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View Full Version : What exactly are the penalties for never eating or sleeping?



Hecore
2008-02-09, 02:16 AM
The handbook has a few reasons on why a character would want to sleep - regain spells, cure fatigue, and so forth. What, per RAW, penalizes a character for never sleeping? You could only walk for 8 hours a day without triggering forced march, but you don't have to sleep to reset it. Other then the DM saying that you have to sleep, does anything really stop you?

As for eating - I could find references to being hungry and eating, but no penalties were spelled out (as far as I could find). In fact, I could see no real reason you would ever want to eat, other then for bonuses from a Heroes' Feast, or your DM smacking you.

There's a very real chance I missed something, and I know it's not that hard to reduce or eliminate the need to eat and sleep via magic items, but I wondered if there was any rules penalizing you for avoiding the above activities?

Baron Malkar
2008-02-09, 02:25 AM
Per raw there are no penaltys even though it dosent come right out and say it. Eating and sleeping are pure fluff unless you are a spellcaster and then it merely requires "rest" not actual sleeping.

Solo
2008-02-09, 02:40 AM
There aren't even rules for sleeping, you know. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0224.html)

AslanCross
2008-02-09, 03:40 AM
I think these (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/conditionSummary.htm#fatigued) are the rules (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/conditionSummary.htm#exhausted) that were intended to represent not eating or sleeping, but the connection is not really made.

One thing that explicitly fatigues a character is taking damage from a forced march (walking more than eight hours). If walking more than eight hours is enough to fatigue a guy, I'd say that not sleeping at all is likely to make a guy fatigued at least.

Kurald Galain
2008-02-09, 04:44 AM
Technically, there aren't any penalties for being dead.

I've generally ruled that not eating causes you to not recover HP naturally, and (after the first day) gives you a cumulative -2 penalty to pretty much everything, as you feel weaker and concentrate and so forth. -1 cumulative if you do eat something, but not nearly enough.

Although it's never actually come up, I'd rule something similar-but-faster for exhaustion.

The_Snark
2008-02-09, 04:55 AM
Actually, not eating or drinking will make you go comatose (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/environment.htm#starvationAndThirst), although you will never die. Funny, that.

Sandstorm adds that once you go unconscious from thirst, you start taking lethal damage instead of nonlethal. Something very similar could be extrapolated for starvation.

Rules for passing out from exhaustion are shamefully absent.

Devils_Advocate
2008-02-09, 04:06 PM
If you're worried about it, just write in your character's backstory that, one day when he was a kid, he took a nice, long nap. Then no one can say that he hasn't slept. (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=rpga/hq/poly9d&dcmp=DDPR-0009)

This rules omission is quite annoying, not so much because some players might use it as an excuse for their characters not to sleep at all, but because there are gonna be cases where, for one reason or another, a character has to stay awake for much longer than usual, and it would be nice to know what penalities to apply. Saying that the DM can do whatever he wants is, as usual, entirely unhelpful. The DM can change the rules to whatever he wants anyway, so providing no RAW for something doesn't give him any more freedom to run the game as he chooses. It just means that he has to design part of the game himself, without even a baseline from which to adjust things.

Personally, I suggest ruling that per day abilities only recharge if a character gets at least 4 hours of sleep. That includes uses of class abilities like turn undead, wild shape, bardic music, barbarian rage, etc., as well as the amount of time that one can spend marching, hustling, or whatever without penalty.

To refresh her spell slots, an arcane spellcaster needs a lot of very sound rest. Only a period of rest in which the caster does not consciously, deliberately perform any activity counts towards spell slot refreshment. That's not even something that I'm making up, it comes from the actual rules. You have to refrain from movement, which covers any sort of physical action, and your level of mental activity has to be so low as to exclude making any Knowledge checks. Sure, you could say that the list of activities that a wizard must avoid during her period of rest, even if she's not sleeping, only applies to wizards who have to sleep. You can say a lot of things that have absolutely no basis in the rules and make no sense. But let's not.

An arcane spellcaster needs an amount of this sound rest totaling 7 hours. However, each period of rest counts for 1 hour less than it actually is, down to a minimum of 0. So a single 8-hour rest is sufficient, but if you only take 3-hour naps, you need 4 of them. This is also from the rules, but rephrased to help clarify how it actually works, and with the "to a minimum of 0" bit actually added in by me, because it's pretty stupid without it. The caster gets back all of her spell slots, but only the spell slots, that she has had the required amount of rest since using.

You might as well house-rule that this applies to divine casters, too. Having already established the concept of spell slots refreshing with rest, there doesn't seem to be any good reason to have clerics get theirs at a specific time of day instead. According to Deities and Demigods, deities grant spells without any actual effort on their part (and actually have to choose to withhold them), so a god doesn't need to set aside a particular time of day to grant spells. And if the party is questing in a series of caverns deep beneath the surface, how are they even supposed to know just what time of day it is?

I don't know when the charges on x uses per day are supposed to come back, and I don't think that the designers do either. The rules for them work just fine if a group keeps to a normal 24 hour activity cycle, but are a pain in the ass to figure out if they don't. If they refresh at a given time of day, a carefully planned outing could double the amount of uses you get from them. If you say that each charge comes back after, say, 15 hours, then a character might not be able to use an item today because he used it too late in the evening yesterday. Cut it down to 12 hours and any out-of-combat utility use of the item is now available twice per day. Per week stuff is even screwier. I dunno, you're on your own on this one.

Oh, and in addition to physical fatigue and exhaustion from strenuous activity, characters really should also experience mental fatigue and exhaustion just from staying awake too long. So: Staying awake for 24 hours results in mental fatigue, which takes the form of a -2 penalty to Wisdom, Intelligence, and Charisma to a minimum of 1, a 5% chance to fail to correctly cast any spell one attempts to cast (akin to the spell failure chance from armor), and a -1 SoDamnTired penalty to armor class and all checks, saves, and anything else I'm leaving out. After a total of 48 hours, mental exhaustion sets in: the ability penalties worsen to -6, the spell failure chance to 15%, and the SoDamnTired penalty to -3. After a total of 72 hours, the ability penalties worsen to -12, the SoDamnTired penalty worsens to -6, the spell failure chance worsens to 30%, and the character must make a DC 30 Will Save in order to keep from passing out. For each subsequent hour spent awake, the character must make another such Will save, with +2 to the DC for each hour spent awake since the first save. Elves are immune to passing out from lack of trance, but not from the delirium that results from going so long without mental rest.

I'm pretty sure that there also ought to be a rule for an exhausted character collapsing if he does something that normally causes fatigue. Eh, someone else can handle it.

Sleeping for 1 hour reduces the amount of time a character is considered to have spent awake by 5 hours, possibly reducing penalties. Thus, it takes 14 hours and 24 minutes to fully recover from 3 days without sleep. Only once time spent awake has been brought down to 0 are per day abilities recovered. A spellcaster who is not fully rested does not get spell slots back and cannot prepare new spells, even if he or she has just slept for 8 hours.

Constructs, elementals, non-native outsiders, undead, plants, and oozes do not tire, physically or mentally. I don't know when they get their per day abilities back any more than I do for magic items.

kamikasei
2008-02-09, 04:19 PM
Well, if you never need to eat or drink, Elans (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/psionic/psionicRaces.htm#elans) have a pretty useless racial ability:


Repletion (Su): An elan can sustain her body without need of food or water. If she spends 1 power point, an elan does not need to eat or drink for 24 hours.

But as The Snark points out, there actually are rules for it.

Roderick_BR
2008-02-09, 04:34 PM
Actually, not eating or drinking will make you go comatose (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/environment.htm#starvationAndThirst), although you will never die. Funny, that.

Sandstorm adds that once you go unconscious from thirst, you start taking lethal damage instead of nonlethal. Something very similar could be extrapolated for starvation.

Rules for passing out from exhaustion are shamefully absent.
And if you are immune to nonlethal damage, you'll never actually have to worry about starvation.

Really, rest is required to revert the exhausted/fatigued status, and heal hitpoints. If you avoid being any of these, and always heal your HP with magic, you don't need to worry with rest. Staying up 24 hours doesn't make you fatigued.

Ah, remember that not eating/drinking, you still get fatigued, even if you avoid the nonlethal damage, so you should either be able to eat, or rest. You can't stay without doing both.

Theli
2008-02-10, 01:23 PM
And if you are immune to nonlethal damage, you'll never actually have to worry about starvation.

Which begs the question: What creatures are immune to nonlethal damage that need to eat? :p

mabriss lethe
2008-02-10, 01:35 PM
Which begs the question: What creatures are immune to nonlethal damage that need to eat? :p

I think libris mortis has rules for certain undead and their cravings... vampires and such. I don't know exactly what they are, but that might fall into the same category.

Aquillion
2008-02-10, 01:54 PM
I think libris mortis has rules for certain undead and their cravings... vampires and such. I don't know exactly what they are, but that might fall into the same category.Generally in a case like that they provide specific rules for what happens if they don't get the needed item, though.