'Fuzzy Time' in long-term rpgs
spike369 put out a call for submissions the other day, and there was something that I wanted to raise, but it's big enough to warrant an entry of it's own, and I would welcome thoughts and/or wild ideas from fellow GMs
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The thing which is (obviously) of main concern to me and my character Eve is the fact that she's pregnant.
In game, when Eve entered into the lives of the characters (as they turned up on her doorstep one dark and stormy night), she and Fowler danced around one another for a couple of weeks, attempting to appraise their situation as Exes With History and establish where they both stood. Eve had experienced A Lot in Fowler's absence, while Fowler had also experienced A Lot and got himself a new girlfriend in Suzanne ( ... )
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Sadly, in-game time, Eve had actually just had a barney/Angst-filled revelatory period with Fowler, had left his car and went to get trashed with the resident NPC Dipsomancer (alcohol magician). Yeah... not the best move for a mother to be.
So... from getting pissed out of her gourd one night and not sleeping for Some Hours due to Angst and Worry, she became 2 months pregnant.
A second example of how time moves in interesting ways is that Suzanne (Mish's character) has just embarked on some crazy semblence of NaNoWriMo and has, in fact, managed to achieve her 50k goal.
OOC, Mish has done this within the month of November.
However, IC, the US elections just took place six days ago, thereby making it Monday, 10th November. I know this, because Fowler's father has just been to visit, and Eve/me threw a dinner party to meet him and two of our friends and share the news of the pregnancy.
So, either time is going to have to fuck itself again and allow Mish's stunning 50k achievement work into the plot despite Suzanne having been as ( ... )
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But this also needs to be there in comics - Wolverine, at any given time, is likely to be in five monthlies written by different writers. Cap, a minimum of two. Spidey's record is seven. The editors need to process and balance that.
Marvel has insisted on the ten-year-rule since about 1983. As more and more real-life events come in, this becomes more and more of a problem - if it's allowed to be a problem.
(For a more literary approach, may I suggest 'The PCs have come unstuck in time, po-te-weet'?)
So long as timing and rates of plot development feel right, it's my experience that players won't mind; sure, these things are happening in November, and a month from now you'll want to do a game Christmas and a month won't have advanced. But that's the kind of thing where the PCs can let it ride; their world proceeds at its own pace, touching base with ours when it's appropriate for it to.
After all, in Narnia any length of time can have passed.
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I like my view of fuzzy time as being each session as an episode of a television show.
I've recently been watching season 1 of Deadwood. Over its twelve episodes, I'd estimate that three weeks have passed, if you time things by the scripted events.
It was a remarkably short epidemic, and Deadwood went from being a saloon and a few huts to being a bustling mini-metropolis even faster than it did in real life.
Al Swearengen has therefore murdered, approximately, one person every other day. The only sociopathic killer on television more prolific is Jack Bauer.
However, Deadwood works if you view each episode as self-contained. If I recall, characters were very vague about timescales - "I'll be leaving the camp for a short while," or "Suchandsuch will be arriving soon." Even so, the tight timescale was attested to by one of the principal characters sporting an ugly tomahawk bruise to the side of his head for about half the series ( ... )
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That's one thing I reasoned out when talking to Mish last night: that the PCs playing off the world is fine, because I determine how quickly, say, the bigwigs at McGowan-Buttermore organise hitsquads, or how fast Bored Issues Clerk at the museum gets the Capone Glass paperwork to Bored Archivist and back again. Such things will happen either 'soon', 'later', or 'now', depending on, ultimately, how I want to pace it. When the players start playing off each other (Terrible! They must stop this at once!) things become very real, and ( ... )
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It's not really feasible for us all to go away and decide what we're individually going to do on a given week, because we all work together and play off one another, and the problem with this time business is that there will be moments within that week - interactions with NPCs, important journeys or acts - which will require role playing.
And isn't that what we're doing anyway...?
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1.'Realistic' activity durations
In the real world, while it is possible to rush around town in the morning for lulz and Charges, bury your best friend in the afternoon, try and piece together an elaborate conspiracy in the evening, and take five minutes here and there to make a few phone calls to organise a Big Event you have planned, if you did that every day you would die. Unknown Armies is very good at quantifying the effects of Big Mental Stresses, but leaves no room for quantifying the innumerable 'Stress Check Rank 0.1' annoyances that everyone faces every day just trying to do normal things. Because it's no fun to arbitrarily hold players up in traffic when it serves no dramatic purpose, nor is it practical for me to keep tabs on how much low grade stress the PCs are under, everything can take place with peak efficiency. Can you think of one day in your life when you've had an inhuman amount of stuff to do, people to see, connections to make, and everything just clicks? They don't happen often, except if you're a ( ... )
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Also done bits of downtime in a similar way: I've previously been able to fudge a space of time where I knew the players weren't being particularly (inter)active and say "...and Time Moves Forward". Trouble is, lately, someone's always been doing something (and a something that needs 'screen time'), and there's never been a good time to 'resynch' the world clocks.
The in-game pacing doesn't really bother me so much, and short of making that shirt term pacing r-e-a-l-l-y g-o-d-d-a-m-n s-l-o-w it's not going to have an impact on the problem of timescales.
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Still constructing such a system isn't overly hard, basically if someones continuously rushing from pillar to post they'll start to get exhausted, so make their sanchecks harder, impose skill penalties, start having NPCs suggest they're looking strung out, that kind of thing.
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