What Happens When A D&D Player Falls Asleep?

I'm not sure this is the best advert for D&D, but what happens when you play Dungeons & Dragons online via a service such as Twitch, and one of the players falls asleep? And, to add insult to injury, begins to snore loudly? This video from Poke Your Eyes Out Games shows exactly this. The DM tries in vain to wake the player up, while the other players roll around with unrestrained mirth. This never happened in any of Wil Wheaton's or Vin Diesel's games!

You can watch the full session in a 45-minute Twitch stream here or just check out the all-important hilarious 2-minute section below.

[video=youtube;sz-RI43EinI]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sz-RI43EinI[/video]​

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Heh, that’s hilarious!

This is one of the reasons I hate evening gaming sessions (especially after a work day). Invariably, people fade by the time you get to the epic end of the adventure you had planned.

I haven’t had someone fall asleep in a long time. The last time it would happen, the player would become increasingly incoherent, just waving their hands around to indicate what they were doing. Once they fell asleep, they'd just be out of the game, unless they woke up.

Of course, when we were kids, the character of anyone that fell asleep would be subjected to all sorts of immature indignities.

 

[Halivar]

I hate falling asleep during a game. I'm the guy in our group who needs the most sleep to be alert (it's a thing I am getting medical help with), and by the time 11 o clock hits I turn into a pumpkin. I am effusively apologetic later, but I know it really rankles some of my DM's. It doesn't help that I'm usually the mover and shaker in the party, so once I conk out, the game slows to a crawl. And, being the guy who writes down game notes and party loot, there is confusion at the start of every next session.

 

[iserith]

Haha, that's hilarious. I never have people fall asleep at my games - too much going on to check out mentally. But we do like to drink and something-something and every now and then a player will have a bit too much of that and needs to lay down.

 

[Curmudjinn]

I've had some heavy-boozing sessions cause people to pass out. Or all-nighters, where we just have the PC fall back to the inn or camp in the meantime.

After a booze incident where a player awoke into projectile vomiting across the table, we enforced a "Go Lie Down" rule if you can't hang.

 

[Cody C. Lewis]

I seriously JUST had this happen in my homebrew last month...during the freaking final 45 minutes of the final session in the whole campaign.

I am 98% positive the player took "something"... it was a little scary because he just mumbled and lumped over onto his desk. We actually had to call his roommate to go into his room and make sure he was still breathing.

 

[iserith]

Within the first 5 minutes of the full version, it's revealed the player is drinking. He claims to have had just the one beer before switching to "pop," but I don't think he passed his Charisma (Deception) check on that score. Skipping around, you can see the DM chastising the player for drunken antics which I've always found to be a mistake. My solution to this is to harness the drunkenness and channel it to useful and hilarious purpose. Embrace the inebriation and make it work for you.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I once had too much to drink while DMing once. It was in 4e, which already had a lot to keep track of. I ended up bringing back a monster that had already been killed. My players still tease me about it.

I used to have a complexity test for RPGs – if we could play the game while polishing off a handle of bourbon, it passed and had a good rules system.

 

[was]

..I game with a lot of folks who have jobs with 'unusual' work hours, so this happens on occasion. We let them sleep for a bit unless something important is happening. Sometimes a quick 30 minute nap is all they need to get fully back into the game.

 

[Talmek]

Sadly, I have fallen asleep on more than one occasion playing in a 4e campaign run by a friend of mine. This happened so frequently that I finally had to change the times that we would play simply because I couldn't apologize enough to the group for my discourtesy. They were luckily pretty understanding about it since I was working 12 hour shifts at the time, but it was for such a long duration that we couldn't / didn't want to put the campaign on hiatus.

Oh well, we moved on and did great things!