GM's Guide -- Anything you would like to see?

[Telarus_KSC]

I love Keys from SoY, interesting idea.

[Lys]

[Sangeet]

[kosmit]

http://lh3.ggpht.com/-OtdmRdp5b1A/U7Pjf ... 25255D.jpg

I want to see one of these

[Utsukushi]

This came up recently in one of our games, and I don't know if we're just missing it or if it's not there -- but if it's not already, the GM's Guide seems like a good place for this. Are the effects of not getting enough sleep established anywhere? I find lots of references to the idea that eight hours of sleep are "necessary", but nothing that really says what happens if, for instance, you're ambushed in the middle of the night and get all woken up.

I take it that you don't get your Recovery Tests for the next day, but this is 1) more from 1st Edition than anything since, and 2) still had to be more inferred than actually stated anywhere I could find. The Fatigue Rules seem like they could be applied, too, of course, but as they stand, they actually only talk about overexertion like Forced Marches or extreme environments -- nothing about staying up all night. Overall, the rules I can find just say.. you need eight hours. Then they seem to assume that Barsaivians are smarter than real people and would never short themselves on something so important, and that Barsaive itself is a friendly place that doesn't interrupt.

Given that everybody sets watch schedules and midnight ambushes are totally heard of... I think it might be a good thing to formalize. How "interrupted" can those 8-hours of rest be? I assume that, say, a two-hour-watch over a ten-hour-sleep-period is fine, but if you have to really wake up at 2 AM - not just for a quiet turn at watch but for an adrenaline-pumping, heart-pounding session of Fend Off the Skeorx - can you make that up just by starting late the next morning? Maybe some kind of Willpower (to calm yourself down and get back to restful sleep) or Toughness (to be OK anyway) roll could be called for?

[Marceli]

I say house rule it.
IMO it is old d&d stuff (8-hour rest to get spells), it make no sense at all for 8H continuous rest.
Just you need rest and sleep that's all

[Telarus_KSC]

Didn't one of the Horrors have rules for lack of sleep? Small thing, crawls up to you and affects your dreams, can't remember the name off the top of my head. Otherwise, Fatigue rules sounds ok (don't have my books atm, can some-one summarize them?).

[Mataxes]

The Kreescra has a power that messes with it's target's sleep. According to the rules, the target of the power (Haunting Nightmares) makes a Willpower test against the Horror's Willpower Step. If they fail, the target does not get any Recovery tests the next day, even if they got a full night's sleep.

[Utsukushi]

Ooh, thank you, Mataxes; that's a good example to think about. I'll pass it along.

The Fatigue rules say that for every 2 hours you spend travelling past a base 8-hour-walking-day, you have to make a Toughness Test against a 7; if it fails, you get a cumulative -1 to all Action Tests, including further Fatigue Tests. The basic concept of it seems easy enough to apply to not getting a good night's sleep, but the rule itself clearly doesn't; it's all about walking. (And Air Armor helps with exactly that kind of Fatigue Test, while it presumably wouldn't with staying up all night.)

The closest thing I find to a clear effect, beyond repeated mentions that 8 hours is "necessary", is that you need that to get your Recovery Tests each day. I think it's intended, but it's not really clear, that if you had a nice, quiet day where you didn't get hurt and still have all your Recovery Tests, and then fail to get a night's rest, you would start that second day with zero Recovery Tests, because they exist on a pure day-to-day basis; but we're not really sure, because that feels like losing Recoveries and... it really doesn't say anywhere.

Marceli's suggestion - "Just you need rest and sleep", seems to be the current state, but that doesn't always happen. I mean, in real life, I just need rest and sleep, but.. I have children, instead. So I spend a lot of days just kind of, you know, tired, because I don't get enough sleep. And that's without midnight ambushes or lurking Horrors messing with my head. So I think a quick clarification of how it works when that doesn't work out for your characters would be nice to throw in. There are already paragraphs that edge right up to it -- it'd just take, like, a couple of sentences nestled up against one of those to actually cover it.

(My sense is that after missing just one night, you'd have zero Recovery Tests, but that's all; adventurers are generally young folk, and I do remember being just fine staying up all night at a Con and going right on the next day. Two nights should start with Action Test penalties, though -- 48 hours awake will start messing with anybody, and people go literally insane very soon after that.)

[Telarus_KSC]

Ah, the Kreescra. My namesake Elf Archer (1st character) had to deal with one for 2 weeks. They cause 7 damage for every week without good sleep. Nasty.

I like the idea of rolling it into the Fatigue rules. Here's how I'd run it:

Sleep Deprivation: Characters who are not able to get 8 hours of sleep start the next day with 0 Recovery Tests. Characters and creatures who are awake for 48 hours must make a Fatigue Test(7) or suffer a -1 Fatigue modifier to all Tests. For every 8 hours a character is awake past 48 hours, the character must make another Fatigue Test. Roll this in addition to any Fatigue Tests caused by traveling or laboring more than 8 hours in one day. Recovering from Sleep Deprivation follows the normal rules for recovering from Fatigue.