Coldness, Wind Chill, and Survival

[Curmudgeon]

Originally Posted by Arcanjo7Sagi

Well, I live around Rio de Janeiro (in Niterói to be exactly, city next to Rio de Janeiro). Here, in most of the year the temperature is around 25°C (77°F) to 35°C (95°F). Our summer is around 30°C (86°F) to 40°C (104°F) and can reach the thermal sensation of 50°C (122°F) sometimes.

So, for most of the "cariocas" (people who live or are born here), 20°C (68°F) is a cold day. Our winter here usually don't go beyond that and it's around 18°C (64,4°F) to 21°C (69,8°F) in cold days. That's not counting the hot days when we have almost as much heat as in summer.

So, for most people used to this range of temperature, 35°F (1,6666...°C) would look like a Glacial Age or the end of the world. Here in Brazil we have even jokes about the differences between the states. What we call winter in Rio it's a nice day in Porto Alegre or Curitiba (in the south of the country), for example.

As far as I remember, the summer of Finland it would be considered a winter in Rio.

So... how we would deal this in GURPS? Clearly the temperature tolerance will vary according to the location from which the person is used to.

Originally Posted by whswhs

The standard version of GURPS simply doesn't. It's like the way that a given kind of armor has a standard weight, not taking into account that some people are 1.5 m tall and some are 2.0 m tall, with corresponding differences in surface area. Some details are fussy to keep track up and don't seem likely to add much to gaming enjoyment, and GURPS usually omits them in favor of gamable abstractions.

If you wanted a way to deal with this in a variant set of rules, I would suggest perhaps shrinking the comfort zone by 10°F (5.5°C) on either side, to 45°F-80°F. Then let it be adjusted up or down by up to 10°F. Someone from a cold climate might find 35°F-70°F comfortable; someone from a hot climate might think 55°F-90°F was acceptable.

Or you could do actual research, looking at the range of mean temperatures over a year for different cities. Though many cities can have extreme temperatures that are not "comfortable." Where I live now midsummer highs get up to 95°F, with occasional spikes close to 120°F; that's not "comfortable" for much of anyone.

The average human being can acclimate to a fairly broad band of temperatures given time. GURPS doesn’t have a mechanism for this as such. However, for those interested, I ran across a tidbit of information more than thirty years ago that works well. The human body acclimatizes to its current environment at the rate of 1 F° per hour. This is affected by changes from daytime highs to overnight lows and back again. When we were in Cyprus, the average winter temperatures (Oct. to Mar.) went from a daytime high of 90° F to a nighttime low of 60° F, a daily swing of 30 F°. When we first arrived the daytime highs were closer to 110° F. It took us about three weeks to acclimatize to the point where the temperatures were comfortable. (For comparison, we had daytime highs of about 70° F when we departed Canada.) It took another week to completely acclimatize to the local temperatures (i.e., we stopped laughing about the locals wearing parkas while huddling around their propane heaters at night and started huddling around our propane heaters in our parkas during the night.) I worked it out at the time and the 1 F°/hour rule of thumb came out just about right.

Obviously, acclimatization will be different if you spend the bulk in climate-controlled conditions, depending on how much the climate-controlled conditions differ from: a) your normal native conditions and b) your new conditions. However, if you could keep people in a sealed environment and raised or lowered the temperature at a steady rate of 1 F°/hr., you could have people acclimatized to a 30 F° difference in just thirty hours, or a bit over a day, which could be very useful if you have the facilities for it.