Optimising Sleep cycles for a party posting a watch?

[vicky_molokh]

Greetings, all!

I'm looking at the way a party of adventurers should split shifts when posting watches during a camp. I'm assuming that few or none of the party members have significant amounts of Less Sleep (having it would simplify things, somewhat). For simplicity's sake, the assumption is that the party needs to be fully awake by 0800 to start moving out.

A minimal-losses set-up seems to require 3 people / 3 shifts, and a whole 12 hours for the night camp (which is probably too high).
Person A starts Shift 1 at 2000. At 0000, Person A wakes up B and drops to sleep, and proceeds to sleep for the remaining 8 hours, regaining said 1 FP. Person B stays put for 4 hours, wakes C and drops to sleep, while C stays put the last four hours. This cycle can be kept up indefinitely, as the party never exceeds 16 waking hours in a row. Of course, 12 hours per day lost is a lot. The loss can kinda-sorta be minimised by doing useful stuff during those 4-hour shifts, but that seems like a good way to fail a Per check when trouble approaches.

When fewer hours of inactivity are available (the minimal 8 hours), the same three people would no longer be able to maintain full FP.
Day 1: Shift 1 has Person A stay up from 0000 to 0400, losing 1 FP for failing to go to sleep in time. Switch to Person B, who stays up 0400 to 0800. Note that Person A will wake up at 0800, and have only 8 waking hours until becoming fatigued further; the counter starts ticking from 1600 onward. Person B will have also have only 8 waking hours until FP accumulation begins, but due to waking up earlier it's from 1200 onward. By the time the clock reaches 0000 again, Person A will lose a total of 3 FP (1 of them yesterday for taking the first step into sleepiness), person B will lose 3 (all of them today, including the one for not falling asleep in time). Note that I'm assuming everyone drops asleep fast before the fourth FP loss is applied).
Day 2: ideally, at this point A and B need to be shifted out by C and D, giving them 8 hours of sleep to restore 1 FP each.
If the party contains 8 members, it is possible to maintain this cycle indefinitely, which is fine for a merc squad (or, better yet, two!), but not so much for the tradition 4-6 team of adventurers. With four members, days will alternate between losing 3 FP and gaining 1, which means that after the fifth day, adventurers will start dipping into ½FP and making Will rolls to stay awake while inactive. With 6 members, this becomes a -3/+1/+1 instead, which means dipping into ½FP at the end of the seventh day.
Having Less Sleep, of course, greatly eases this cycle: primarily, there's fewer hours of sleep needed, but this matters in more than one way. There's the important bit that in 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, someone with Less Sleep 1 regains 2 FP, while someone with LS2 regains 3. LS4, of course, lets two adventurers maintain an indefinite cycle with a total 8-hour bedtime (split between them equally). Likewise, adding an hour or two of resting time has similar effects.

Now, I recalled Kromm saying that Very Fit is useful, among other things, for SpecOps people who occasionally have to put up with having little to no sleep. And wow, it is indeed great for those bursts of sleeplessness:
A Very Fit character can stand a watch the whole night (8 hours), lose 1 FP immediately and another when others need to wake up (due to losing FP at half rate), then (after spending 16 more hours past sleepytime) another 2 FP. And getting 8 hours of sleep the next night becomes enough to restore half of the FP loss. 9 hours of sleep and it's okay to spend the next whole night standing watch again!

But maybe I'm thinking in the wrong direction with these approaches. What is your experience with such hour-counting?
Thanks in advance!

[johndallman]

I've never done this with GURPS FP accounting, but in other game systems, we ended up settling for 12 hours of stopped time. If you had anybody who stood up to interrupted sleep well, or saw in the dark well, you put them on the middle watch. There was an assumption that the morning watch would get some of the preparations for moving done if there was light before revile.

If you have the people to run four watches, and can stand half of them getting interrupted sleep, then you can cut your stopped time down to 10 hours, but five watches is definitely diminishing returns on that path.

If you have some people who need less sleep, then building that into the watch structure can help. For example, with three people who need 8 hours and two who need six, the two make up one track of the watches and the three the other track. The first track changes over part0way through the middle watch of the second track.

[Phantasm]

Simple method is to put the guys with Less Sleep or Doesn't Sleep on watch. Or barring that let folks rest longer before getting moving.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by tbrock1031

Simple method is to put the guys with Less Sleep or Doesn't Sleep on watch. Or barring that let folks rest longer before getting moving.

Or just have the people who have their own less critical jobs (not drivers, and not leadership) be a little bit tired or sleep on the move. That's what we did in the corps.

[Gedrin]

First Shift: Workaholic
Second Shift: Night Vision
Third Shift: Cooking

This seems to be the preferred method of dealing with things IMC.

[BraselC5048]

And I still haven't figured out how it works in the navy on the classic 4 hour/2 watch system. I know it works indefinitely, from historical experience, but it would seem to have half the crew asleep 16 hours a day. Not a problem on a starship, but on a sailing frigate, I'm wondering how that worked out.

Of course, there's not a lot of light on the gundeck with the ports closed anyway, and even less a deck below if it's not a ship of the line and has no spar deck.

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by BraselC5048

And I still haven't figured out how it works in the navy on the classic 4 hour/2 watch system. I know it works indefinitely, from historical experience, but it would seem to have half the crew asleep 16 hours a day.

I don't think all the ship's complement were on watch-and-watch. There was a category of "idlers" (including cooks, carpenters, stewards…) who were not required to stand night watches. Only the ship-handling crew (and perhaps gun crews? marines? I don't know) had to stand night watches.

And of course lookouts at any time would be less that 1% of the complement, not a third of it.

[sir_pudding]

J

Originally Posted by Agemegos

I don't think all the ship's complement were on watch-and-watch. There was a category of "idlers" (including cooks, carpenters, stewards…) who were not required to stand night watches. Only the ship-handling crew (and perhaps gun crews? marines? I don't know) had to stand night watches.

And of course lookouts at any time would be less that 1% of the complement, not a third of it.

If marines didn't have to stand watch I will personally travel back in time and knife-hand them.

Actually since Chesty Puller didn't travel back in time to knife hand them already, I think they must've stood watches...

[Agemegos]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

If marines didn't have to stand watch I will personally travel back in time and knife-hand them.

You're a hard man.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Agemegos

Only the ship-handling crew (and perhaps gun crews? marines? I don't know) had to stand night watches.

Marines stood watches. You always wanted some on hand. A large fraction of the crew served as both gun crew and sail handlers, and stood watches. There were specialists in each role who didn't do the other, or not much, and they also stood watches.