Ok, here are the numbers:

Sleep regulator allows you to go 48 hours without sleep, and only to sleep for 4 hours regularly. Both offer no negative affects of any sort.

Long Haul gives you 4 days awake then 8D6 hours asleep (8-48 sleeping) or a TN mod of +6 to everything, though you can take a second dose and be awake 1D6/2 (1-3 days, assuming you round up). But for that, you take 10D stun and crash for 8D6 hours.

So, would you be able to go 48 hours, take a long haul and go an extra 4 days, and then maybe take another one to go 3 days, thus being up 9 days total?

And how would that factor into doing tasks such as programming or construction that are based off hours? In CC on p 79, it talks about if a character was a gunsmith they could spend 6 hours and still have a runner life, whereas more than 12 started eating into eating and sleeping and all that. If you're up for 9 days, would it just be that you could do stuff for 12 hours each day and still have a life? After all, you don't have to sleep, and that six hours difference can be the maintaining contacts time while the extra time is for eating and such.

Or is there some information I'm missing? Just wondering if the two can work together to get your time related jobs done faster, or is it better just to go with one, and if so which is it? I've tried running the math on it, and in the long term assuming you work 12 hours everry day and roll as high as possible you're looking at more hours with just the sleep regulator. But with probability, you stand a chance to get better hours with the sleep regulator by rolling low on hours you have to sleep before you can take it again. But I don't think it can effect the benefits of a sleep regulator. Unless you tweak the math in some way I don't see because it i snot working for me.

I can post what I have for math if someone wants to see it, but I think I explained most of it in the text.

I´d rule that Long Haul and Sleep Regulator do not add up for staying awake - on the other hand I might be talked into reducing the required hours of sleep Long Haul causes.

Regarding having a normal social life - no. Long working days will be possible, meeting friends too. But you will be totally out of sync with the world around you. And physical work will be limited too. The Sleep Regulator does only improve your sleep, not the regeneration of your muscles.

Ahh, but having a sleep regulator there to help shove you into REM sleep, means you are getting the top most out of your time. Sleep from 2am to 6am, put in some good hard work till noon or so, do runner stuff till 10pm, and put in another 6 hours of work. Totally do-able.

Id defintly consider wacking you with some social modifiers though after 5 or 6 DAYS awake, just because you havent had the time to sort things into long term memory. Try staying up for 36 hours, and tell me how stupid you feel (its stupid O clock!).

Actually, relatively little impairment is seen in the first week or so, barring preexisting sleep deprivation.

~J

I managed to ace two exams and four papers after staying up for 120 hours. Of course I was consuming harmful substances by the handful now have a mild phobia of libraries...

Most I've done is 5 days straight without any sleep. Morning of the fifth day I was seeing things.

Paranoia sets in for me at about the 24 hour mark. I start seeing things in the corner of my vision at the 36 hour mark. At 48, things started getting really wierd and I went to bed.

I know it doesn't take anywhere near a week for me to have some serious negative effects. I'd be interested in seeing the testing methodology behind those numbers.

A little Google Fu

I've gone 5 days without sleep, and I was damn tied. I have gone a month with just a few hours a night.

Yeah, I start seeing things after about 36 hrs. Though I did go 6 days once with only around 1/2 hr sleep per day (when I literally passed out on top of a computer or sitting at lunch or soemthing). You can still do things, but all your reactions are off. I'd give cumulative reaction penalites and some social modifiers after a couple of days.

Why do so many Dumpshockers have personal experience with sleep deprivation?

I think a lot of people have experience with it in general. College students frequently party too hard and then have to make up for it with marathons.

Gamers in particular will often forego sleep when the gaming is good. I know I've done it, and would happily do it again.

I was in the Army. the first time we were deployed (the five days) we were deployed and I just never found time to sleep for more than five minutes. The second time we were in Montana fighting some really bad Forest Fires, I think it was fall 1994. We only got a couple of hours each night, tell you though, best damn food we ever got.

My most is 48 hrs, Aced both tests, didn't have any side effects except being a total robot that could only think about physics and math equations.

Infact, I usually do better on tests where I've hardly slept, maybe it's because I don't over think it when I'm tired.

As for juggling the numbers, 8d6 will average .. 3.5*8=28 hours. so if you stay up 9 days, then sleep 28 hours. thats a ratio of .11 hours of sleep to wake time, or you'll be asleep 11% of the time (based on 244 hours, (9 days + 28 hours of sleep))

If you can use just the regulator, to go 48 hours, and then sleep 4 (The rules as described appear to say that this is sustainable). THen you've got a ratio of .0833, or sleeping 8.3% of the time. (base on sleeping 4 hours in the 48, 4 hours after 48 is 7.something %)

So it looks like you're right, just using the regulator would be better over all.

I´m put to shame with my measily 54h-record... in my case the second night was planned and the night before ...happened. Thats what drinking in combination with chess will do to you.

Reducing sleeping time under 5.30h does not increase overall productivity for me, so a sleep regulator would be welcome. (And thats from someone who can´t really sleep longer than 7 hours - I tried to adapt to my girlfriend, really)

----

Back on topic. The sleep regulator is limited in its function. You need time to recover from physical activity. What would actually help there are the suprathyroid gland and symbiontes. Regarding living a normal social life, most of your friends would be freaked if you did double shifts all weak and spend the rest of the day with them. Totally out of line.

Most of my friends would think it was a little weird, but not actually concern themselves much with it if I was acting normally.

There are people with cases of insomnia that have gone years without sleep and have no noticable repercussions.

That would be incorrect, you will die from lack of sleep. No one has gone years without sleep. Years with bad sleep, yes, but not no sleep.

Actually no.... he correct, my aunt had went for 2 years with 0 sleep even with the strongest tranquilizers. She has to perform meditiation for at least 3 hours a day, she is chronically tired... but didn't sleep. (Oddly enough caffine is a sedative for her)

Wow she should call guiness, cause everyone seems to think the longest anyone has gone without sleep is 11 days.

No offense to you, but I serioulsy doubt that your aunt went two years without sleep. Sleep is the only way certain biological functions happen. One of them is cleaning the toxins out of our blood, which only happens in REM sleep. Don't get REM sleep, the toxins build up and you die.

More than likely your aunt and all these other people who "never sleep" are doing this,

Polyphasic Sleep

I'm not sure about the toxins hypothesis, but yes, animals kept alive longer than a few weeks (about two weeks for rats, apparently, I think it was larger for larger animals) died of hypermetabolism-related causes. I suspect Platinum's aunt is getting a few minutes here and there that she doesn't realize.

~J

The original thought process was that because long haul let you stay up for those couple of extra days then perhaps for every 2 days you would have an extra 4 hours to use if you combined the two of them, since you would be eliminating sleep. Yes, it could catch up to you at the end, but where you're getting 7 extra days (4 hours * 3 groups of 2 days = 12 extra hours), you could possibly gain some extra hours from it (assuming your 8D6 rolled low). If it rolled high, you're losing time your sleep regulator alone would let you use. Or maybe the sleep regulator might return the time to recover from the crash, since your body doesn't need as much sleep in the first place.

For example, 8D6 for a 7 day period, you range from 8 to 48 hours (assuming no rule of 6). 48 breaks into 7 chunks of about 6.9 hours, which could be considered an average night's sleep for most though studies have said adults could do with 8-8.5 hours of sleep a night. So, in other words, it's life trying to tell you 'you should have been sleeping regularly'. But if you only need 3-4 hours of sleep a night thanks to your biology (or bioware), then perhaps it would handle the crash differently. If you're looking at 4 hours a night, then your body wouldn't bite back as harshly, maybe 8D6*.75, or even 8D6*.5, but those could be seen as taking advantage of some of the unwritten rules.

In a TT game, I suppose this wouldn't be much of an issue, since you can say so much time has past between jobs, but it does sort of factor in if you're looking at a whole team. If they wait for the slowest person, then they can be raising skills, doing side adventures, waiting for their new gear to arrive, things like that and the GM could say, 'The decker finishes up his program, which took him a month. In the meantime, the street sam bought herself a monowhip, the mage spent time getting new spells and the rigger stole a few new drones.' I guess it's how anal retentive you are.

And on that note, let us not forget..."You can't be anal-retentive if you don't have an anus." -- Bartleby

I stayed up for around 75 hours before I started hallucinating.

More likely, Platinum's aunt is doing this.

Thanks for the link K! I'd like to see the stufy though, as that story just says they suffered various mental impairments, but doesn't mention when they set in.

Just to leap on the personal anecdote bandwagon. Three days with approx two hours sleep and started hallucinating. On another occasion four days without sleep followed by physical collapse and unconciousness. I remember feeling completely wiped out afterwards.

I still remember my roommate zoning out, me thinking everything was fine and hitting the can for a dump. Took a look down at my camo shorts and freaked out cause it looked like the pattern was alive and trying to eat my legs. This continued through classes the following day. Sleep dep does screwy things. Incidentally, Dave Plotkin, DJ at my old college set an honest to Lofwyr Guiness record for longest continuous broadcast. 120 hours, no sleep, no drugs, lots of fun. The man owned the airwaves in Orlando.

When I was about 12 years old, I stayed up for roughly nine days. I started having full on hallucinations (things moving that shouldn't have been) at that point -- knew they were not real, but saw them anyway -- and decided it was time to get some sleep.

(we were on vacation and I wanted to make the most of it)

As I get older, it's become harder. As recently as 18, I stayed up for five days straight, followed by 36 straight hours of sleep, interrupted only to hit the bathroom.

These days, I can do about 48 if I'm kept busy, at which point I have micro-hallucinations -- movement in the corner of my eyes, silly stuff like that. Reaction time becomes negatively impacted at somewhere between 28 and 36 hours at varying times.

When I was young extreme sleep deprivation would cause me to vomit. I never did stay awake long enough for halucinations. The vomiting was more than enough to make me rest. Now I can't stay up more than 36 hours without dozing off.


So I say you should make sleep deprived characters roll to avoid randomly vomiting. A body (4) test should be fine.

I used to get that too. It was worse when I hadn't eaten, but the thought of eating wasn't exactly a keen idea. Stupid catch-22s.

i have gone 48h exactly ones, and it was like being drunk more or less.

still, not something i want to do again if it can be avoided.