Atmosphere

I post this as something of a humour, wishing to be clear at the outset that I'm not serious.  Some might think I am.

Just prior to my long illness of nearly two months, my partner Tamara and I acquired a rather sophisticated treadmill, to keep us company in our old age when sidewalk cracks and curbs lie malevolently in wait for our benign footfalls.  Using this, I've considered a D&D rule that argues for the players to travel any significant distance in my game world, say more than a mile, then one or more members of the party must mount the treadmill to aid in covering the distance.  I imagine some ratio is reasonable, say 1:20, so that if the party would travel 20 miles, then someone must walk 1 mile on the waiting mill.  A moderately brisk pace could manage this in about 20 minutes ... and of course any distance, of say 400 miles, would definitely be memorable to the tag-team group of players doing their time, that they'd certainly hesitate before setting out across my game continent.

This puts me in mind of other possibilities.  For example, if it's evening in the game world and not day, then the party should be limited to forms of light created by physical candles and actual oil lamps by which to read their character sheets — and underground when in a dungeon, also — with all the electrical lights in the room suspended.  Arguably, a small portable LED could be used if the character were to cast a bluelight cantrip, preferably a blue one, and the overhead chandelier turned on if someone were ready to expend a light spell.  Obviously, the duration of these would be limited by my phone alarm.  Naturally, the player characters should be billed the correct spoilage on burning candles and lanterns.

And this could also be applied to the food being eaten by the party during game time.  Before bringing a dish or bowl of anything to the table, a set amount of copper or silver coins would have to be expended from the character's sheet to cover the cost.  After all, characters must eat ... if the players are made hungry by the taste of adventure, it stands to reason the characters must be also.  So long as the money were paid up front, the players could then imbibe at will.

The representation of weather would have it's difficulties.  I could hardly represent rain at the D&D table, except to perhaps spritz the players as they walked on the treadmill.  Certainly, if I said as a DM that it looked like it was about to rain, there'd be considerable activity at once for players to rapidly slip their laptops and paper sheets into waterproof containers ... though naturally I have no plans to soak my living room on a bi-weekly basis.  I could open all the windows in the house to effect a December weather day in Romania, but no doubt the pipes would freeze even in a few hours.  I can't help thinking this an unrealistic approach to providing the "feel" of adventure.  Getting summer temperatures is far easier:  ten persons in a 200 square foot room, while ample for a 90-inch gaming table and chairs, nevertheless manages to produce temperatures in the '90s by ten p.m.  This is, no doubt, due to all the hyperactivity, the higher brain functioning, the occasional object hurled at the DM in lieu of a polite response to bad puns and so on.  Yet as I wrote in the last post, it can't always be balmy in the game world.

It might be interesting to require players to bring along bedrolls, to roll them out on the floor at the start of every evening in the game's timeline, only to have to roll them up and again while breaking camp some five or ten minutes later — but some might find the process tedious after several runnings.

Which, I admit, I find those people who feel the need to create "atmosphere" with costumes or decorations.  If we're going to insert physical applications into the imagination of the game, why stop at a plastic sword, which can only get in the way of another player's donuts.

Though it doesn't hurt to give time and thought to things we ask player characters to do, such as travel great distances or eat constantly over a campfire.  Some actual sense of this is necessary, else we're bound to cease thinking of the player characters as biological entities rather than the bits and bytes of our self-mage graphic images.  Travel and survival are far more unpleasant and aggravating than we suppose.  It doesn't hurt to remind players of that, which is why I've written the post.  At the same time, we don't have to get silly about it.

Lest we forget its a game.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide. 

Bridge to a Present

As a boy, I remember my parents getting progressively more involved with a neighbourhood bridge club ... that is, the card game.  This consisted of some two score player teams, mostly couples, with games organised at private houses on agreed-upon nights.  How it worked was thus; using a physical bulletin board, or this heavy plastic-and-metal object called a "phone," as a host you'd try to organise just eight couples for an evening from the available much-larger pool.   Eight couples made four tables; and most people in my parents' monetary bracket could easily afford a set of four folding card-tables.  My parents stacked theirs next to the washing machine.

If you didn't wish to host, you could put your name down on the board and get yourself invited to someone else's house.  My parents would play weekly and about once every six weeks (though not in the summer), they'd host their own game.

The preferred version that my parents played still is called "duplicate bridge."  Imagine, if you will, four tables where the hands are pre-dealt before anyone sits down.  Each hand is put in a sleeve, which is ready for the players when sat.  Then the hand is played, the score is counted, and the original hands are replaced into the sleeves for the next players.

Imagine, if you will, four tables arranged in a manner that we'll call East, South, West and North.  I'm going to use Anglo-Christian names here, because this was the 1970s and, sorry, everyone was AC.  So imagine the Randalls and the Johnsons are playing at the East table.  At the south are the Holts and the Brimsmeades; at the west are the Bolters and the Paxmans; and at the north are the Nicheforucks and the Williams.

So all four tables play their pre-dealt hands.  Get ready, because this gets complicated.  Here's a diagram, if it helps.

From each table, on the second round, the green couples all move counter-clockwise, while the tan couples move clockwise.  To the table where the Johnsons have just played the Randalls, the Holts arrive from the south and the Williams arrive from the north.  See, the idea is that, eventually, each couple plays at all four tables (not seeing the same hand twice), and at no time do the same couples ever play against each other.  Here's a diagram for the second round of play.

At this point I start to get confused.  For the third hand, if the Johns keep going clockwise and the Randalls counter-clockwise, they'll play each other again; so instead, the tan couples continue going clockwise and the green couples jump across the compass, from north to south, south to north, east to west and west to east.  That is, the Holts and Nicheforucks switch, as do the Bolters and the Randalls.  Which gives this layout:

Confused beyond all reason?  Yeah, me too.  It takes adults to invent a system like this.  In the end, I couldn't figure it out.  I end up with four couples all shifting tables and having to play each other again.  The duplicate bridge rules I could find online are all for more than four tables at a time ... so I can't say for a fact this is how my parents and their club did it.  I was nine.  And in bed.  Under threat of extreme punishment, because this was the 1970s when parents were still allowed to beat their children.

Anyway, I'm getting caught up with details.  My failure to make sense of the dance aside, I went through this process to give a feel for the dance that occurred after each round of play.  All together, sixteen people get up, go the bathroom, get drinks, smoke (right there in the living room, because that was also expected) and otherwise talk about the oil crisis or what a bunch of twits those Liberal bastards were under Trudeau.  That is, the other Trudeau, the present-day one's father.

Laying in bed, not sleeping — of course — I could hear the shifts being made.  I listened to a room of adults laughing, falling quiet, laughing, falling quiet, in a familiar routine.  Without music playing, because they didn't.  Bridge nights were always a Friday.  They lasted until midnight, and many's a time I remember my parents coming in after midnight when going to play at someone else's house ... not drunk, at least not that I could tell.

But on a Saturday morning I'd get up early (I always did, the best cartoons were on early) and find that my parents were too tired to clean up.  That was rare; they were usually demons for a clean house and I'd get up and the living room would be pristine, my father having done it before going to bed.   But sometimes, nothing was done.  The folding chairs were still in place, the ashtrays full of butts, wine-glasses still with a swallow of vintage in them.  Those weren't my first taste of wine (we were allowed a tiny eggcup-sized sip on Christmas), but they were a taste I had from time to time.

Bridge was not just a game.  It wasn't merely social.  People cared about testing their skill against one another, which is the purpose of duplicate bridge.  The winner (and there were door-prizes in private homes in those days, usually a bottle of something but it might be other things) was the couple that scored best playing the same hands.  Skill mattered.  Performance was measured in points.

If all they wanted to do was just play bridge, they could have moved round the room and dealt new hands with every round.  Apparently, that wasn't satisfying enough.

Now, I could say something about how casually those folks drank while playing cards, which nearly everyone does, now as then ... and how infantile it is to find some brands of people muttering that, absolutely, D&D shouldn't be played while *gasp* drinking!  But as it happens I don't drink during D&D.  I don't care if others do, but they don't either.  Not because it's wrong — I mean, seriously, is there some sort of accident that happens involving dice, pencils and a miniature I'm not aware of?  But because we want our heads about us.  It's a thinking game.

Moreso than bridge, I guess.

I think rather I want to highlight any sense that D&D isn't reality, or that reality isn't D&D.  Gathering a table to play, I'm not running a group of "characters" or that of a fantasy realm.  I'm employing those tropes to create an unusual set of problems which a circle of humans undertake to solve.  As a DM, the act of stringing words together to convey a scene, or extrapolate on a player's action, is honest work that takes effort and skill to do well.

Managing a player demands a host of other skills, from handling and explaining rules to lifting the spirits of individuals who are having a bad night — sometimes from the dice and luck, and sometimes because they lost their jobs just two days before the game.  It's admitting that we're wrong and giving ground when that's called for, and standing on a line and not taking one step back when a point needs to be made.  It's giving a "good game," but it's also not selling the game's cow when milk's going to be wanted on another day.

I don't do these things in a "fantasy world."  My player may want some terrific piece of bling that could be used to smash a host of enemies, and I may be willing to let that happen — but every minute I've got to guage in my mind what the consequences will be for me, the game, the player, the other players and what sort of games I'll be running to ensure a challenge still exists.

In bridge, the cards do most of the work.  The order of cards provide an umpty-upt million combinations that keep the game fresh, at least for bridge players, but when running the game, I am the cards.  And it's foolish to think that responsibility isn't very real when handling both long-time and new players.

It urks a little, then, to be told I take the game "too seriously," when that comes up now and then.  What I take seriously are my friends — their respect, their approval, their sense of satisfaction and their unavoidable life-driven difficulties, whatever those are.  Asking me to "relax" or "take it easy" means, to my stupid ears, like I'm being told not to give as much as I can to my friends, who deserve every drop.

This is no doubt because of how seriously my parents took bridge night.  When the game was "at home," dinner was early, the dishes were done early, the living room's set up was sacred, and woe-betide any child who was seen when the doorbell rang with the first guests.

Now, obviously, that sounds odd to the modern sensibility.  Lest anyone be uncertain, I don't ascribe to any of the nonsense my parents did.  My players all knew my daughter when she and I were both much younger, and naturally my grandson knocks everyone's elbow during games now.  He moves from lap to lap, begs candy, sometimes delays a running all by himself and I don't mind.  I'm only speaking of how the event of game play was treated in my childhood, though the game was different.

It can't be coincidental.

_____

If you wish to comment, please write questions, ideas or opinions to alexiss1@telus.net and they will be posted on Saturdays.  Feel free to introduce new subjects or present your own work. 

If you wish to make a donation to Patreon, it will be greatly appreciated and help with costs for illustrating the Streetvendor's Guide. 

Getting Started ...

The new book is taking a great deal of my time, draining it away from the wiki and this blog.  It being Saturday, I'll take some time to explain what's gone on this last week, which has flown by.  I'm 11 days into the book's writing, with 14 pages written ... dense pages, 8x11 in size and ten-point font.  Managing a page a day is comfortable and practical; the time commitment is some 2 to 4 hours each day.  This goes by in a state of flow; a finger snap and it's into my dinner time.  I feel like I've spent the last week being shot out of a cannon.

Ran D&D last night.  The players achieved their goal of plundering the lost Portuguese treasure ship that had escaped with the Portuguese Royal Family in 1580, when Portugal fell to Spain.  This ran over 1,000,000 gold pieces and experience.  Every person in the party went up a level, including the ranger that was 9th and is now 10th, and the druid that was 11th and now 12th.  The players chose not to plunder the whole ship.  Two near TPKs and a whole lot of nasty left, they settled for the first grab and decided they were done with the underwater adventure and ready to return to the above world.  That was the end of our last running.

Last night was all record-keeping and accounting.  Everyone wanted access to the market place (Las Palmas in the Canaries); they had their character stats and sage knowledge to update; they had all the usual questions to ask and plan-making to do.  Nothing was firmly decided, except their intention to return to Europe.  During the evening, the players themselves raised the discussion of "Is it worth it to spend a whole running doing bookkeeping."  The answer was overwhelmingly YES ... followed by admonitions for people who play such shallow games they don't think any approach is needed towards building up the character's livelihood and personal reach.  After all, if we're not going to build anything with the money, what the fuck difference does it make if we're 9th level or 10th?

Today, I'm working on descriptions and pricing for tree nuts.  Then it'll be crops for farming cloth fibres (cotton, hemp, jute, sisal, ramie, etc.) ... then vegetables and tubers.  I need to calculate the cost to hire farmhands and fruit pickers.  Then it's into livestock, with sections on horses, cattle, sheep, goats and pigs, followed by fowl, donkeys, mules, elephants and other various creatures.  Then fishes.  This is a long haul, and should take me much of February ... but once the animals are done I'll be in a position to work on complex foodstuffs, since I'll have prices for what's grown or raised on farms.

In the distance after that is cloth and clothing, then wood products, with the concommitant sections on vehicles and ships.  Then stone and building materials, construction rules, followed by chemical products like perfume, paint, lamp oil and what else.  Then, finally, after all that's done, I can sink myself into the horror that is metallurgy and metalwork.  That, then, would be the whole book.

This'll be well over 2,000 products.  The size, at the going rate, is going to be big.  I'm operating on a principle that the final product will cost 50 cents a page.  I'm considering the practicality of drawing a line at 200 pages and calling it "volume 1," if need be.  I really have no idea how big the work is going to be.  I only know that I don't want to hold back.  If I want to use 45 words to describe "gooseberries," then I will.  Many things, much more complex, will need many more words than that.  I want to give it all as much verbiage as it deserves.

One page a day.  I just need to keep myself in a good state of mind, to feel comfortable working and to feel assured that I'm not going to quit, as I have with so many projects.  Those failings haunt me ... as they haunt any writer.  Thankfully, much of the head-and-design work has been done.  Readers who have seen my pricing tables know exactly how big they are, and how many things they include.  Those tables are the crutch I need to hobble my way home.

Okay.  Post done.  To work.

Boardgames & D&D

I was asked by ViP about the continuity in behaviours and social dynamics between board games and D&D.

There are obvious ones, starting with sore losers.  These are people who feel their personal worth is determined by the outcome of a game, equating their capability of winning with their competency or value as a human being.  It has to be understood that the connection is taught.  It arises out of family members or friends gloating over their wins or mocking their siblings for losing, which is a memory that can last the rest of a person's life — the pattern is at it's worst when the mockery is condoned by parents and authority figures.  In my childhood, this abuse was so common with boys that examples can be found on television shows and movies from the 1960s and 70s ... where the abuse is depicted as a positive thing.  Arguments like "it will make him a man" and "it'll give him motivation to win" were seen as good parenting.  If your parents are good people, just imagine the shit they had to overcome.

In D&D, the "incapable" loser manifests as envy; an inability for a player to hold themselves accountable for a mistake — and thus accusations against other players for not holding up their end; outbursts of rage at a bad die roll; calls that the game is "unfair" when someone else rolls a better character or succeeds more commonly in combat, and disappointment at not getting the character class the player wanted.  Listening and catering to this behaviour, effectively ennobling it, has led to die matrixes to determine character class abilities, safe cards for game play so that no one is made uncomfortable, fudging dice to make sure than everyone "wins" and a host of other design changes that have been baked HARD into 5th edition ... and ultimately into a whole generation of players.  This is the psychological backlash that arose out of the 80s and 90s to the poison described in the above paragraph ... and it is just as bad, in reverse.

Hopefully, boardgames can teach children how to lose without losing becoming a traumatic memory — either because the loss is minimized, thus crippling the child by creating a sense of constant primal entitlement, or because the loss is maximized, thus crippling the child by creating low self-esteem and a fear of taking responsibility.  The child that kicks over a checkerboard will grow up to rage-quit a D&D game ... just as the child who mocks a loser will grow up to chuckle and laugh when someone rage-quits their game (see the same clip).  The push at the end is encouraged by the DM's response ... giving insight to a combination of different things going on:  the paladin being told how to run his character, the paladin's obvious feeling of helplessness; the paladin's poor self-esteem, the sneering indifference of both the DM and the yellow-jacket guy, the total lack of empathy from any of the players, including the DM, when the paladin gives up, the paladin's cringing response after the push, the insult about whether the paladin is "retarded," the continued smiles and chuckling of the other players through the confrontation, the "asshole" insult, the DM's denial that he's an asshole, the DM returning the insult with "you're a fucking weirdo" ... it's all a wonderful example of an extremely toxic space with extremely toxic people.  Made all the better by someone getting their jollies by posting it on Twitch.

Here is another example, in the reverse.  Angry player wants to increase his chance to hit, finds himself DM'd by the DM (who can't take his pen out of his own face), and DM'd by the player across the table, and who then has his space violated by the player on his right, who snatches up the Angry player's die.  Of course the angry player feels entitled ... but is he necessarily an "angry" person, or has this browbeating been going on all night?  We may think he should "chill," but perhaps he's been doing that for the two hours before the 33-second clip is shown.

As children, when we're ready to start thumping on our friends because the threshold between tolerance and violence is pretty low, we learn NOT to fucking touch other people's armies in RISK, or other people's racing car in Monopoly, or the bank, or other people's D&D dice.  I remember when I was eight I had a drag out fight in my friend Kevin's basement over a RISK game that one of us was losing; it went sort of like this.  I don't remember who threw the first punch or why ... but it didn't end my friendship.  It clarified where the boundaries were.  When someone grows up to be 18 and they still don't know not to touch other people's stuff ... well, I can only say, I hope that guy doesn't find himself working on a job site, in a restaurant or joining the army.  I've played with ex-military who would have, spontaneously and without thinking, broken the kid's arm for that.

Politeness didn't originate socially by everyone agreeing to be sweet and kind; but by an inherent understanding that you WILL be sweet and kind on that side of the boundary or you'll lose an arm.  I grew up learning this from my vicious, selfish, self-righteous but extremely polite Russian and German family members ... who had to be polite with each other despite all those qualities.

Moving onto cheaters.  Much of this has to do with the sore loser problem, taken to extremes.  "I can't bear to win, so I'll cheat to make sure I do."  By and large, cheaters fear conflict; though maybe you haven't caught one, cheaters have been caught before, and probably often, since cheating is a compulsive behaviour.  Cheaters tend to avoid intimacy — again, because letting someone behind the wall increases the likelihood you'll see what they do there.  Cheaters in D&D especially don't like what business calls "quality assurance."   They don't like to prove their character's possession of things or how much experience their character has ... and will usually use the "privacy" argument I've just made about dice to protect their character sheet from a DM.  These are the same kind of people who hold their monopoly money in a single stack, habitually in their hand, or like to add armies to their RISK territories in a glob rather than one at a time.

The principles of performance magic are built on tricking the senses into being able to cheat you ... obstensibly for the purpose of entertainment, but there are more than a few magicians in stir who realized that the skills that enable them to perform magic will also help them lift your wallet.  For an ambitious player of any game, there are many, many ways to cheat.  There are no sure-fire ways to guarantee that one of your players isn't slyly cheating from time to time ... though the player who rolls six 1s in a particular game night probably isn't.  [who knows?  It could be a set-up; that's how cons work].

It's strange to me that people would cheat in D&D, since the game isn't about "winning."  By the time I'd played a year of D&D I'd already met several examples.  After all, I'm talking other 15 y.o. kids, not experts along the Las Vegas strip.  I'd learned to watch my relatives for cheating; my uncle Igan had a nasty habit of counting four holes in cribbage when he pegged three.  He was a huge, leathery, terrifying farmer with hands like a catcher's mitt, but even when I was eight, if I called him on cheating he'd shrink and apologize, counting accurately.  Usually, my aunt could hear us playing.

Truth be told, cheating in D&D as a player will not help that much.  I don't randomly ask to see a players' character sheet ... but eventually they'll have to roll a saving throw for every item they're carrying due to a breath weapon or a high fall.  For those times, I'll definitely be looking over the player's shoulder as they roll down the list.  I insist on all dice being rolled in front of at least one other witness, and it's not usually me ... but if I want to see a roll because it's a life-or-death roll, then I'm going to get up and watch that puppy hit the table.  So for all the cheating any player might do, sooner or later, they're still going to roll or die, when I'll be watching.  They might hit a little more often; they might level a little more sooner; they might have a bit more gold than I gave them — but unlike a card game or a chess, the other players and I don't "lose" by their cheating.  At worst, its a pathetic bad habit they ought to shake before getting into a situation with not-nice people, where their habit gets them thrown out of a fast-moving car.

Ah, then there's gamesmanship.  This is the art of winning games by being a total fucking dick.  I have played everything from golf to football to chess to tiddly-winks with people like this, in my family and out, but I don't have this problem with D&D.  See politeness, above.  I expect my players to wait patiently for their chance to throw dice in combat, I expect them to listen politely to other players, I do not allow harassment of a player (except by an occasional taunting NPC, and the players get to kill those) and I don't trust anybody who commits an infraction against protocol more than once in the same way, despite being told to stop doing it.

This is why I have rules like, "no one throws a die until the DM says its time."  I did my years of play where players would roll a die out of turn, get a high number, then pout and complain and moan that they didn't get to keep the roll in spite of rolling it out of turn.  Note that if they're rolling it out of turn, everyone else is distracted by watching the legitimate roller, so who the hell knows what was really rolled?  And even if they do, it creates a lot of negative energy around the table when a player has to be disappointed because they really did roll a critical ... which no, they can't keep.  Rulez is Rulez.  Everybody abides by the same ones and everybody sucks it up.   Nobody, but nobody, rides for free.

I get exactly how that makes me sound like a "miserable bastard."  I'll remind the Gentle Reader that we all thought the teachers were miserable bastards when they forced us in line ... which they did for good reason, because if you don't force 35 kids in line, you get chaos and nothing gets learned.  I'm only a miserable bastard DM when a particular player feels the protocols don't apply to him.  When there are protocols, and the players get used to them, and accept them, and recognize why they exist, they're just as annoyed as me when someone bulls in and decides to act chaotically, while vociferously proclaiming that protocols are wrong and unnecessary.

Thankfully, like our grade school teachers, I don't give a rat's ass who thinks I'm a miserable bastard.  I care that my players are able to invest themselves totally into a game that runs as smooth as creamcheese glaze.  I played several year's worth of games without protocols; as I closed my first decade as a DM, I couldn't help noticing the protocols were making the game a lot tighter and efficient ... and thus improving both momentum and immersion.  After four decades, I will boot the cog that won't turn right before I'll tolerate it in my engine.

Those are the problematic game elements that occur to me.  If anyone has any others that deserve discussion, let me know.

Goofy Game Gimmicks

A DM was recently telling me his woes about his players visiting towns and "not having any fun there."  He meant they they wouldn't buy drinks or food at a bar, even when they were encouraged to do so.  His plan was to provide a special incentive for them in the way of tokens that would be used for a lottery to see who would receive a game bonus ... but as I was listening, my own mind began to work out its own peculiar solution.

I don't suppose I'd ever put the things below into practice, but in some cases I do think it would create some absurd and funny situations.  Decide for yourselves if you'd ever implement these gimmicks.

My first thought was to suggest that if the actual players wanted to drink anything at the table ~ and of course half the experience of table-top is junk food and the like ~ then their characters would have to pay the cost in gold or silver.  The character, of course, would be buying ale and mead in the game world, but one game beer would allow the player to drink a comparable substitute: coke or mountain dew or what have you.  Specific comparisons could be imposed and prices arranged, so that if the player was fine with pop, then a purchase of ale would be sufficient.  But if the player wanted to drink something more posh, like an energy drink, oh, well, then obviously they're have to be a charge for brandy or some comparable addictive beverage.

Likewise, chips and cookies and whatever else at the game table would have to rely upon the character's purchase of staples, meats, vegetables, whatever seems a fair comparison.  And if the player doesn't want to spend character in-world money on their real world cheezies, they can do without, can't they?  We can fairly stipulate that players who won't have their characters pay for their drinks can have as much water as they like, for free ~ in both the game world and out of it.

Now, once I started thinking about this, a few other thoughts came to mind.  Obviously, the character would have to buy these vittles and drink in advance ... if it's not on the character's sheet to be marked off, well obviously the player can't drink it now, right?  This would certainly make the next trip to the town market a little more interesting.

Another matter that is bound to come up, for some tables, is the subject of tobacco.  I have players who regularly step out for a quick smoke whenever there's a break, so naturally it's only fair that the characters have also thought to buy some tobacco for this moment.  Of course, it would be a bit tense around the table if Jean and Jimmy weren't able to have a puff at all that night, because they had forgotten to pick up tobacco at the last village.  It might be a good time to have a wandering stranger passing by, calmly smoking, so the players can anxiously ask if the NPC can lend a bit from their pouch.  This, I think, would play out hilariously.

And, point in fact, we can carry this a little farther.  If you'll excuse the connection ~ and perhaps the lack of taste in mentioning the subject ~ it seems only fair that if the player goes to the bathroom during the session, we should assume the character does too.  Which brings up another point.  What if the character can't go to the bathroom, or smoke, or drink or eat, because there is a combat going on?  Wouldn't it be perfectly logical to demand that these things be put aside for the duration of the combat, to be happily imbibed afterwards, in the glow of a well-earned victory?  Wouldn't that put just a bit more inconvenience on Steve or Shiela, if they were uncomfortably shifting in their seats waiting for the battle to finally be done?

Though they could, reasonably enough, simply exit the battle for a few rounds (timed, of course), to deal with the situation.  That would be fair.

This does put me in mind of something, however.  If we're limiting the players actions by virtue of what the characters have the freedom to do, they why not insist that all players, for the course of every combat, remain standing?  Obviously, no one is performing a combat sitting down, are they?  Of course not.  Still, there's only so much that a party will stand for, isn't there?  Perhaps we can forego this little suggestion.

It did occur to me that rolling to hit could be made a bit more, erm, legitimate, if the player had to roll the die with something in their hand ... a weapon substitute, so to speak.  It doesn't have to be anything excessive.  A pencil, for instance, or any longish object that isn't going to put out a fellow player's eye.  I can see imposing this and then, unfortunately for the player, my having to remind them that they don't use their left hand to swing their sword (unless the character happens to be left-handed) ... which would necessitate throwing their attack die with their left hand, while their right gripped their pencil.  Hm.  That might be a bit cruel as well.

I do think there must be other parallels between character and player that could be imposed.  Many tables already use a simple premise that if the player's character isn't present for a given parley, that the player should keep silent.  This is essentially the same line of thought.  Whatever binds the character's actions could, in some manner, bind the player as well.

Which is not to say that we expect the players to settle into sleep, while one keeps watch.  We have to be reasonable on some points.

When we say "immersion," we don't mean we have to flood the apartment or anything.