[IW] Sleepout and XC-Skiing

[Refplace]

And this assumes they have the tools to cut and shape the container.
If they go in a straight-line back their also going to be on the wrong side of a slope eventually.
Following the valleys and water is the best bet but you probably need a survival roll to figure that out.

[LordMoose]

Playing around with google earth, its pretty damn flat. For the first 15 miles, it rises to 2300 feet or so from 1700, and then on down about to 1500 feet where I put the training facility.

Put a couple hundred feet of ice on that and it averages out to pretty damn flat.

Having only really seen glaciers on Discovery, would prehistoric ice age glaciers behave in a similar manner to modern ones? Crevasses and such?

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

If you play out the thing realisitically with all the Gurps rules at your disposal, everybody dies, every time (exceptt eh vampire and maybe the robot). Crossing 100 miles in extreme artic conditions on foot requires a lot more than the clothes you can put on in 5 minutes and the stuff you can fit in your pockets.

As we've discussed before, for (para)military recruits in a boot camp, 5 minutes is a very long time.
Specifically:

Originally Posted by Kromm

If they're remotely skilled troops, this will be full kit. If they need more than 5 minutes to shrug into clothes and sling their pack, then somebody, somewhere made a mess of their training. The challenge of Sleepout isn't that you have no gear (see above) or teammates (of which you have 3-6). The challenge is that you didn't get a briefing, didn't have time to psych yourself up, and are operating without a supply line. It's about being adaptable and resourceful, not about enduring the elements naked and fighting armies alone with nothing but your teeth and a knife on a stick.

and

Originally Posted by me

Honestly Sleepout doesn't even seem that hard. The recruits almost certainly have had hints about it (from prior graduates if nothing else) and so are all ready on guard for it (if I was them once I was in the part of the training cycle that includes Sleepout, I'd get up after lights out and make sure all my gear was good to go each night, if I thought I could get away with sleeping in my Utes I would). They probably would have some advance warning, ie. when the drill instructers get up early the firewatch should see the writing on the walls and start quietly waking up recruits. Personally I'd run this with one of the PCs on firewatch at the time, see if he thinks to wake his fellow recruits early. With this kind of prep they should get a substantial TDM to their Soldier roll (+2 if they prep their gear each night, +1 if they sleep in their Utes, +1 if they are awake before revelry, +1 if they are lucky enough to be on firewatch). Five minutes to get ready is a long time in boot camp.

As far as safety goes, they aren't going to really be in that much danger. They are certainly going to observed by their instructers throughout the excersize and there is going to a S&R team on standby. I doubt the sabertooths are much of a threat, the big cats are almost certainly already wary of organized parties of adult hominids. The big worries are a)hypothermia, b) getting lost, c)food. Certainly they need to have been issued all the cold weather gear that they need, already. There probably are boundry markers and/or landmarks to prevent them from getting too lost. They should expect to take a maximum of a week to cross 200 miles in wilderness conditions, IMO, so they certainly can carry the mimimum amount of chow they'd need (~10 MREs each), since the Patrol emphasizes idependent operation, I suspect they've already had wilderness survival training and are expected to supplement their meals by forage.

Really, I've done mountain warfare training that's almost as bad, and there certainly are real world military schools that do training that's even harder (SERE anyone?). Sleepout isn't logically the death-march people seem to want to make it, IMO.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

As we've discussed before, for (para)military recruits in a boot camp, 5 minutes is a very long time.
Specifically:

and

Really, I've done mountain warfare training that's almost as bad, and there certainly are real world military schools that do training that's even harder (SERE anyone?). Sleepout isn't logically the death-march people seem to want to make it, IMO.

<shrug> Change what the book says to make it rational if you like. I'd just as soon gloss over it or ignore altogether. Extreme Arctic survival is like going over Niagra Falls in a barrel .i.e. mostly a matter of equipment. It's not like you're going to be scrounging from the surface of a glacier.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

<shrug> Change what the book says to make it rational if you like.

I've just reread the brief description of Sleepout on Infinite Worlds p 10, just to make sure that I wasn't misremembering something there.

Originally Posted by IW p 10

The unofficial line between "basic" and "advanced" training is Sleepout: an unannounced midnight alert that picks up four to seven cadets at a time (depending on class size) and drops them a couple of hundred miles away from the Academy to find their way back through sabertooth country. With only what they were wearing and carrying five minutes after waking up. In December. In an Ice Age.

Nowhere in that paragraph does it say they won't have cold weather gear. They have to have already been issued cold weather gear, they've been training at the Academy for the last three months. Only an idiot would be caught surprised by it, it only happens in December which means starting Dec. 1 they should be expecting it, and unless you are in the first group(s) (out of 162-93, apparently) you should be already aware that Sleepout has started.

It really looks to me like a lot of stuff like that in real life, it's deliberately talked up and made to sound impossible, but really isn't and therefore helps the recruits build confidence. It certainly doesn't sound any harder than the way SERE graduates talk about that school ("They're allowed to intentionally break your bones!", "You have to survive in the woods for days without any supplies!" and so on).

What am I missing, that requires a change to the text in order to make the exercise plausible?

[LordMoose]

That other thread's good stuff too. Some good ideas in there.

My guys don't have a radio, but they do have an emergency beacon set to activate if it takes a 50g acceleration or a button is pushed. They were told that ends the test, but they will have to complete it at another time. I figured that they would be allowed to kit up, and grab their rifles and packs. I took each one of them aside and told them they had five mins to pack and they told me what they brought along.

The trick for me is going to get them to go slowly enough so I can have them do a few encounters and create some tension.

You do seem to be removing (or tiotally subverting) "unannounced midnight alert". Also, unless somebody hands the first bunch to go through it a list of "Things to always keep in your dormroom" that has "heavy pack with 10 MREs" it's hard to see how they'd be prepared for it.

Either everybody is in on it and "what they are wearing and carrying 5 mijnutes after waking up" is everything they need which they drew from Supply from a "secret" list handed down from class to class by Academy tradition or it's a throwaway line about how Toally Badass the Academy Training is.

I'm thinking that Infinity doesn't *want* their cadets to fail, and hint at the event during training. My PCs don't have more than a couple of MREs each, but they did all have their winter gear handy as they've been going through survival training for three months, and its not unreasonable to have that gear handy. Rifles and sidearms were gathered on the way to the helo, and the tech guy has a toolkit, and the medic has a medical bag.

[Michele]

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Alternate Ice Age North Dakota. So probably mountains.

Thanks.

My advice is to treat the whole thing generaously and cinematically. Sleepover is really only part of Infinity Patrol agent's claim to Total Badass status.

If you play out the thing realisitically with all the Gurps rules at your disposal, everybody dies, every time (exceptt eh vampire and maybe the robot). Crossing 100 miles in extreme artic conditions on foot requires a lot more than the clothes you can put on in 5 minutes and the stuff you can fit in your pockets.

I think it could be treated in a generous way, but not necessarily in an over-the-top cinematic way.

Let's assume the guys can build snowshoes. Those are not as hard as building skis or sail rigging, and don't require a skill for using them. Let's assume they build a version with crampon-like spikes.

Let's further assume the slowest has Move 4. That would be a basic 40 miles per day. With a successful Hiking roll, even at default, that would be 48.

Now, p. B351, which I'm reading for all of the above too, has rules about using skis on snow, but not for snowshoes. Let's say that while skis let yo treat all terrain as Average, snowshoes will let these guys, on this Very Bad terrain, treat it as Bad. That's 24 miles per day.

Taking into account that building a snow trench each evening will take at least an hour (making a Survival roll to find a good place for it), that's probably down to 20 miles.

So it could be done in five days, assuming they spend the remainder of the first night building the snowshoes.

That also assumes they don't need to hunt or forage for food... which would mean their pockets are very deep indeed.

Some side hunting would not only be realistically necessary once they run out of their high-tech, small-volume, high-calories bars. It would also be some fun for the players, as opposed to the grinding march.

The day they hunt, kill, and prepare the food they will effectively not move towards the base. So let's say it's six days. Allowing for minor accidents and a decreased speed towards the end of the trek, a week.

This is generous, but it doesn't stretch credibility, I think. Of course credibility is a matter of personal preferences.