'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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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.
Very fuzzy.
I think fuzzy time in roleplaying campaigns works much the same way: it's not perfect, but it's the best way of running things.
Possibly an idea for the GM would be to have a little more in the way of downtime. Take the players aside and say, "Right, what are your plans for the next week?"
From that, insert plot at an appropriate rate. To use the UA example, the murder could have taken up all our time, but that time need not have been productive (and was therefore not put on screen).
I was watching a few of the Messiah TV movies the other week with Anny, and I noticed how each one did actually cover periods of at least weeks, and in at least one case several months... like a real murder investigation often does. However, fuzzy time meant that sub-plot elements like personal grudges, arguments, romances and so on only developed in synch with the main plot.
In the case of UA, where the emphasis appears to be reversed, it'd do better to have the main plot advance at a pace according to PC plans.
Even James McGowan has to take time to plan things, to deal with other issues, and then crush us like ants. Similarly the Sleepers gave Alex 48 hours to resolve the issues sparked by the side-effects of his major charging ritual.
48 hours to kill a story that had hit the media? To alter the beliefs of an entire newborn cult? To (potentially) murder a messiah and a priest in such a way that the messiah's stigmata were forgotten and he didn't become a martyr? Alex got the job half-done, and told the Sleeper that he may as well go and fuck himself because, ultimately, it was the Sleeper's responsibility to sort the job out, and if Alex failed, the Sleeper would also get kacked.
If Alex had had a week (several days of which happened off-screen, contiguous with other players' extended schemes), yes, the pressure would have been less on Alex, but for the players it still would have been an uncomfortably close deadline.
One of the hardest things about GMing a game is saying, "Yes, you don't resolve this problem in 30 minutes." Hacking that government database does actually take the best part of a week to do. Researching this new spell takes a month. Making those explosives will take at least two days. Yeah, that thing that's being posted to you? Please allow 28 days for delivery.
And then skip forwards a bit in time. This is out-of-play time, where the only things that happen are unimportant enough that the editor cut them for time, or the scriptwriter didn't bother writing them in the first place.
However, even when that's done, there's a difficulty in synchronising in-play events such that they occur at the same time. This is where fuzziness and synchronicity come in.
Wild Bill Hickock and Seth Bullock arrive in Deadwood on the same day. This is coincidentally the same day that a Norwegian family is apparently massacred by Indians on the road, and also the day that Al Swearengen attempts to swindle Brom and Alma Garrett as they negotiate for the purchase of a worthless gold claim.
That's the plot of the first episode of Deadwood - events that in reality would probably happen over the space of a month, compressed so that they all occur at conveniently overlapping moments within the same 24 hours.
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They know - to take the example of pregnancy where time is obviously a universal standard - that if someone falls pregnant at the start of the episode and pops the sprog at the end, 9 months (give or take) has passed.
As a player, I didn't know that 2 months was about to suddenly shoot by and couldn't meter my actions accordingly. A TV show wouldn't be in a situation to make the mistake of saying "Yeah, so-and-so is due to make the switch in two days time" and then have the female lead develop a 3-month bump in that period. A TV show would have enough of a passing nod to the progression of time to leave out such indicators.
We, as players, with characters who have their own individual schedules and secret agendas, have our own - sometimes conflicting - timelines.
Another example was Suzanne's acquisition of the orange-juice glass for Shithead. IC/OOC, this was supposed to happen "in a couple of days, when I do my next lecture". This actually turned into a few months as time was fudged.
And, just to make another point, there's a difference between time to NPCs and time to PCs. NPCs stop when the game stops. When the book closes at the end of the session, the NPCs freeze and wait to be thawed the following Wednesday. We, as players, go away and chatter over our Facebook accounts, exchange emails and develop plans in "downtime". 48-hours is not a lot of time to the in-game character of Alex, but to the player Richard, that's a fortnight of planning. Either Alex's brain runs at 7-times the usual speed of the average human, or we have to take it as read that Characters' Thought Processes Are Not Like Yours And Mine.
48 hours to the Sleepers is 48 hours. 48 hours to Alex, is however long Richard is prepared to think on the matter.
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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 sadly out of my omnipotent control.
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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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It does falls down though, in that Deadwood is small. Small and isolated. It doesn't have to maintain any sort of link to the rest of the world. A Cosmic Level game of UA pretty much has to keep step with developments of the world and its Collective Subconscious, because the world actually changes, and these changes have to be taken into account somehow.
However, I think TV shows may hold the answer yet, and I'll get onto that in a moment.
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