Sleeping

From Shadowrun: Awakened

"Sleeping" is what the character does when the player is NOT playing them. The character can be set to do tasks: such as heal, train, craft, or any other task listed as consuming time in hours or days in the SR4 rules.

Game Rules Description

Sleeping is intended to remove some of the drudgery of the game by making it possible for characters to continue to do things while their users are off living their life.

Sleeping happens in a location, usually based on the character's lifestyles. Organizations friendly to the character, teammates, or for-pay locations (such as coffin hotels) will allow characters to sleep safely in a place away from harm. If a character goes to sleep out in the open, they may come back to their stuff being taken from them commensurate to how "bad" the neighborhood is (based on security rating of the area). Alternatively, the character may have been arrested by security services if they went to sleep in a corporate location or in a high security area.

Also, current thinking is that player characters will be allowed only a finite amount of time per play session before their character starts to require sleep. The time is currently assumed to be 6 real hours. In the short-term, this enables our finite server and assets resources to be conserved over several sessions. It also very explicitly enforces our commitment to a game intended to be played in discrete sessions of a few hours at most. If in the future this becomes a limitation to the game, it can be reconsidered to force the character off, but for the time being remember that in the very least, players can always extend their sessions by exiting as one character and re-entering the world as another.

Technical Implementation

PCs accrue lifestyle expenses for both their time online (at least 1 day on the lifestyle for 1 session) and their time while performing sleep tasks. After a character completes a sleep task (they are fully healed, finished crafting, etc) then the lifestyle cost will no longer be charged to the PC and the character will be treated as being in stasis. This total calculation will happen when a PC is logged into the system and will be based on the last time they logged out (or were dropped).

The classic example for a sleep task in Shadowrun is a rigger's customization of a car. This activity can takes weeks in Shadowrun. While this might have been used as a great excuse in some games to keep the players online for hours, in SRA, a player would set their character to work on the task while they are NOT playing the game. In the case of something that takes weeks, the players will be able to wake up the character, pause their progress on the task, then leave the shop to go on a mission, explore, etc. When done with their session, they can return their character to the task, enabling them to make yet more progress while they are away. This will enable players to spread their sleep tasks across multiple sessions without chaining their character to the task at hand.

Other activities that could be sleep tasks includes long haul hacking, healing, item crafting (guns, computers, cars, cyberware, bioware), some types magical initiation ritual (such as fasting or thesis creation), or ritual summoning. These activities may play into campaigns or storylines, but never missions.