'Fuzzy Time' in long-term rpgs

[moradrel]

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

Comments

Re: Tired rambling on time

[lucrecia]

One thing I will point out as being a major problem with drawing comparisons between fuzzy time and movies or TV shows is that the directors and script writers will know what the end point of the episode will be, and so can pace things accordingly.

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.

Re: Tired rambling on time

[moradrel]

The Al Capone glass thing was fudged, but more happily than the other fudging. Because it was interaction with the world, I could prescribe a timeframe of 'in a while', and have it sorted when enough time has felt like it has passed. I'm grateful for Mish not pushing me too hard on the exact timing of this, but she could have, and that would have made things tricky, because saying that it's going to take a couple of weeks IC time (which I think I did, originally) to arrange will mean it drags on for ever.

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.