„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.