[UA] Oneiromancer charges

Matthew Rowan Norwood matt at intermute.com
Mon Jul 23 14:10:30 PDT 2001


> I tended to think that the sleep deprivation rules made it more likely that you'd fall asleep than my experience (though I don't have the books handy for exact chances or anything).  At least, if I'm up and active I can easily go without sleep for two nights with little chance of accidentally falling asleep.

Me too. When I wrote "Hypnomancy" rules, I put the penalty at -10% per
_night_, not -10% per _two hours_. (Charges were also correspondingly
harder to gain.) 

And yes, I read the part in PoMoMa about Oneiromancers having funky
metabolisms or whatever, but come on: a bunch of rave kids who can't
stay awake through the next afternoon unless they have Body 120?

I propose something more like -1% per hour instead of -5%. Keep
everything else the same. 

Reasons:

1) The world record for staying awake is supposed to be 11 days.
(http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/ffacts.html)

2) I can still perform fairly well after not sleeping one night (-5% to
-20% by my rules, -25% to -75% by PoMoMa). A -20% penalty is actually
pretty crippling if you look at most people's skills, and a -5% is
pretty significant. I am not particularly good at staying awake, nor am
I particularly skilled (certainly nothing at 75%... except, perhaps,
"Bitching on mailing lists").

3) I can stay awake two nights and still operate the next day (-30% to
-45% by my rules, which would result in automatic failure for most skill
checks).

4) Casting spells for three sigs requires staying awake three nights.
This is beyond impossible with the PoMoMa rules.

And one question: do Oneiromancers get charges for the hours during
which they take stimulants? I think they should (it would encourage drug
abuse among adepts, which makes sense to me), but the rules are
ambiguous. Without stimulants counting toward total hours awake, getting
more than two siggies would be impossible even by my rules. But with
stimulants, an adept can pull a five-day amphetamine-fueled stretch to
power up for that big spell (note: three to five days of wakefulness is
not unusual for heavy amphetamine users).

-Matt Norwood

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