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Old 08-17-2018, 09:12 AM   #21
malloyd
 
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

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Originally Posted by (E) View Post
The point about children was focused on the shorter term. Day care, preschools, primary schools all have less adults than children.
A game focused on children might be a bit dark, but traveling from school to a safe location through a shell shocked city has many interesting challenges.
Of course half the children have vanished too, so the *ratio* isn't any different. Facilities big enough to have more than three or four people on staff able to do any particular job, which certainly includes most schools, aren't all that badly off. Except of course for that troublesome panic.
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Old 08-17-2018, 02:33 PM   #22
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

Beginning a few minutes after there might be several urban fires as suddenly unattended cooking or heating devices ignite objects.

The chain of command in some organizations might be broken.

Localised disasters as small groups in charge of potentially dangerous facilities would in some cases be wiped out. Dams overflowing, power generation, every other fuel tanker on the road.
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Old 08-17-2018, 04:09 PM   #23
tanksoldier
 
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

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Andreas Prodromou was able to enter the cockpit of Helios Airway Flight 522 after the pilot and the co-pilot were incapacitated. This was in 2005, after airliner locks were instituted.
It took him hours to get in. The fuel ran out by the time he got in the cockpit and the plane crashed anyway.

...and you'll notice I didn't say it was impossible. So, instead of straw man arguments how about we focus on what I actually said: in MOST cases you aren't getting in, and even if you do in MOST cases you'll crash anyway.
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Old 08-17-2018, 04:17 PM   #24
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

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The fact is, if people were emotionless robots, half the population vanishing would be a fairly short term glitch.
Yup. Half the population disappearing wouldn't significantly impact the remaining population. Trucks would still drive, critical systems would still run.

Things would tighten, schedules become harried, and the crashes and and such increase problems and further stretch responses and resources... but... it isn't an After the End scenario by a long stretch.


However it would be an interesting gaming campaign, regardless of genre.
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Old 08-18-2018, 10:46 AM   #25
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

Assuming this is modern day:

As mentioned: You only have a 25% chance of aircraft ending up without a pilot. If it ends up without a pilot there ARE overrides to get into the cabin (The reason why the joyrider was able to lock out the captain is that those overrides can be canceled/blocked from inside, if there is no one inside...). So your actually talking about 1-5% of aircraft crashing because they needed pilot input before anyone figured out what happened.

There would be a lot of traffic accidents on high speed highways, but there are also a lot of tow truck drivers, that would be cleared in a day or two.

On the scale of the whole planet there would be a lot of sob stories about children dying of starvation with no parent(s) and no one to check on them, but just as many stories of people doing something about kids they worry about.

In a hospital there are very few people who need 100% attendance care, so again your looking for major outlier situations like if someone vanishes mid-cut during surgery or similar.

Communications will remain up, most gas pumps keep working, the digital economy keeps going.

The most important part will be effective leadership and command. This is an entirely manageable situation with minimal loss of life or disruption to supply chains: But only if someone takes a strong leadership roll and convinces people to focus on work and not panic.

One of the major things that could go wrong is one country assuming this is some sort of attack from another country and triggering fighting/missile exchange or atomic weapon use, establishing early on and concretely that this is a global phenomenon will be of great importance.

Then you've got about 2-3 weeks to sort things before you have problems like crops dying in significant enough numbers that famine is an issue.

On the upside food stores and preserves will last twice as long, so while there will be the occasional sad story of someone with a rarefied diet who died of starvation most people will only have to complain about the part where they had to subsist on corned beef and creamed corn for a week.
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Old 08-20-2018, 10:55 AM   #26
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

Something to explore is the difference between random distribution and even distribution. (yes, I'm a math nerd).

If everyone disappeared evenly, things would be ok fairly quickly (logistically). 50% of the farmers could feed 50% of the population. 50% of the truckers could supply 50% of the city folk etc, but that's not how randomness works. Some industries would be hit harder than others just due to luck. Maybe most tow truck drivers are ok, but almost nobody knows how to fix the sewer systems. Maybe truck drivers are in high demand or electricians or... something.

Geographically, it is also interesting. Elementary schools in the US are frequently staffed by only 24 or so adults. The odds of loosing all 24 adults are about 1 in 16m, so that may happen once. This means that about a quarter of them will be down to 6 people. Day care centers are worse, with many loosing all of their adults.

For a nuclear power plant, I would guess (based on wild speculation) that the odds of being in an unsafe condition AND loosing enough key personal that there would be a major incident would be about 0.1%. Google tells me that there are 99 nuclear reactors active in the US, so there's a 10% chance one of them will meltdown. I would guess (wild speculation again) that the odds are much better for other types of power plants given fewer precautions, and there are a lot more of them. So, if there is a 1% chance that enough personal are taken AND safeties fail, then most cities are going to have some kind of accident because many factories have their own power plant. These are less severe, but still exciting.

Other quick effects:
Communications will be flooded. Most of the survivors will be calling/texting everyone they know to see who survived. Even with fewer active phones, the traffic will be off the charts. The understaffed telecom facilities may result in true outages, but it would probably just be the "all circuits are busy" for a while.

911 would be worthless. The understaffed center would be fielding calls about "the event" in such quantity that they would have a VERY hard time getting to people who need help right away.

Group idea:
National Guard. Given the disappearance, the PCs from whatever background get thrown together and given a neighborhood to care for. "You're a radar tech? Not today, we need you on the ground. We're dropping you off from a blackhawk at the corner of 7th & Blake. Help people & keep order. Also, since Lt. Rodriguez is gone, you're reporting to him now."
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Old 08-20-2018, 11:00 AM   #27
David Johnston2
 
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

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Originally Posted by khorboth View Post
Something to explore is the difference between random distribution and even distribution. (yes, I'm a math nerd).
"
The more instances you have the closer random distribution gets to even distribution. So you might have some schools where every teacher gets zapped, but in the distribution of teachers as a whole you'd end up with something very close to an even 50% surviving.

Last edited by David Johnston2; 08-20-2018 at 11:28 PM.
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Old 08-20-2018, 11:10 AM   #28
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

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The more instances you have the closer random distribution gets to even distribution. So you might have some schools where every teacher gets zapped, but in the distribution of teachers as a whole you'd end up with something every close to an even 50% surviving.
That is true if you look at one profession. But, if you look at 1000 professions, the odds of them all being within a 25%-75% survival range is minuscule. SOME profession will have to have more survivors and SOME profession will have to have fewer.

This is what I mean by the difference between random and even. The casualties won't be distributed evenly across any demographic profile if they are truly random.

Last edited by khorboth; 08-20-2018 at 11:21 AM.
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Old 08-20-2018, 11:32 AM   #29
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

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The scenario begins like so: The PCs happen to be together in one place. Maybe they're all students. Maybe they're all on a bus. Maybe they're all in a staff meeting. For most immediate effect, they should probably be in a public place.

Then 50% of everyone vanishes in something that looks like it'd be very expensive to reproduce through special effects.
What is the mechanism? Is it completely random (a la Thanos) or selective (a la the Rapture)? These are two very different scenarios. Everyone has been discussing the first case, but the second would introduce strong biases in the remaining population, plus the necessity of dealing with the consequences - will it happen again, is it in some way desirable to be raptured, etc? Can this even be determined?

Also, do people's stuff disappear at the same time, and if so... what constitutes their "stuff"?

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Originally Posted by PTTG View Post
1: What's a game-able time and place to start this off?
2: What are the most immediate effects of the sudden disappearance?
3: Are there any character contexts that seem especially interesting? First responders?
1. Depends on your characters. As always, you need a reason for them to be together, so it could be a plane or street for random characters, or an army base or hospital or some such if your characters know each other or have some professional association.

2. Already addressed by others here. Bad stuff that would extend well beyond the missing 50%.

3. That depends on the kind of campaign you want. As a one-off focused on survival, randoms work fine. As a campaign focused on addressing the issue, first responders or military or government types make the most sense.
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Old 08-20-2018, 09:44 PM   #30
malloyd
 
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Default Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario

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Originally Posted by khorboth View Post
That is true if you look at one profession. But, if you look at 1000 professions, the odds of them all being within a 25%-75% survival range is minuscule.
Actually it's rather large. Add up a bunch of distributions and they cluster more or and more toward the center. This is why 6d damage rolls are much more likely to be close to the average than say 2d ones.

For a normal distribution (the limit on a poisson distribution like this), 1 out of 1000 samples fall more than about 3.3 standard deviations from the mean. Since the standard deviation is sqrt(n/4), the mean is n/2, and for 25-75% is +/- n/4 we can compute that we can expect 1 out of 1000 samples to fall outside the 25-75% range if the size of the samples is 4 (3.3)^2, or about 44 people. There are very few professions with 44 or fewer people in them....
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