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08-17-2018, 09:12 AM | #21 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario
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08-17-2018, 02:33 PM | #22 |
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: New Zealand.
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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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Waiting for inspiration to strike...... And spending too much time thinking about farming for RPGs Contributor to Citadel at Nordvörn |
08-17-2018, 04:09 PM | #23 | |
Join Date: Feb 2005
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Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario
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...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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08-17-2018, 04:17 PM | #24 | |
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: 100 hurricane swamp
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Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario
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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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08-18-2018, 10:46 AM | #25 |
Join Date: Dec 2006
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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. |
08-20-2018, 10:55 AM | #26 |
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Denver, CO
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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." |
08-20-2018, 11:00 AM | #27 |
Join Date: Dec 2007
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Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario
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. |
08-20-2018, 11:10 AM | #28 | |
Join Date: Aug 2007
Location: Denver, CO
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Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario
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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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08-20-2018, 11:32 AM | #29 | ||
Join Date: Mar 2010
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Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario
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Also, do people's stuff disappear at the same time, and if so... what constitutes their "stuff"? Quote:
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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08-20-2018, 09:44 PM | #30 | |
Join Date: Jun 2006
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Re: What if half of everyone dissappeared? Building/Gaming a Rapture Scenario
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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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