'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.
This all played well and, in those early days, seemed to synch quite nicely with the progression of the weeks OOC - in "Real Time"
There was romance, there was wary circling, there was the break up of Suzanne and Fowler and there was the decision to take a trip on a dirrigible to New York where - according to Science and the Will of the cosmos - a baby was concieved.
However, Synchronicity spoke and as Fowler and Eve went at it cross-country, one of the key NPCs was murdered, random organs were delivered to Eve's bookshop (the current party base of choice) and the brown smelly stuff hit the rapidly spinning stuff.
After the pieces of the puzzle slotted together and we came to realise that body part(s?) that had been delivered belonged to the party's Amoromantic NPC, obviously the investigation into the murder became the main driving force, compelling our actions. There was also the matter of the funeral to deal with and this, atop of fears that the trail of the murderer might grow cold, we needed to cram a lot of actions into a short space of time.
The in-game period of a week, from the discovery of Jennifer's body to the funeral, took less than a week. In "real", OOC time, it took over a month. Could it have even been two months?
During that period, there was a considerable amount of Angst as divinations were conducted (Fowler believing himself to be the ultimate target of the murderer; Eve being forced to confront the potential fallout of several stupid, well-intended mistakes she had made in the not-too-distant past; so on, so forth). There was the "mundane" investigations into the murderer - looking at surveillance tapes, the autopsy reports and crime-scene investigations; there was Mish/Suzanne's intricate city-wide schemes and construction of a Court... yadda, yadda, yadda. In short, this meant that Every Minute Counted.
No longer could Mr GM say "Okay, well, it's Sunday. Anyone doing anything? Just the usual? Okay - nothing happens. In fact, nothing happens on Monday either unless you want to speak up. No? Right then, we get to Thursday....".
No, because we each had Urgent Matters - there was (still is!!) a killer on the lose, Suzanne's plans are still charging forward at full steam (no pun intended), there's the continually (joyful) interaction and development of the relationship between Fowler and Eve etc, etc. And because we all know our characters and know the intricacies of how they would behave, we want to make those actions and those thought processes manifest in game time.
So this brings us to situations where, with the US elections imminent, it was necessary for game time to suddenly be brought into synch with the "Real World".
In game, we jumped the best part of two months.
As the player of Eve, I lost 2 months of character development time as the reality of her pregnancy dawns on her and there is considerable wrestling and - potentially comedic - encounters to be had.
No: what actually happened was that OOC, Mr GM had been dropping hints about what was to come so Eve's pregnancy (sinister or no) was something that I, as a player had been bracing myself for. A note was slipped in my direction at a certain in-game time, and there it was. My little line on a pregnancy test kit.
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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 active as she usually is on a day-to-day basis (meeting people, travelling to get charged etc) for the last week. Or, equally as poo, she's going to have to wait for a month to pass in game time before she can reap the benefits of her accomplishment. This would, of course, render her damned-near incapable of mixing with the rest of the PCs as she locks herself away - unable to do much else other than write - thereby unable to progress her grander plans.
As a player, the fudging of time is frustrating in a number of ways because we seem to go from the extreme of a single IC day taking a fortnight OOC, to glossing over grand tracts of potentially interesting development in the name of keeping up to date with current affairs.
Despite having "re-set" time at the beginning of November, come a few session's time, we'll probably be another month behind. And then it'll be Christmas and New Year, and we'll have to do another big jump.
As a player, the opportunity to really experience my characters in this way has been unbelievably deep and involving. I've never felt this consumed by a game.
But, as a character, making plans and sticking to schedules is impossible. If time were really running in-synch with real life, we'd lose out so much of our development time and the IC moments which have given this game the unique flavour it has.
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