Acquiring perks & advantages on a realistic setting

[malloyd]

Originally Posted by whswhs

There is a lot about adding advantages in GURPS Social Engineering: Back to School. Though it doesn't say much about adding physical advantages. I suppose Less Sleep might count as that.

There are enough things in the real world that claim to teach you to power nap or optimize your sleep or whatever that I'd probably be willing to just let you buy it as a learnable advantage.

No, they probably don't actually work in the real world, but they're believable enough for gaming purposes. If you are considering one in reality keep in mind one thing we do know from sleep research and sleep clinics is people are *really bad* at figuring out how much they sleep and how impaired they are or are not. Something like 10% of "insomnia" patients apparently get an above average number of hours of sleep in a week.... A program could easily succeed (or fail!) based entirely on how it changed people's misperceptions regardless of what it did to their actual sleep patterns.

[Bruno]

Originally Posted by malloyd

Something like 10% of "insomnia" patients apparently get an above average number of hours of sleep in a week...

That doesn't indicate they were getting enough (or too much) sleep though. I have pretty obnoxious sleep apnea, and before my machine I would sleep 10-14 hours if I wasn't restricted, because I couldn't sleep properly. If I was forced to sleep 8-9 hours, I was miserably sleep deprived because I was choking 30-40 times an hour (not joking).
I've also had attacks of insomnia, and I would get stuck sleeping 8 hours or less, and it was horrible.

There's other conditions that result in needing more sleep too. Notably entire life stages where we need it. All it takes is a retardation of exiting the teenaged developmental phase where you need to sleep like a log to get stuck with it for surprisingly long periods, for example.

It's absolutely true that people have really only the vaguest idea as to whether their sleep state is good, though. I didn't know that even when I was getting my 10+ hours I was a brain-fried zombie (oxygen deprivation sucks).

[Flyndaran]

I think it's more that too many of us confuse quality of sleep with quantity. And that when we "can't sleep", we really believe that we slept for at most a few minutes rather than a few hours fitfully.
I think it might relate to the Dunning Krueger effect in that we're so tired and/or lightly asleep that we are incapable of judging how tired and much sleep we are getting.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Bruno

It's absolutely true that people have really only the vaguest idea as to whether their sleep state is good, though.

I've got a pretty good idea when I'm not functioning up to normal*.

I've got mild aphasia**. On good days I can go all day, sometimes even a week without losing any words.

On a day when I'm overly stressed*** or sleep deprived I lose words with greater frequency. To the extent that on really bad days (like being awake for 3 days) I can't communicate anything complex at all.

Like I'm reduced to "I do thing, you do thing. No. Stop. Bad thing. Other thing-thing."

Which could be something like "I'll cook while you clean the dishes. No, not 'feed the cats'. Clean the dishes."


As such, I know I've been at some level of sleep deprived dysfunction the last few years as my anomia is a daily (sometimes hourly) occurrence.



* What is normal after two years of sleep deprivation?

** I tend to lose improper nouns and when it's not bad I can describe the subject (so mostly it's just anomia). When it's really bad I even lose the capacity to describe. When it's the worst I lose complex verbs and am reduced the "caveman speech".

*** Most of my stresses come from dealing with people I care about. So.... I've learned to reduce that to a manageable number. Like 2 people. Of which I barely ever deal with person number 2.

[Bruno]

Yeah, other brain problems will amplify the effects. I've got mild aphasia too [1] so I can definitely echo your observations. In general brain damage (which is what I have) is aggravated by stress, sleep deprivation, poor nutrition, etc. etc.


[1] amusing side note: the urge to form a group language, combined with doing a lot of overtime in a closed group, resulted in the rest of my departments speech drifting to mimic my aphasia (it's not like I could modify my speech to match them). It became common for the programmers to just start pointing at the screen saying "that!" (one of my more reliable words). If "that" was something really important or exciting, there'd be a lot of hand waving to go with "that!"
Other greatest hits:
"Make it... more better." (or "less worse")
"Do the needful." (Do the thing that needs doing with this thing. Used when "this thing" is a thing that breaks one specific way regularly.)
"We/I/it need(s) to make a do." (... because right now it's not doing anything)
Yeah, lots of sleep dep going around.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Bruno

"Do the needful." (Do the thing that needs doing with this thing. Used when "this thing" is a thing that breaks one specific way regularly.)

One of my players and I have both run into "do the needful," but we both think of it as Indian English, as we've only ever seen it in e-mails from India. Is it common usage in other English-speaking areas?

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by whswhs

One of my players and I have both run into "do the needful," but we both think of it as Indian English, as we've only ever seen it in e-mails from India. Is it common usage in other English-speaking areas?

Not in the UK. I'd see it as old-fashioned English rather than Indian (but Indian English seems to preserve quite a few older usages).

[Anders]

"All language skills drop to Broken when sleep-deprived" would be an interesting quirk.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Anders

"All language skills drop to Broken when sleep-deprived" would be an interesting quirk.

That's probably one of the easier (better) ways to stat out my level anomia/aphasia ("All languages are at max Accented at 2/3 FP due to sleep loss, and Broken if below 1/2 FP due to sleep loss" is probably a bit more accurate, for me).

It's really not a barrier in daily life (so a quirk is probably priced about right), even now with it occurring as frequently as it does now, as pointing and and saying "Thing need fix" often get's the point across just fine.

At least for me. Note, I'm also not a lawyer, politician, or any other sort that relies strongly on clear flowing communication for my work. For those sorts it would certainly be a more significant problem.

[Culture20]

For Less Sleep you could throw in some limitations involving medication, sleeping in a special environment (bed at home). I don't know how you would model a Da Vinci or Edison sleep cycle.