Okay, so my biggest problem isn't with openbsd. It's my battery being old, inconsistent, and not giving much more than an hour of time to work with. So, I tested the apm options and here's what I came up with:
Hibernate:
looks like it works, but fails to boot at unhibernating and marks the filesystems unclean.
Standby (Light Sleep):
works, but I put the system to sleep and pulled the battery, fsck ran automatically, yet complained significantly.
Suspend:
This is the default function on closing the laptop lid and incidentally works the best - recovers the quickest after removing the battery. Fsck still must do it's thing, but it is a far less invasive affair.
My cron job checks apm -m every nine minutes, at <20 minutes it will suspend and at < 10 it will halt with a five minute warning.
Ideal I think.