Chi Power Limitation: Rituals = Missed Sleep?

[Pseudonym]

So, something that kinda bugs me: it says that someone with Chi Mastery is going to spend the time for rituals by missing sleep. It's just a fact that the time for their daily rituals comes out of sleep the way the rules are written. Unless I misunderstand, it sounds like succumbing to exhaustion from sleep deprivation is inevitable, if not immediately, then in some days.

I believe my interpretation might be over-literal (and it precludes someone who might have bought enough levels of less sleep or the no sleep advantage that they *can't* miss enough sleep,) but I wanted to do a sanity check. Is it fair to allow a martial artist to sleep a full night then do his rituals in the morning? Is it fair to let her do her rituals on the move if you have something like a cart she can ride in while praying? Is the inevitable cyclic crashes intentional? Is it fair to let someone buy less sleep to offset this missed sleep penalty, and expect that the rituals will use up the extra slack from extra waking hours first before cutting into sleep time? Is it expected that a martial artist is trying to catch naps whenever he can to recover sleep deprivation fatigue?

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by Pseudonym

Chi Mastery... It's just a fact that the time for their daily rituals comes out of sleep the way the rules are written.

Not quite. While spelling out details for the Disciplines of Faith necessary to keep your Chi Power, sleep is one example of things you might be doing that you have sacrifice. The text is:

Originally Posted by DF1 p21

Each day, roll 1d; this is how many hours less he has for sleep, standing watch, etc... {also needs mystic stuff} ... or if he fails to sacrifice the necessary time...

Notice the "standing watch" and "etc"; it's an open-ended list. Your rituals take 1d hours, the "necessary time" you must "sacrifice". Therefore, you have 1d fewer hours for anything else you might want to do in the day, including sleep, or standing watch, or (etc) eating, research, scouting, etc. If you always choose to skip sleep without any compensating Advantages, then you will indeed wind up with a problem eventually.

I'd say it's up to the GM whether you can do your meditation while riding in a cart. Might be a good time to call for a skill roll with a distraction modifier (failure meaning you still have to make up the time later). "Exercises" seem less plausible in a cart, but that depends on what they are. (Slapping bowls of water, repeatedly bumping your head with a board...) The main reason I'd be tempted to allow it is the purely practical meta reason that I can see it irritating a lot of groups to no end to have the chi warrior always slowing down their travel.

[mlangsdorf]

In my DF games, Rituals have only rarely been a problem. People are rarely in a dungeon for 5+ hours a day, so there's usually plenty of time to get a full night's sleep and perform rituals. The big problem is when people are on the roads and pushing hard to get somewhere: 12 hours of sleep (in three watches of 8 hours each) plus 5 hours of rituals means there is only 7 hours of marching.

It's a moderately limiting disadvantage, especially when I started charging for meditation incense. A small fee, but it added up. Seems suitable for 10 points.

[Pseudonym]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

Notice the "standing watch" and "etc"; it's an open-ended list.

Ah, etc. Good ol' etc. And kinda agreeing with the maybe distraction rolls for the travelling. I read Chi Rituals as "meditation" but never thought of it as exercise, though that also makes sense. Doing maybe an IQ based meditation roll for the prayer/meditation part and a DX based meditation roll for exercise and/or stretching might be a compromise if the transportation suits either or both (eg, a largeish boat where it is big enough to allow the exercise portion) Failure at one or the other means it is too bumpy and he is distracted or unbalanced, and might need to land...

Sounds a bit too much dice rolling for a DF game, but might work for a less DF-ish game. For Dungeon Fantasy on the other hand, might just want one or the other picked by how the GM is feeling is appropriate.

But yeah, the day of the actual dungeon crawl, time is probably rarely an important constraint... unless you have vampires that are really screwing with the planet rotation to throw off day and night cycles.

[Nereidalbel]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

In my DF games, Rituals have only rarely been a problem. People are rarely in a dungeon for 5+ hours a day, so there's usually plenty of time to get a full night's sleep and perform rituals. The big problem is when people are on the roads and pushing hard to get somewhere: 12 hours of sleep (in three watches of 8 hours each) plus 5 hours of rituals means there is only 7 hours of marching.

It's a moderately limiting disadvantage, especially when I started charging for meditation incense. A small fee, but it added up. Seems suitable for 10 points.

1d leads to 3-4 hours more often than 5. And, uh, 12 hours of sleep? What sorts of disadvantages did your entire party agree to take there?

[Joe]

Originally Posted by Nereidalbel

And, uh, 12 hours of sleep? What sorts of disadvantages did your entire party agree to take there?

Note the part in three watches. If your goal is to get a full 8 hours of sleep for everyone in the group, without exception, and you still want to post watches, then the whole group has to rest for more than 8 hours, so that those watching can have time for sleep.

I suspect the three watches he's thinking of run something like this:

Watch 1: Character A watches for 4 hours. Characters B and C sleep.
Watch 2: Character B watches for 4 hours. Characters A and C sleep.
Watch 3: Character C watches for 4 hours. Character A and B sleep.

Or similar. Larger parties have more options. In any case, using this kind of method, everyone gets 8 hours, and someone is on watch the whole time. (In passing: I'd hate to be character B in this example: it sucks to be the one to have interrupted, rather than continuous, sleep).

Ok, that's quite enough derailing from me. I'm enjoying the discussion of Ritualism and its effects - please continue!

[Pseudonym]

Originally Posted by Joe

Note the part in three watches. If your goal is to get a full 8 hours of sleep for everyone in the group, without exception, and you still want to post watches, then the whole group has to rest for more than 8 hours, so that those watching can have time for sleep.

I think the point is that... I can't remember exactly where I read it, but I feel like it is in How To Be A GM, and maybe Dungeon Fantasy 2, For whatever hand-wavy reason, staked watches aren't considered to lose sleep.

Keeping on topic of Rituals then, what do people do with the -5 point version? I had a cleric in a campaign just recently where I got to play instead of GM for the first time; there was no mechanical explanation of it, so I just decided to make a big deal of praying at meals, before going to bed, when waking up, and explicitly performing funerary rites for downed enemies, even if time was precious... though the last one sounds almost like a specially mutated and refluffed version of trademark (always performs a polite ceremony accessibility: only in fatal interactions) I roleplayed as an old guy on the verge of retirement, so in character my guy would boss around the big strong and 80-year young dwarf barbarian (we decided to give dwarves super huge lifespans for no apparently important reason as setting background, so 80 years was approximately the maturity of young adult) and he'd resent me back when I told him to do the digging; I'm too old for that.
"You're thirty years younger than me!"

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Joe

Watch 1: Character A watches for 4 hours. Characters B and C sleep.
Watch 2: Character B watches for 4 hours. Characters A and C sleep.
Watch 3: Character C watches for 4 hours. Character A and B sleep.

(In passing: I'd hate to be character B in this example: it sucks to be the one to have interrupted, rather than continuous, sleep).

One gets used to it. After doing that long enough you get used to sleeping in 4 hour blocks and will awaken after 4 even if you're on a straight 8 shift. You get a drink, go the bathroom, get a smoke, whatever and go back to sleep for 3 1/2 more hours.

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by Pseudonym

I think the point is that... I can't remember exactly where I read it, but I feel like it is in How To Be A GM, and maybe Dungeon Fantasy 2, For whatever hand-wavy reason, staked watches aren't considered to lose sleep.

DF2 says to ignore order of watches and roll randomly for when the attack occurs, but that's a speed-of-play thing, and there are valid reasons to ignore it. For instance, in my current game, the PCs were sleeping in a hallway when a little after midnight a horde of ghosts came marching through. Since the PCs had established who was getting the middle watch, it made sense to have those PCs awake at the time. But for random triger attacks that can happen at some point between sunset and sunrise, it's easy enough to roll randomly to see who's on watch.

DF: Wilderness Adventures assumes 8 hours of sleep time, and doesn't explicitly address setting watches beyond noting that the pilot of a vehicle traveling overnight can also keep watch but it isn't the best idea.

[Pseudonym]

Originally Posted by mlangsdorf

DF2 says to ignore order of watches and roll randomly for when the attack occurs, but that's a speed-of-play thing, and there are valid reasons to ignore it..

Absolutely true. I think in a less cinematic game, it would totally make sense to use, for example, the given 12 hour sleep-by-shift scheme. One of the things I like about GURPS is you can play at the resolution of *fun,* whatever that means for your group. For me and my groups, travelling is *usually* a means to an end instead of an adventure in of itself, so it is mostly abstracted to the point of "calculate estimated speed according to terrain traveled and encumbrance. Roll a random event a day/week/month as appropriate to travel-time scale, consume 3xParty Member rations a day, slow down to smell the roses if supplies run low."

If it becomes the focus of an adventure, for examples, chasing quarry in the open, getting stranded, or being robbed blind, that is when I start adding details like measuring sleep, keeping accurate tabs on encumbrance, and contrived situations where the healer is disabled via low/zero divinity terrain that also happens to be disease infested as well.

Which is what brought me to the question of these chi rituals which, the way I interpreted it, added a lot of extra complexity to a relatively smooth operation.