Time for time!
On a game where characters age, but those same characters are usually seen around a certain age range, time becomes an important issue. It would be strange, for instance, for a character who is in middle school to go unplayed for a while, only to have the first player suddenly have to deal with the character being in high school.
Now, some of this is unavoidable. Time must march on. Several series take place over more than one IC year, so we need time progression. On the other hand, we don't want time racing along, because characters conceivably can do a whole lot more in a week than the players have time to RP out!
So how can we handle this? Well, we have a few options.
We can just let time march on. 1 RL day = 1 IC day. The advantage of this is that it's always easy to tell when it is ICly. The disadvantage is the abovementioned problem with time moving on.
We can slow down IC time, so 2 RL days = 1 IC day. For those of you at Persona MUSH, this is the method they use. The advantages are several: characters age more slowly (in RL time), so there's less worry about them getting too old too quickly; there's more time for date-related scenes like holidays; we can decide what date to start the game on. If we go this method, we will likely set opening day as early April, the beginning of the school year. There are some disadvantages, however, the biggest one being that it's a little confusing to have the IC day and the RL day different. We're going to try to solve this by having a calendar function that tells you the IC date, day of the week, and whether it's the first or second RL day of that IC date.
For example, a reading might look like: IC Day: Tuesday, May 22, Part 1. Something like that.
However, we want your opinions! Tell us which of the two methods you prefer, or if there's another one that we might consider. Let us know any advantages or disadvantages that weigh your preferred choice.