Well I'm afraid that I can't do both at the same time but congratulations on your ability to. No, I'm not talking shite and, unless I'm playing a mathemetician (which I never do because I have no facility with numbers at all) in which case it might be reasonable to try to calculate how much longer one has left to live.

For me, playing a role is about seeing the world through someone else's (ie. my character's) eyes and thinking, as much as possible, the thoughts that they would. Seeing a Coke can doesn't impinge too much on my thoughts because it can be processed simply as "rubbish" and be ignored. Doing complicated maths (subtraction is complicated) means that I spend so much time thinking about it, there is simply no space left for the character. 

Ummm. Intresting. So the key words/phrases that have been generated (IN MY OPINION) here are: "Immersion" and "Assistance to Roleplaying".

Personally, and I can only state personally, I find that all LRP is unbelievable in some way. As it is impossible to achive total immersion without doing direct Dimensional travel to the realm your adventuring in, where weapon blows seriously hurt and kill and magic frizzes through the air. The limitations of the medium, which most specifically must be the creation of the group imagination, dictated and guided by a designer, can only have partial cohesion. At the point that individuals in the group achieve a connection with that group imagination the game can become mystical in quality. I've managed (or imagined I've managed) this several times in my long experience and all of them are still fresh in my memory.

I think that the ethos that simplifies the rules to allow access to all, is probably correct, but I personally am aided by realism, and that means that I can forget reality easier through selective comprehension and phsycological tricks.

Ex-TT? try: http://www.treasuretrap.net