How much sleep is required per night?

[Stroess]

Hi,

I was wondering if it said anywhere how much sleep is required per night?  What are the penalties if the players choose not to sleep?

Any thoughts / advice would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks!

Stroess

[Blankbeard]

Characters need 8 hours of sleep to recover attribute damage or soul drain. They lose a grade of fatigued for every hour of sleep.

As far as staying up, I don't think there are specific penalties.  I'd say a character who isn't getting at least 5 hours of sleep a night on average is going to be taking some extra stress damage. 

Apparently the record for staying awake is 11 days. I'm tempted to say that after 12 hours of being awake, 1 point of stress per hour is appropriate.  Maybe call for a saving throw versus stress damage every 12 hours.  Even if you miss the first five saves, you're still able to stay up 3 days.

If Mythbusters is to be believed, catnaps make it easier to stay alert at least for a day or two.  I guess the real question is why are the players not sleeping?  If it's a heroic reason, let them stay up for a week and only make saves/resolve checks when it's important.  If they're just being silly pile the stress damage on until they run for the covers.

[MilitiaJim]

I read about an Army test on some Spec Ops guys (an entire team of Special NPCs):  They let them get their Army minimum four hours of sleep per night, and ran tests and such during the day.  After three days they lost about 10% of their muscle memory, but almost 70% of cognitive capacity.  When they got dropped in a simulator, they couldn't tell the innocent villagers from the bad guys shooting at them, so they waxed the whole village.

[TheVastator]

hey Blankbeard, as stupid it might sound, wouldn't it better to give them subdual damage, hence leading to Fatigued?
I don't really see why a lack of sleep should make you run away scared

[Blankbeard]

Heh.  Yeah, fatigued fits better thematically but you can remove a grade with an hour of sleep.  So the PCs can operate 23/7 as long as they sleep for an hour when they fail a save.

I think if you wanted to be realistic, you'd give both stress and subdual.

[TheVastator]

unless you state that those particular Fatigued level won't go off until a full night of sleep!

[Stroess]

Hi,

Thanks for all the input.  I'm thinking of the following:
- 6 hours of Sleep are required per night.
- After missing the required sleep in a 24 hour period, make DC 15 (+1 per previous Save) FORT check or gain a level of Fatigue.
- Repeat roll every additional 6 missed hours.
- Fatigue cannot be removed until getting a full 6 hours of sleep.  Then, still need to spend the time to actually remove the Fatigue level.

Thanks again!

Stroess

[Krensky]

Well, for refrence:

Sleep Deprivation
A character may stay awake for up to 24 hours without effect. Thereafter, he becomes fatigued and must make a Fortitude save (DC 15 + 1 per previous save) at the start of each 24-hour period without at least 4 hours’ sleep. With failure, the character falls unconscious for 1d4+4 hours.

Note that fatigued wasn't a graded condition in SC2.0.