Joss Whedon has a point

„I’m still unconscious, right?“

Wait, the fucker sits on my chest? And I don’t get to roll?

This is a question you will never hear in real life, just like the sentence „you are still asleep“. You hear them all the time at the gaming table.

Basically, there are only two ways to deal with this.

Players of sleeping or unconscious characters are sent out of the room.  This takes some time, and you need a space to store these players. Maybe they can do the dishes or check the barricades for midgets. But they might get the feeling they miss out on the action (especially when the checked out during a tense fight). It smacks of rudeness to send a player out of the room just because he failed a health-check. It may even be perceived as a punishment: Tommy could not keep his raconteur-assassin in the fight, so he is sent out of the clubhouse, while we are having fun, fun, fun. So, this is mostly not the way it is done: Players are only sent out when something momentous happens in their absence, or there are individual prophetic dreams, or the thief is up to something very much, like stealing the distributor cap to the party’s car. Most gamemasters in “grown-up” groups trust their players to differentiate between the knowledge of their characters, and their own knowledge. So everyone gets to sit at the table, even if only one character is awake. This is much more practical, and most gaming groups I know handle it this way. But there are reasons to go another route.

The voice of the powerless (is fucking annoying)

Players are just human (dissect one, if you don’t believe me). In a tense situation, they will want to do something, even if they can’t. Because of their PC’s heavy skull trauma or exotic poisoning.  Often it is the deadest PC who comes up with the best ideas, because he is the only one at the table who can take a step back and look at the situation. Well-behaved players will keep those ideas to themselves, only to brag about them weakly after the game, but sometimes it’s just too tempting to share, and just as the party is going to do something amusingly stupid, a disembodied voice of reason pulls them back. Shut up the nagging by sending the players out of the room when their characters keel over.

Discipline is enforced by continuous physical presence of the enforcer

“While you are sleeping, I steal your stuff.” You don’t say that, it sounds crazy.

It’s easier to steal, manipulate and be an amusing jerk when you don’t have to look at the other players’ faces while you are going about your nefarious business. It seems like the little interior policeman can only do so much without outside help. There is also less interference with sudden declarations that certain items are of course firmly tied down, used as pillows or transported in a secret pouch cut into the inside of the character’s cheek: just you and the game master coming to a gentleman’s agreement that someone has a brand new full-body tattoo and a lot less silver in his purse. In any case it’s more fun to throw around accusations when you don’t know the culprit (like, for real), and it makes for a real surprise when the paladin is outed as a kleptomaniac and tattoomancer.

Spoiling the surprise

If players are only sent out when some momentous occasion is due during their PCs’ absence, you create a heavy sense of foreshadowing, if you want to or not.  It’s like when FedEx delivers big cages to your house in late December, and you just know that you’ll be fed to alligators for Christmas and you’ll have to make a big show of being surprised/ terrified. Now imagine if big, gnarly cages were coming in all the time: After a week or two of non-stop terror, a sense of false security would set in, and then, bam, it’s the alligators.

Like in children-raising, rules and predictability (and early exposure to j-horror films) are of the essence. Make it a habit to send players out of the room for certain, codified circumstances. It helps if you have a large man cave with lots of other diversions or you might tell them to get their character sheets up to date while their PCs are bleeding out – anything to keep hope alive. Then, a few sessions in, a player wises up and makes most of the opportunity. And from that moment on, simple sleep is to be feared. Still, it’s a lot of interruptions. Atmosphere might suffer.

What about little notes?

Or SMS? Or interpretive dances behind the other players’ backs? This is very difficult to do in a subtle way, at least for me; I took a few levels in klutz (we get killer talents later on). So most players see the little paper packets going around, and most of them don’t think drugs, but  “Steve is trying to fuck us again.” Maybe if you make it a habit as a game master to pass around lots of empty notes you can drown the signal in noise, but this appears as a lot of work, and also spoils atmosphere.

I think you should send players out, but use it as a precise tool to set or shift the tone of a campaign:

• Always out: harsh realism in any genre, Illuminati, spying in the Cold War mode, lots of backstabbing, Paranoia. Feels excessive to me
• Out quite often: according to fixed rules which are common knowledge. So it could be the rule that a split party is always, and I mean it, handled apart, even if they are only gone for five minutes to check the perimeter. Or you’re always away from the table when your PC is asleep and some other PC is on watch, doing whatever.  Or you, as the GM pull people arbitrarily outside, and handle the thing just like a surprise employee appraisal – “Where do you see your barbarian in five years? Do you think your clan handled the yeti-situation well? Is there anybody you would rather see as first shield carrier than Thorgrund Eisgrund?” Nothing might come of it, but the more entrepreneurial of your gamers will use the opportunity to fuck over the other guy while garnering a nice extra bonus.
• The Golden Mean. The Correct Way of Doing Things. How The Secret Masters Do RPGs.
• Almost always in: surprises coming from other party members are not that important, twists are visible for miles and miles: high fantasy – “Look, Steve had a prophetic dream again which he won’t share with us.”          
• Always in: As above, but your group actively hates party conflicts (they also might have trust issues), or you play a campaign where all characters are part of a hive mind or the various personalities inhabiting a schizophrenic’s body.

      That last one sounds like fun.

Dishonored

The mark of a good game? Simple - shutting down the computer at five in the morning. I like Dishonored very much, and there are only minor quibbles. You should try it. Spoilers abound.

The Dickensian aspect

You play Corvo, a supernatural assassin, in this first person stealth game/ shooter. Your playground is the city of Dunwall: Imagine two-thirds Victorian London and one third Blitz era London, add a large spoon of leper colony and garnish with steampunk walkers. Corvo is in service of a conspiracy hunting the conspirators who killed the Empress, so that they can be brought to justice or crown the Empress' daughter, as the case may be. There is also a plague, the whale oil powering the trains and walkers is running out, and premonitions of capital-D-doom are everywhere.  If you think this will end well, you are as naive as Corvo, a professional assassin who will suck down any drink handed to him.

The city of Dunwall is a delight to explore. While this is not a sandbox game, the single missions take place in sprawling levels which make the most of Corvo's ability to jump nearly everywhere, and every bit of location oozes atmosphere. The missions function as a kind of Gin Lane for single aspects of an imperial metropolis in final decay. So one of the first missions leads you into a large, bureaucratic institution, a nice mix between the Vatican and the Reichssicherheitshauptamt. The artwork is spot on, as in all levels, creating a strong quasi-Victorian flair, with lots of brilliant details bringing the world to life, although every household seems to have the same two-by-four meter oil painting of the regent. As this is a stealth game, you get to eavesdrop and watch little scenes playing out between religious fanatics, and after you ganked them, you get to read their correspondence. Leaving the level, you have been the witness to some splendid world building, and each of the "topic" levels enforces this effect - at the end, I really thought I "knew" the society of Dunwall. There are lots of tantalizing hints about why Dunwall is in dire straits, although these are not expressly explored, and their moral (The Empire kills magic whales to power their war machines) is quite heavy handed. Regrettably, the grand finale of the game does not use this foundation, leaving you in an impressive location that, regrettably, seems quite divorced from Dunwall.

I think this is the greatest strength of Dishonored - Dunwall sure leaves an impression, on par with Rapture, and that is saying something.

The story itself is not that strong, with a big honking twist visible even behind the horizon.

Now you see me, now you don't

Dishonored is a stealth game, and normally I am not great fan of those, especially if you instafail a mission if a single guard notices you. If a stealth game is unforgiving, I unforgive right back. The stealth-aspect is very strong here, but there are always many different approaches available to you. This is not only true for the possible ways to reach a target, but also for the level of violence you want to employ. The levels are riddled with rooftops, canals and secret approaches: The careful examination a plaza from a rooftop may uncover surprising ways to get into the arch overseer's office, and all the while you get to listen to small dialogues, and the insidious artwork drips into you brain...And even if you fail the stealth, you can mostly fight your way free. A mission might become more challenging after an alarm, but if you really hate nosy guards, there is nothing here to keep you from slaughtering them all.

And there are many many ways of slaughter. Dishonored is basically like Bioshock, in that you have various weapons and powers, but here truly all powers have their uses in that you can build your style of play around them. If you liked the mechanics of Bioshock, you will feel right at home. You even heal by gulping down food, like potted whale meat  The weapons and magic powers (not gained from gene-tonics, but awarded by the benevolent Prince of Darkness, who has taken a liking to Corvo) are steeped black magic or steampunk, and although I have a bit of a dislike for this genre, playing around with the various tools handed to you is great fun.

Consequences, schmonsequences

And there is a moral choice system. There are two endings based on how much of the Dunwall police force you cut to ribbons. One is all sweetness and light (hard to believe in a city that just lost a third of its population to the plague), the other is rather dark, and, concerning the endings, there is nothing in between. This is a bit weak. But the missions also change a bit with regard to your previous exploits. If you kill with gay abandon, the street with fill with voracious rat swarms, aggressive plague victims (basically zombies) will be everywhere and City Watch will step up security. This not only changes the tone of the game, but also adapts  the missions to your play style. An aggressive player will have that much more enemies to play with, while a stealthy player can go for a playthrough without a single character killed (although this defeats the purpose in my opinion, I mean, you get all these nice toys, and you can stick a razor wire mine to a guy while you stopped time, so that he explodes into bloody chunks when time starts up again and you are twenty feet off on a rooftop, scratching your chin and going hmmm...why would you want to miss out on that?). I like it it that even the weepers, the half-zombified victims of the plague, are integrated into the moral choice system. The game counts them as people, and if you want a happy Dunwall, then you should too.

Too short

this game is.

I really like Bioshock

Yes, I do.

Four and a half tins of Pratchett's Jellied Eels

Timur Bekmambetov: Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter

This film has an interesting premise, and that's basically it. What if vampires - creatures defined by their ability to jump really far - were real and the Great Emancipator fought them? This sounds like something that this crew could turn into something glorious, but the idea is not enough to carry the movie for its running time, although, mercifully, it's only 105 minutes long.
There is a lot of very obvious CGI, including a horse stampede so fake it hurts and the longest bridge of the world on fire. Maybe the film would have been more interesting if it had really tried to keep Lincoln's vampire hunting business in the shadows, maybe even concentrating on the necessities to keep the war secret. Instead, there is this huge bridge, which must be the engineering marvel of the world, only now it's on fire, and the fields of Gettysburg are left littered with solid silver cannonballs. The premise of the movie (there is a shadow war against vampires, and Lincoln was part of that) is left hanging in the air (a shadow war has to stay in the shadows, or it's just your standard, run-off-the-mill war). All that remains is a guy with a manifestly false Honest Abe chin strip twirling an axe before our tech level's variant of a painted backdrop.

Bekmambetov did the fascinating Night Watch and Day Watch - look for those instead.

One and a half gloating vampires