Have you ever heard of the “Strange Face In The Mirror” illusion? Or the Troxler effect? All right, I see the person at the back of the hall with their hands raised, and you up in the gallery. Anyone else? Didn’t think so.

There’s a reason why both these terms should be included in every GM’s vocabulary.

The Strange-Face-In-The-Mirror Illusion

This phenomenon was discovered in 2010, and first reported in the journal Perception, by Italian psychologist Giovanni Caputo.

In a nutshell, if you stare at your reflection in a large mirror in a dimly lit room, you will start to hallucinate – usually in less than a minute.

“At the end of a 10 min session of mirror gazing, the participant was asked to write what he or she saw in the mirror. The descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included:

(a) huge deformations of one’s own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants);

(b) a parent’s face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased;

(c) an unknown person (28%);

(d) an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%);

(e) an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%);

(f) fantastical and monstrous beings (48%).”

Note that these effects were not static, but continued to morph and change, segueing from one form of the illusion into another. Unsurprisingly, these illusions had an emotional impact on the viewers.

“The participants reported that apparition of new faces in the mirror caused sensations of otherness when the new face appeared to be that of another, unknown person or strange ‘other’ looking at him/her from within or beyond the mirror.

All fifty participants experienced some form of this dissociative identity effect, at least for some apparition of strange faces and often reported strong emotional responses in these instances.

For example, some observers felt that the ‘other’ watched them with an enigmatic expression – situation that they found astonishing. Some participants saw a malign expression on the ‘other’ face and became anxious. Other participants felt that the ‘other’ was smiling or cheerful, and experienced positive emotions in response.

The apparition of deceased parents or of archetypal portraits produced feelings of silent query.

Apparition of monstrous beings produced fear or disturbance.

Dynamic deformations of new faces (like pulsations or shrinking, smiling or grinding) produced an overall sense of inquietude for things out of control.”

This was an entirely new class of “visual illusion”, one that was both dynamic (changing) and entirely within the mind of the beholder. One respondent reported his eye looked away and then looked back at him. At another point in the experience, that respondent described the perception of something black slithering across the floor behind him.

Early speculation was that the brain had a short-cut for facial recognition, one that was responsible for the phenomenon of seeing faces in clouds, trees, or even in two dots and a line.

This mental process is always looking for faces to get a “head start’ on identifying those it knows. This might also explain the “lookalike” phenomenon, in which physical resemblances between two individuals are overemphasized to the point where we think they look alike despite the presence of more numerous points of differentiation. It also seems likely that some features are more prominently emphasized in this process, and hence more important to recognition of an individual, than others.

Caputo suggested that the process might be more unstable than previously thought, prone to misinterpret fluctuations i n the stability of edges, shading, and outlines into a determination of “someone else” by the recognition process.

Later analysts have suggested that the Troxler Effect may be involved, interfering in the normal process of recognition.

Whenever I read or write about this phenomenon, I keep flashing back to the aphorism, “The Eyes Are The Window To The Soul”. I can just see people trying to get a glimpse of their “true nature” or “inner spirit” in the mirror by staring fixedly at their reflection for long periods of time.

This leads me to wonder just how many times and in how many places, both before and after it was identified, this illusion has entered our folklore.

One obvious case of it doing so is the legend of “Bloody Mary” which claims that her image will appear in a mirror if you stare into it while chanting her name. (This in turn suggests connections to the reported phenomenon of “Directed Dreaming, better known as Lucid Dreaming, but that’s getting off-topic.)

I have to wonder how many spiritualists and “occult investigators” stumbled over it? Is this responsible for the entire concept of Possession? How much has it played into our concepts of Angels and Demons?

Another practice that Wikipedia has connected to the Illusion is the medieval practice of Scrying.

Food for thought, indeed. But probably too heavily into “realism” for use in most RPG campaigns, which have as a premise (stated or otherwise) that the fantastic is real.

The Troxler Effect

Swiss physician Ignaz Paul Vital Troxler first identified the effect that bears his name in 1804. Also known as Troxler’s fading or Troxler fading, it’s a category of optical illusion in which concentration on one point for even a short period of time results in even relatively nearby unchanging stimuli being “subtracted” from the brain’s awareness or perceptions.

The Troxler effect has been used to explain the “Lilac Chaser” illusion. The example below shows a cross in the center of a series of lilac dots, which are taken away one at a time and then replaced, as though something “invisible” were rotating around the cross and masking one dot at a time.

• If you focus on one of the lilac dots (for some reason I naturally pick one in the lower left, but it should make no difference) then the empty space where a lilac dot has been “masked” will be filled in by the brain with a pale green dot of the same size, that the brain has manufactured.
• If you focus on the sequence of vanishing dots, you might not even see the cross.
• If you focus on the cross, the lilac dots will reportedly vanish.

In a nutshell, because you have processed the image, and decided not to focus on a particular detail, the brain removes it so that you can focus more of your attention on the point that does have your attention.

If you combine these two, you can have one part of the brain censoring what it considers unimportant while another manufactures hallucinations to fill the void. And that brings me to…

Standing Watch

It’s a standard precaution – if in a potentially dangerous location, the characters will stand watch in shifts, so that someone is armed and at the ready should the camp be attacked (or something dangerous approach).

The military protocol for standing watch is to have two men on watch, at a minimum, if at all possible. Why? Because one man, on his own, can start to see things that aren’t there, or can fall asleep, leaving the camp unprotected. And, if you are relying on that man to awaken the next to stand his watch, then you have an obvious problem.

Despite this, the usual RPG Practice is for a single PC to be on watch. There are two conditions under which that watch can take place: well-lit or poorly lit.

“Well-lit” avoids the problems stemming from the phenomena described earlier – but even a glance in the direction of the fire is enough to ruin night vision, as shown by Mythbusters in the season 7 “Pirate Special”. In the “Eye Patch” segment, they tested the theory that Pirates wore eye-patches to preserve night vision in one eye. Wikipedia describes the results thus:

“This myth works under the assumption that the eye covered with the eye-patch is already accustomed to low-light conditions, while the other eye must take time to become accustomed. The Mythbusters were sent into a pirate-themed obstacle course (which was dark, and Adam and Jamie had not seen the course in light, let alone the layout) with light-accustomed eyes and were told to complete certain objectives. Their movements were hampered by the darkness, and it took them five minutes to finish. When they went back in with an eye that had been covered for thirty minutes, the Mythbusters were able to complete the test in a fraction of the time. As a control test, the Mythbusters then went back into the same exact room with light-accustomed eyes and ran into the same difficulty as the first test. The myth was deemed plausible rather than confirmed because there is no recorded historical precedent for this myth.”

According to Dr Christopher S. Baird, writing for West Texas A&M University (abbreviated WT by the university themselves), we start acquiring night vision after only ten minutes, have almost fully-adapted after about 20 minutes, but can need several hours for night-time sensitivity to reach its peak, as shown by the following diagram:

Dr Baird also provides some caveats regarding the diagram: “Note that this plot is only representative of the general trends. The actual curve varies from person to person, from one spot on the eye to the next, and from one day to the next.”

This more or less makes a watchman useless in a well-lit camp – though the fire might drive animal assailants away, it will simply advertise the camp’s location to anyone else. That means that the optimum is probably a ‘cold camp’, i.e. no fire – despite the increased risks. But that brings these phenomena right back into play.

Every watch in an RPG should contain either incidents where the watcher is seeing things that aren’t there (and potentially raising alerts over them) or ignoring things (that might actually be there) because he thinks he is seeing things!

In a Fantasy Game / Firelight environment

I find that I’ve probably stolen most of what I had to say in this section in the material above. In fact, I have only one observation to discuss.

The nature of the light source involved might be a pertinent factor in triggering the illusion, according to one line of thought. Because natural light from campfires and candles and the like are unstable, flickering, dancing this way and that, this would force the brain to continually reappraise it’s surroundings, overcoming the Illusions.

Alternatively, you could argue that by making the environment even “fuzzier” in terms of definition, such sources of illumination would amplify the tendency.

In the absence of anything more than the logical analysis in the above two paragraphs, this is obviously the referee’s call.

But if I were to make that decision, I know which way I would immediately vote: bring on the Hallucinations!! You might feel differently, though.

In a Modern environment

The invention of the electric light bulb, which doesn’t rely on an oxidation chain-reaction to produce illumination, changes everything. Early bulbs were undoubtedly a LOT dimmer than those we have taken for granted throughout my lifetime – extensive research turned up Are Edison Bulbs Bright Enough? at “1000 bulbs”, an internet-based lighting company which uses a dedicated blog to discuss all matters lighting-related both as a way of giving back to the community and of marketing their products. They state that antique bulbs were typically half as bright for a given wattage as more recent tungsten-filament bulbs – and, presumably, were available only in lower-wattage models than the more modern range, since there is a relationship between wattage and lifespan, and lifespan was a primary challenge back in the early days of commercialized electrical lighting. What’s more, the light is more orange than modern bulbs, which is also perceived as being dimmer.

So, if the typical bulb was 40W, the light produced was probably on the order of only 15-20W by modern standards. A 20-Watt bulb would not have been much brighter than a handheld battery torch from the 1980s – never mind the improvements in technology since.

That means that the first half of the twentieth century was probably just as prone to experiencing the “Strange Face In The Mirror” just through ordinary usage, and the vulnerabilities to those standing watch remain valid.

But even in the modern day, it remains true that illumination only advertises your position to potential adversaries. Better a cold camp and low-light vision enhancements!

Which means being just as prone to seeing things that aren’t there….

A story of numbers

The obvious question is, why don’t RPG parties have more than one person standing watch at a time?

The equally-obvious answer is that they don’t have enough members to make it practical.

If watches are 4 hours long, a party of three would be resting for a full twelve hours. If they are two hours long, you’re still talking about twelve hours – but you’re interrupting two members sleep twice a night, and one, once. Minimum. And you start running into the problem of alert time, also known as Attention Span.

Simply put, the human organism isn’t designed to focus intently on something for more than about 20-25 minutes. Over that period of time, the error rate – the frequency of making mistakes related to the task being focused on – rises steadily. Other researchers suggest an alert time of 45-50 minutes, and still others of 90-100 minutes – it largely depends on the tolerance for errors involved in the task.

Several researchers have also found that strategic, short, breaks can “reset” the clock and significantly boost productivity. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing something (like this article) or studying for an exam, the principle holds. What’s more, simply switching attention to a somewhat different task can be at least partially effective – in writing this article, for example, there were a lot of five-minute breaks spent researching this topic or that, like the information provided in the last couple of paragraphs.

It’s also known that sleep deprivation and a number of psychological conditions both impair alert time directly and increase the tendency to both make mistakes and for the attention to drift off. Other factors – environmental and internal – can also have a negative impact. I have long maintained that masking ‘random environmental distractions’ with known content such as music that is familiar to the listener can mitigate some of these effects.

These subjects have been matters of active investigation by a number of agencies since 1943 due to the impact on the public safety of commercial aviation deriving from inattention and pilot error. Ergonomics is now considered a sub-field of Human Factors by many.

Balancing the issue of sustaining alert levels over a span of time is the issue of the quality of interrupted sleep. I wrote extensively about sleep for GMs in Tourism in Sleepland: Sleep management for GMs & other creative people back in 2014. Be warned, it’s a long article even by Campaign Mastery standards!

Applying that information to this situation, 90 minutes of sound sleep plus X minutes to actually fall asleep is probably the basic multiple. For multiple deep-sleep phases in succession, we’re again talking 90 minutes at a stretch. In hours: 1.5, 3, 4.5, 6, 7.5, 9 – all plus that “X” at the top and after each interruption. It’s normal to allow 30 minutes for “X”, giving the standard 8-hour sleep recommendation.

This defines the optimum time for a person to be on-watch: 90 minutes, plus 30 minutes in the case of the first watch of the evening.

How many party members do we need to give everyone enough sleep?

• Start with guard one: 2 hours of watch plus 8 hours of sleep. Total: 10 hours.
• Guard two gets 2 hours of sleep, then has a 90-minute watch, and then needs 6 hours more sleep, and another 30 minutes going-back-to-sleep time. Total = 10 hours.
• Guard three gets 3.5 hours sleep, then stands a 90-minute watch, and then needs 4.5 hours plus 30 minutes more sleep. Total = 10 hours.
• Guard four gets 5 hours sleep, stands a 90 minute watch, then sleeps for another 3 hours plus 30 minutes – a total of 10 hours.
• Guard five gets 6.5 hours sleep, stands a 90 minute watch, then sleeps for another hour-and-a-half plus 30 minutes – if he can. If I wake up after this much sleep, I find it hard to go back to sleep.
• Guard six gets eight hours sleep, and then stands a 90 minute watch. And probably then stands an extra 30 minutes, so that someone’s on watch for the entire 10 hours.

Six guards. If you don’t have six warm bodies to fill those slots, effectiveness is compromised. There are two choices of compromise: longer watch shifts, or multiple interruptions on any given night. The first is undoubtedly the simplest.

Notice that the total time spent with the party resting is defined as Watch plus 8 hours, in the very first line of the above analysis.

In theory, for example, three people would need watches that were twice as long – three hours long.

• Guard one: 3 hour watch plus 8 hours sleep = 11 hours.
• Guard two: 3 hrs sleep (inefficient resting) plus 3 hrs on watch plus 5 hours sleep plus 30 minutes = 11.5 hours. Right away, there’s a problem.
• Guard three: 6 hrs sleep (inefficient resting) plus 3 hrs on watch plus another 2 hours sleep plus 30 minutes = 11.5 hours again.
• no-one’s left to guard for the next 2 hours. The problem has just become critical.
• At the end of that 2 hours, Guard one wakes up – and finds himself standing watch for another half hour. And probably feeling disgruntled because he’s already done his shift.

All three party members are compromised – either their sleep patterns have been disrupted, leaving them feeling tired and irritable the next day, or they’ve had to stand an extra half-hour’s watch. And all three would be uncomfortably aware that for two hours that night (or perhaps that morning), the entire party was blissfully snoozing.

What this shows is that there’s a non-linear relationship between the number of guards and the length of their watches. It’s not as simple as doubling the length of watch to allow for half the number of people. I’ll show the right way to calculate the watch length, in a moment.

First, though, let’s think about the simplest solution to the problem of not having enough people to stand watch.

The simple solution: add more characters?

If you have a party of three PCs, and each recruits one henchman / apprentice / minion / hireling (whatever you want to define them as) who the party can trust,, that gives six people to stand watch. Problem solved.

It’s that “who can be trusted” that’s the rub. And that assumes that the PCs can trust each other.

Arranging a Watch-list

There are lots of ways of arranging a watch list. The Wikipedia page on Watchkeeping lists eight of them. But the focus there is on rotation from day to day; once you accept that principle, and the concept that watches are only to be kept while encamped, the content of the page becomes less relevant. Fortunately, there’s a simpler way.

The straightforward way

The length of a watch is determined by dividing the sleep period required, by the number of guards minus one.

Right away, this highlights the cause of the problem with the three-person example given earlier: eight hours divided by (3-1) gives a watch length of four hours, not three. So the first two people standing watch for only three hours each leaves the overall total two hours short – and the only reason guard number one was available to take that last half hour is because his sleep wasn’t interrupted, so he didn’t need that extra half-hour of rest.

Four-hour watches after a full day’s exertion are really too long. But the alternative – multiple watches of 2 hours length – is even more inefficient because there will be multiple thirty-minute go-back-to-sleep requirements.

Conclusion: three people aren’t enough to both maintain a watch and ensure that everyone gets a good night’s sleep.

Four people don’t work out very evenly – eight divided by 3 gives a watch length of 2 hrs 40 minutes, and means that two or three guards are again awoken at “bad points” in their sleep cycles. But if you accept that 7.5 hours is close enough for a substantial period of time, with the occasional sleep-in when you reach secure lodgings, 2.5 hour watches result. The sleep disruptions still occur for two people, but both first watch and last watch get uninterrupted sleep.

A simple rotation means guard one gets 1 good night, two bad nights, and another good night – but also means that he stands last watch one morning and then has to stand first watch that night, producing a very long day.

A sequence of “1, 3, 4, 2” avoids this problem and means that every second day, each party member gets an uninterrupted night’s rest.

Of course, if you multiply the length of a watch by the number of characters, you discover how much of the 24-hour day is consumed by camping. Some arrangements are more efficient than others – we’ve already shown that a 6-guard roster totals ten hours, and a 3-guard roster totals 12 hours. A 4-guard roster at 2 hrs 40 minutes totals 10 hours 40 minutes (not bad) and gives everyone 8 hours of sleep, or totals 10 hours if based on 7.5 hours’ sleep (about as good as it gets).

How much adventuring could you get done in that 40 minutes? It’s the equivalent of taking a reasonably leisurely lunch break, and a couple of extra 5-minute rest breaks along the way.

• A 9-guard roster gives shifts of an hour each, and a total time lost of 9 hours, and a full 8 hours rest.
• A 13-guard roster gives shifts of 40 minutes each, a full eight hours rest, and a total time of 8 hours 40 minutes lost.
• A 17-guard roster gives shifts of 30 minutes each, a full eight hours rest, and a total time lost out of the day of 8.5 hours. In effect, those extra four guards buy you a whole ten more minutes on the road – plus watch shifts that are close to optimal.

Of course, all these calculations assume that the changeover is instantaneous – which it isn’t. But there’s plenty of room in that “plus thirty” for the outgoing watch to relay anything important to the incoming watch.

It must also be noted that these are the minimum, with one person standing watch at a time; the optimum is actually two or three at a time, as noted earlier.

But this leaves roughly 13-15 hours of room for travel and adventure per day, right?

Oh, if only it were that simple.

Additional Tasks: Setting Up Camp

There are a whole lot of additional tasks involved in setting up camp, and in breaking camp. There are two ways to arrange these: assume that it’s enough for everyone to be awake, and hence no guard is needed, or assume that the party is in a dangerous location and guards should be posted whenever you aren’t in transit from A to B.

This choice is not up to the GM, it’s up to the PCs. But it is the GM’s responsibility to put the choice to them at least once, if not every time until they set a policy – a petard upon which the GM can hoist them, in other words.

The first case is simple – the calculations don’t change, and the extra time is simply added to the total.

The more paranoid approach is a bit trickier – you have to factor the additional time into both the resting time and the total time. So the calculations are now:

     guard shift length = (8 + Y) / (n – 1)

     total time used = ( shift length × n ) + Y

Both involve this new number “Y” – the amount of additional time spent setting up and breaking camp.

Before we can assess that, it’s necessary to think about the actual tasks that have to be performed. By my count, there are seven, possibly more:

1. clearing a site,
2. erecting Tents,
3. gathering firewood,
4. fetching water,
5. starting a fire,
6. cooking a meal for all,
7. digging a latrine.

To that list can be added

8. hunting
9. gathering wild produce

Lets Ignore those for a moment, and ponder the division of labor:

Assuming that everyone works to clear the site of flammables and burrs and stinging nettles and the like, the person who cooks the meal probably also starts the fire. That leaves the rest of the PCs to dig a latrine and gather enough wood to keep the fire burning for as long as is needed – which is how long exactly?

All night? Or just long enough to cook the meal and clean the dishes?

Right away, we’re again confronted with the Cold-camp vs Night Fire question.

Either way, Let’s assume two hours for that task – but it could be longer if in an environment without a lot of consumable resources, or less. If it’s too much less, however, you start to lose time in the “clearing the site” task. But, in any reasonable environment, 2 hours is probably a worst-case.

Tasks can be made easier by campsite selection. Instead of defensibility being the primary consideration, being close to a supply of fresh water should be dominant; defensibility should be a poor second. Not only does this provide a ready water supply, trees are often found along riverbanks if nowhere else – and trees mean fallen branches, i.e. wood.

How recently someone else camped in the vicinity (using up the available timber) is also a factor! You may have to go a mile or so up- or down-river to find a suitable campsite.

I did factor these thoughts into my suggestion that two hours is probably a worst-case scenario in a reasonable location.

The practical fact is that the cook can’t get started until the first load of wood arrives. In some of my campaigns, the players have made a point of setting the cook’s tent up for them so that they can get on with cooking the meal; the thought was that this maximized the efficiency of the overall process. But the truth probably is that the cook can clear the site for the fire while the others are setting up their tents, erect their own tent in a suitable location while the foragers are out, and be ready to start the evening meal when they begin to return. The other tasks involved can probably be completed while the meal is being cooked.

All of this needs daylight for maximum efficiency, though characters with special vision might be able to make do – or might not, it depends on how their special vision actually works.

The meal, on the other hand, can be consumed in twilight conditions or even pitch darkness (thanks to light from the fire). So that gives us a fixed point in time each time – sunset marks the time the meal (and the campsite) are supposed to be ready. Thirty minutes or so later, the campers should turn to and the first watch begins.

How much sleep? There’s that question, again.

No one can deny that combat is an intensive activity. But so is hunting, or simply walking a long distance in relatively insecure surroundings – and they are all insecure; in “civilized” parts, rogues, opportunists, and bandits may lurk anywhere, and in the wilds, monsters abound. The type of threat may be different, but the reality of the threat is unchanged.

So standing first watch comes at the end of a long day.

These estimates are very heavily influenced by the numbers. The larger the group, the larger the site needed for an encampment, and the deeper the latrine needs to be, and the more food will be required. On the other hand, many hands makes light work. Most of the tasks on the list can be considered proportional to the number of characters, and that means that the total encampment time remains unchanged at roughly 2.5 hours.

That stops being true roughly when we get to the Squad level of party size – twenty-something people to thirty – and changes again when we start talking about larger army units. But those are rarely relevant to the logistics of an adventuring party (the one exception: caravan duty).

Additional Tasks: Breaking Camp

There are also seven tasks involved in breaking camp.

1. Gather more firewood
2. Relighting the fire
3. More water
4. Cooking a meal for everyone
5. Putting the fire out
6. Packing the tents
7. Policing the campsite (includes filling the latrine)

It’s fairly rare for another session of gathering wild produce or hunting meat. More commonly, some will have been set aside from the night before to add to the morning meal.

In addition, there are two optional tasks that might be required:

8. Removing tracks
9. Navigational Fix

So, how long? The best sites for gathering firewood would have been noted the previous evening, so less searching will be required. Relighting the fire will also be easier if there are some embers from the night before. Obtaining more water will take about as long – and is still sensitive to the specifics of the campsite selected.

Cooking the meal will probably be quicker, due to the nature of the meal usually served. In my experience, packing the tents takes 1/2 to 1/3 as long as it does to erect them – and half of that is packing them neatly so that everything is ready for the next campsite. Policing the camp simply means cleaning up any litter – and that’s a much smaller problem in most fantasy campaigns. But there might be orange peels or something. Basically, you don’t want to attract predators to this campsite because you might want to use it again at some future time.

So far, then, we’re probably talking about an hour, plus time to actually eat the meal.

But there are three tasks to be considered on top of these, the first of which is putting the fire out (you may have noticed that I skipped over that one!)

Fire is, frankly, quite easy to put out – until it isn’t.

When it gets so intense that any water dumped on it tends to turn to steam before the fire is extinguished, you have yourself what we in Australia call a bushfire and those in the US refer to as a wildfire. As a general rule, this will only happen if the campsite was inadequately cleared – but that’s sometimes more easily said than done.

The hotter and drier conditions have been lately, the more sensitive to fire the local environment is. Fires can spread by grass or underbrush. I’ve even seen a fire in a tree-stump that spread to surrounding vegetation through the roots of the stump!

Given the right conditions, and the right vegetation in the right condition, and flames can tower double the tree height – sufficiently hot to generate their own weather events. Embers can travel more than a mile (2 km) on the wind to start spot-fires.

Clearing the campsite adequately isn’t just a question of comfort while encamped; it goes directly to the safety of the camp.

In between these extremes, there’s an intermediate situation that I have also encountered in real life, in which a fire can appear to have been extinguished only to flare back into life a few minutes later. I remember one which had been reduced to embers by a lack of fresh fuel, which had been the recipient of two bucket-fulls of earth and one of water – which reignited. Another bucket of water, and a few minutes later, it reignited again. A third bucket of water after breaking up the coals with a rake, and we thought it was finally out, so we set to other tasks – only to notice a small wisp of white smoke emerging fifteen minutes later. Some more water applied to that specific spot finally killed the fire that wouldn’t die. We later surmised that some of the branches we had used for fuel had been more green than they appeared, containing a flammable sap – but that is just speculation.

So, most of the time, a fire will only take a minute or two to extinguish – but every now and then, especially on a hot summer’s day, it may be half an hour. Or a LOT longer if it got out of hand overnight!

Also, for the most part, only one person will be needed for the task, especially if buckets of earth have been prepared in advance – a wise general precaution!

What are the others doing? Well, usually there isn’t enough time required to worry about, but if the fire is giving problems, they might break down the cook’s tent and prepare his pack.

So we need to allow a few minutes – but how many? Let’s make a few assumptions:

80% of the time: 2 minutes.
50% of the remaining time: 5 minutes.
50% of the remaining time: 15 minutes.
Whatever’s left: 30 minutes.

With this profile, we can determine an average time:

0.8 × 2 = 1.6
0.5 × 0.2 × 5 = 0.5
0.5 × 0.1 × 15 = 0.75
0.5 × 0.1 × 30 = 0.3
Total = 1.6 + 0.5 + 0.75 + 0.3 = 3.15 minutes.

Not enough to justify all the efforts – treat a fire that refuses to go out as an encounter when breaking camp and forget it (encounters don’t factor into any routine procedure, they are wild cards).

That leaves only the two optional tasks: if being hunted / pursued, it might be worth spending half an hour removing any trace of your having spent time at the campsite. Most of the time, though, you won’t bother.

Getting a navigational fix on the morning sun is more likely to have to happen regularly. But it only takes a minute or two (at most) and a single person – two at the extreme if you have to mark a landmark some distance away (one person climbs a tree and looks for the landmark, the other marks a tree that’s in the right direction).

Note that this doesn’t have to be a permanent mark – a ribbon loosely affixed to a branch will suffice, and will eventually work loose and blow away.

So, all told we’re talking about 1.5 hours, plus a couple of minutes – most of the time.

Excluded Characters

But there’s a complication: Not all hands will necessarily be available for these tasks. Clerics have their morning prayers, and Wizards their morning memorizations – either way, it comes down to spell selection. This can take considerably longer, depending on your game system, than the 1.5 hours set aside for breaking camp.

There are two approaches to this problem, and the choice is up to the PCs once again; all the GM can do is put the question in front of them. Option one is for the remaining PCs (less guards if necessary) to go hunting/gathering for tonight’s meal, or for lunch fixings. The alternative is to set a time limit on daily memorizations – that 1.5 hours seems convenient – and designate one day a week when you will encamp for as long as necessary. The practical consequence of the latter is that higher level spells used may not be replaced for a while – making it a far more important decision as to when to use one.

In the AD&D era, it wasn’t unusual for spell memorization to take 3 or more hours.

You could calculate how large a delay this shortage of willing (or unwilling) hands will cause – but if you dig into this, with the assumption that those available will pick up the slack, you’ll probably find that the spell-casters’ tents are being folded up and packed away while they are still inside, performing rituals theologic or secular!

The alternative is pack these tasks into the sleeping time of the party. So, the night (for a spellcaster) now has the shape Watch, rest, Memorize – remembering that the rules specify unbroken rest.

These are areas of the rules that I often “monkey” with because they are a great way to impart additional, targeted, flavor.

• “Spell memorization takes the time indicated for the highest level spell being memorized plus one minute per spell of equal or lesser level” cuts the time required massively.
• “Clerics have full choice of all spells their Deity has permitted them to learn, adding 1d3 additional spells to that tally for each castable spell level each time the Cleric gains a character level, but have to perform a two hour prayer ritual each morning to have ANY spells that day – and cannot recharge their spells for 22 hours thereafter without the direct permission of the deity. Up to one hour of that ritual may be conducted in advance as prayer services conducted during the day and on the move at 1/4 efficiency.”

The effects can be subtle but powerful – the “clerics” change described doesn’t change the basic flavor of a cleric in D&D, but it does sharpen it, and focus the character far more on the theology that he represents, at least to the external perception. Almost every time something happens, the Cleric is in mid-prayer (or should be) to fast-track his religious services the next morning.

In any event, the exclusion of spellcasting characters from watch rotation (perhaps from standing a watch at all) can radically alter the calculations.

Another Factor: Alert! Alert! Alert!

While we’re on the subject, I mentioned above that encounters haven’t been factored into these “ideal world” calculations. Not only do these wake everybody up, and mandate extreme physical activity, perhaps inflicting injuries that make sleep harder to come by, but they disrupt sleep cycles. If you spend 15 minutes in combat in the middle of your watch, everyone then has to get back to sleep – and, if they are to get their full quota of sleepy-time, you have to be on watch for an extra 30 minutes to give everyone time to get back to sleep.

And the same is true of any false alarms you might sound.

The temptation therefore has to be to check anything out by yourself rather than waking the entire camp, unless you’re sure that it is dangerous. And that’s a great way to get yourself in over your head.

What may have seemed a trivial mundanity – Watch policy – has suddenly become a significant factor in the resolution of an encounter.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter what the PCs decide as policy – “Always wake us” or “Exercise your own judgment” – the consequences play into the GMs hands if he’s clever enough to take advantage of them.

And still another: Defensive works

Something else that hasn’t been taken into consideration is the erection of any defensive works – because even a trivial wall or breastwork is beyond the capacity of a small adventuring party.

But there can be exceptions. I know of one party who used a spell to erect defenses every time they camped.

Minimal Watch

Another alternative is to wholly or partially abandon the concept of a Watch. This is achieved by stringing some alarms around the campsite. The most effective arrangement that I’ve seen looked like this:

But I’ve also seen an Unseen Servant instructed to watch for anyone or anything approaching the camp and ring a bell if they get too close.

Such an arrangement removes the need for more than one watcher on guard duty, and even lets that one attempt to sleep. You can probably rotate the duty on a nightly basis and be reasonably comfortable and content.

How Long To Adventure?

When you tally up everything, eight hours or so of rest turns into 10-11 under most circumstances. On top of that, 2.5 hours of setting up camp precedes the night-time arrangements, and 1.5 hours of breaking camp follows it – and that’s if you restrict spell memorization time to about an hour. That totals 15 hours out of 24.

Nine hours a day is what’s left. That’s how long you have to adventure. And have lunch.

Sometime in the 70s or 80s, I saw a T-shirt that read “Adventuring is a full-time job”. I doubt whoever created it (and I forget who was wearing it) knew how right they were.

References:

• My primary source and inspiration for this article was Hazel Lockey’s answer on Quora to the question, “Are there any facts that are extremely scary to know?”.
• A secondary source was the first source that the above answer lists as a reference, “The strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion” at Mindhacks.
• The report on the strange-face-in-the-mirror illusion by Giovanni B Caputo can be found at this link.
• I also relied on the Wikipedia page on the Troxler Effect.

All other references are cited and linked in the body of the article.