broken.

After the second day, we started acting goofy, but we were dead-on when it came to running the exercise. It was pretty physical, moving and firing over perhaps a mile, including a stream crossing and setting up Claymore mines. Afterwards, we had a debriefing and cleaned weapons for hours, then snoozed for a bit and did it again. During the day, we ran additional exercises.

I remember laughing at really stupid stuff, and occasionally my attention would drift, but I had all kinds of physical energy, which kind of frightened me at the time. I probably couldn't have done anything requiring complicated mental calculations, and found myself double-checking just about everything. I remember thinking, "This is how stupid people live."

Ranger School is even worse. Twenty-one hours a day of hard physical exercise for two months straight. Average weight loss is something like 30 pounds from individuals who are already at the peak of fitness. Hallucinations set in during the later phases. One of my friends was in a fighting position, and his buddy got up, walked over to a tree, started digging in his pockets, and asked the other guy if he wanted a Coke.

Telas, not concerned at all about accusations of sleep deprivation as torture.

 

[Angel Tarragon]

I find myself unlike most people. I require at least ten hours of sleep and have been known to fall asleep on Friday, wake up on Sunday and think that it was Saturday. Sleeping for 24 hours when your body doesn't need that much sleep is pretty unusual, if you are in good health or even overweight.

I think the rules you present are reasonable. In my games I allow a character to be awake for a total amount of time equal to 12 hours plus an additional amount of hours equal to her constitution modifier. If the character is awake past that time she must make a Fort Save at DC 15 to stay awake. For every 4 hours past your maximum that you are awake the DC rises by 2 points. If the character fails their save, they become dazed. A dazed character can then only attempt to be able to take actions at a Fort DC of 25. If they succeed, they can last until they can find an acceptable place to cach some shut-eye.