Longhaul lets you stay away for 4 days where after you fall asleep for 8 - 48 hours. The sleep regulator lets you stay up for 48 hours with only 3 hours of sleep (if I've read and understand the text correctly). During the 48 hours of the regulator, or the 96 hours for longhaul, you don't accrue any fatigue or weariness penalties.

So I've been reading through SR4 trying to glean the penalties for not getting enough sleep. The only reference to the effects of fatigue I've seen to fatigue is in relation to running. Nothing else. Can anyone clue me into the penalties?

Sleep Deprivation is handled with the toxin rules. Its in SR4A on page. 256. This is also included in the SR4A changes document available at http://shadowrun4.com/resources/sr4a/sr4a_changes.pdf. The description covers Sleep Regulators and drugs such as Longhaul.

Peace,

K.

Check SR4A.

Don't ask me how that is supposed to interact with perfectly integrated Endure but mostly that's Endure's own fault.

Wow, so basically there were no rules regarding fatigue from a lack of rest in SR4. Unfortunately the sleep deprivation only talks about how long you can go without sleep (24 hours naturally). The second half of my question, which I forgot to ask, is how many hours of sleep would be required per night? I'm guessing it's either 6 or 8.

Likewise, how would you rule on getting partial sleep? If the default is 8 hours of a sleep and you can stay up for 24 hours, but you only get 6 hours of sleep, would that mean that you would be able to only stay up for say 18 hours before you have to worry about the fatigue effects? Basically, if you got 75% of the required sleep, you could only stay up for 75% of your normal waking time before suffering from fatigue?

Example:
6 hours of sleep required per night, w/o sleep regulator: 1 hr sleep = 4 hours of wakefulness without fatigue penalties (max 24 hours awake without penalty)
8 hours of sleep required per night, w/o sleep regulator: 1 hr sleep = 3 hours of wakefulness without fatigue penalties (max 24 hours awake without penalty)
3 hours of sleep required per night, with sleep regulator: 1 hr sleep = 16 hours of wakefulness without fatigue penalties (max 48 hours awake without penalty)

I'm debating the value of having a sleep regulator. Mostly due to the fact that when it comes to recon, my character may in many cases be working solo while performing recon, and I have no idea how long he may have to be on any recon prior to a run occurring. As a possible positive note, whenever in shared living quarters with the other runners, I could always fall asleep after them and wake up before them, and they would never see me sleeping....

On a side note, supposedly in SR4A the rules for healing with the first aid skill have been altered. I've seen no SR4 errata, or anything in the SR4A errata that would indicate any changes to the first aid skill. The change that I had been told is that the rating of your medkit can be substituted for amount of damage healed instead of using your first aid skill to determine it.

I'm not sure what you mean by "no rules" unless you mean that there are no rules in SR4 as opposed to SR4A. These are not separate versions of the game. All the rules updates in the document I linked to apply to "SR4". The only reason for calling it SR4A is as a shorthand for post-errata SR4.

As regards how much sleep is required, I would for the sake of argument go with the power given, which would mean a minimum of 6 hours. For handling less than the minimum sleep, the rules say that you continue to suffer the stun damage and that Power continues to increase. The rules are pretty generous as is, imo, so I wouldn't have much of a problem sticking to RAW and not allowing people to heal the stun damage until they get a proper amount of rest. If the GM wants to be merciful, then she could allow you to "catch up" on sleep, so getting four hours means you only need to get another two a bit later in order to be fully rested.

You need to query this with your GM ultimately, both to see how your GM will handle it and whether its likely to come up.

Hope this helps,

K.

SR4A indicates a specific book which is basically SR4 + SR4 errata + specific changes added in SR4A that were not in any previous errata. Sleep deprivation is something entirely new that was released with SR4A. Meaning that prior to the SR4A errata was shown, or copies available, there was no rules regarding a lack of sleep. That is shortsighted when there are at least a drug and augmentation, if not magic, in SR4 that modified the sleep rules which were never presented. That's over a year and a half between SR4's publication and any of the early errata for SR4A to get any sort of rules regarding sleep.

Well it's fixed now.

And I can sleep quite well knowing this.

It's sorta like Alpha Omega. Items have hit point tracks just like players (though the only one you keep track of normally is your armor) and it has a difficulty to repair, based on damage [points taken * repair mod] which basically means that most items become impossible to repair by mortals before they are a third damaged (heavy armor--maxes out at ~120 repair difficulty, your average human is rolling 6d6 summed) or are crazy simple, even when almost broke (laser guns?!? which have all of 8-10 HP and a repair mod of 2, vs. a club at 30 HP and a mod of 1).

Then there's a repair kit that offers +3 to the roll made to repair an item.

But there is no repair skill nor associated attribute.

There is however a spell for repairing items, but that has its own rules (it's in fact just as easy to repair a person as it is to repair items with magic).

The Armorer skill is used for building/repairing weapons and armor, the linked attribute is Logic.

...In ShadowRun. In Alpha Omega there is no "armorer" skill.

I'm going to support this from personal experience. 4 hours of sleep leaves me a bit groggy from the afternoon onward, easily dealt with by taking a catnap.

I've always required 6 hours of sleep for an adult human, which allows 24 hours of wakefulness.

8 hours of sleep is optimal, but not necessary for adults in my experience.

I'm taking away your license to pun.

8 hours of sleep is a luxury.

This is actually something that I was looking for just yesterday in my good ol' BBB. It seems that there were supposed to be rules for it in there, but they were left out or ended up on the cutting room floor. There's even a page reference back to the BBB for them in Street Magic, under the Crank spell, but it's an old-timey, 2nd edition style page reference that doesn't actually go anywhere.

Yeah, the lack of Fatigue rules (but random references to them) drove me crazy. Then we needed them for an adventure - one of the Dawn of the Artifacts ones - and Bobby came up with the rules. When SR4A was being produced, I begged and pleaded to get them included in there, and shifting some stuff around enough space was made during the final layout. I'm quite pleased. There was much discussion amongst the freelancers on if you need 4, 6, or 8 hours of sleep to function. (As a parent, I merely laughed... sleep? what's that?)

Have to agree with you on that one,Tiger Eyes.

sleep is a rare and precious commodity once the little ones arrive. Can't remember when I had a full 8 hours sleep. ( accidently doubled up on paxil a few months ago and slept for about 6 hours before having to go to job #2. not sure if that counts though)

Prime Mover has been using a fatigue system for our games, not sure what but it has cut down on the kamikaze usage abit so I guess its working..

Medically speaking the average you always hear is 8, but it varies so greatly thats almost meaningless. Teens generally need more and adults need progressively less sleep in a single session the older they get (thats why your grandpa is up at 5 every morning). Then you have people (like doctors and soldiers) who are trained (tortured?) to function in sleep deprived states. Interestingly enough, JCAHO has guidelines that state that the maximum number of consecutive hours a doctor can be on shift in a hospital is 30, which is apparently based on studies that show that after thirty hours people start to make more critical mistakes.

So anyway the answer is there is no standard sleep length...

Mostly depends on age, for young adults they definitely need to be getting 7-8 hours in a night to be comfortable, after about 30-35 you really don't need as much. For the last 6 days at work I've been running on about 4hrs a night for all kinds of crappy reasons, feeling fine and mentally alert. Not being shot at and running around probably helps, otherwise I'd like 6 then.

As a parent myself, sleep is what you get when you're finally able to foist the child on the other parent. Unfortunately, there are some things that only a mother can do (breastfeeding.... that's about it, but it's important and has to happen fairly often).

For the thread, my personal record was 73 hours without sleep, and I functioned fine through the first 60. Then I started declining, until I hit 71, and I felt like dieing. I also did a 58-ish session, where the worst part was the no-food for the first 34 hours.

If I remember correctly, after about 100 hours you start falling asleep with your eyes open and carrying conversation, as your brain simply quits. And if you make it to something like 200+, you go permanently insane.

On the other hand, there's something that's reffered to as "power napping," which Thomas Eddison and Benjamin Franklin were purported as doing, which involves 3 hours of sleep at night, and then every 2 hours you take a 15 minute nap. It allows for much more productive time, as you end up only getting like 5.5 hours of sleep, but you feel completely energized. My wife did this for a while, but ran out of things to do, so she stopped. Now my laundry hasn't been done in a week...

Lately, I've been getting about 6 a night, and I feel slightly tired, but still functional. But I do have a 4 year old and I've been working ~48 hours a week for the last 4 years with only 4 weeks off (2 1/2 of those being unemployed - it's not the same), so being tired might just be due to something other than sleep deprivation.

It's called microsleep and can occur from any sleep deprived state, even run of the mill sleep apnea. I'm not too sure about that second part.


Its also possible they were a little bit manic to begin with.

Yes, I was introduced to sleep deprivation when my daughter nursed every two hours for the first year of her life. I decided then (well, later when my brain began to function) that sleep in increments does not count.

I read about a study on the matter back in Psychology class. The doctor that volunteered himself made it to like 214 hours, and is now permanently insane, barring the fact he may have died since.

OK, gotta ask:

Is you have a sleep regulator AND have the adept power, does that leave you only at 48 hours (making it useless), 72 hours (each contributing an extra day), or 96 hours (doubled doubling)?

I'm sure I am going to catch lots of FlaK over this, but I have to know.

(For those who wonder, I intentionally typed FlaK the way I did, because I am cognizent of the original etymology of the word: derived from the WWII German abreviation for Flugabwehrkanone or Air Defense Cannon; It's one of those many things I'm "quirky" about. Learn something new - and generally useless - every day. *grin*)

Personally I'd rule the second option.

My D&D upbringing is making me say that a doubling of a doubling is a tripling.

D&D had a very good reason for it, other than game balance (as you could quickly exceed a x10 if x2x2 = x4).

Here though, I only chose the x3 option due to the fact that the x2 option means that you get no benefit out of the second one, while the x4 option is a little crazy.

Yes, there are methods that let you replace a full night's sleep with a 2 hour night sleep and regular naps. The most extreme method involves six 20 minutes naps only.
The main drawback is that it's very easy to disrupt: you'll need several days to recover if you miss one nap. Also, even if you don't feel sleep deprivation, there's no telling if it's really good for your body.

I had the idea of implementing them in game as positive qualities.

I don't see the adept power in SR4, so I'm assuming it's something in street magic? From a D&D background I would say it's just a tripling, but without reading the descriptions I can't say.

When I read the description of the Sleep Regulator it sounds as though that augment modifies your BASE sleep period since it is physically and "permanently" modifying your brain to behave in that manner. From a gut feeling, depending on how the adept power is worded, I would say it's either 48 or 96 hours.

Of course with just long haul and the sleep regulator, this creates a very interesting issue. The sleep regulator has one of two effects. By the wording, the sleep regulator likely behaves in the following manner. Remember that the sleep regular also cuts the number of hours of sleep you need by 50% as well as increase the amount of wakefulness by 100%. Which is a net x4 effectiveness in sleep.

The body requires 50% of the hormones to stay awake, thus leading to twice as long of wakefulness on the same amount of hormones.
The hormones are 100% more effective, allowing for longer periods of wakefulness for the same amount of hormones.

The behavior of the sleep regulator is going to be some variation of the above to achieve that 400% efficiency. Now I think it gets interesting when you toss in Long Haul, but only because I'm delving deeply into the sleep regulator. It doesn't matter the strength of the hormones in Long Haul, what matters is that the hormones are strong and potent enough that it will take 96 hours before they are fully consumed by the body. So here's the question. If the sleep regulator causes the body to utilize the hormones at a 50% rate, then how does this impact Long Haul? Unless Long Haul's hormones naturally decay, the body would be metabolizing them at a 50% rate. This means, in theory, that someone with a sleep regulator, taking Long Haul would be able to stay away for 192 hours before crashing. If you take a second dose that would nets you +8 days.... you'd be able to stay away for a grand total of 24 days before requiring sleep, 26 days if you take the Long Haul does at the end of those initial 48 hours provided by the sleep regulator. Granted you would crash for anywhere from 8 to 48 hours, but still......

Sustenance, Street Magic, page 179.

I don't own Street Magic, just SR4, Unwired, Augmentation, Arsenal, and Runner's Companion.

Can't it be done now?

I was thinking, make the standard test (body + willpower) vs the Power of 3, and end up with 6 to 9 hours of sleep required (12 if you critical glitch, of course).



I'd agree with that.