'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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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 PC when this happens every single day.
This needs slowing down, to account for the things that would slow a PC down that aren't dramatically viable to dwell upon. I was initially thinking of a flat 'It takes you three times as long as a conservative estimate to do this thing' ruling, but I think I have a better, more entertaining way, which I'll expand upon if anyone thinks I may be onto something.
2.The Friends Effect
Analogies with TV shows are well taken because, as I freely admit, I take directorial queues from stuff like Angel. However, when I was thinking about the problem last night my mind fell back to Friends, as it has more interpersonal conflict resolution between shows, and less waiting for the next hellbeast to show up.
Now, in such a tv show with long-running plots set in a world that changes (Thanksgiving one episode, Christmas in a couple of episodes time) there is Drama that takes place. This drama may not necessarily get resolved at the end of the episode, but when the episode ends (unless it's specifically a 2-parter) that drama... hangs. By the time the next episode has picked up, time has clearly moved on, tempers have cooled, but seemingly no IC/screentime discussions have taken place. It's like people's actions towards anything that isn't 'downtime activity' have been placed in suspended animation, but their feelings towards them have had the chance to 'mature', a bit like what happens between RP sessions.
The way I can see this being implemented in RP is thus: unless it's obvious that the 'episode' is a multi-part episode, time is assumed to roll forward one week between sessions. You won't notice it happening, as inter-character activity will hang until the next session, but time will move forward. The scene will break, and the next session will start with a new one. In between, downtime activity, where no-one questions how exactly you can return to whatever it is you want to do when you've just shot a man / had a psychotic break / performed an Ancient Unspeakable Blood Rite.
I'm not sure how to work the details, but can you see where I'm going with this?
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Not in a harsh, 2 weeks now becomes a month.
But the more... Players are all Roleplaying, they natter for a good 15 minutes, plan, plot, sceme what ever.
They started talking at say 19:00 game time.
They finish, go ref, what time is it in game... I say hmm... 21:00.
There 15 minute conversation took 2 hours in game time. I've never really had this questioned or pulled up. If I did, I'd throw in things like real life plotting and planning takes alot longer, needs more details, and all the other stuff that gets ignored when an RP battle Plan is put into action.
As to long term pacings, I'm not to sure about that one.
Darkluke in his M&M campaign sort of bought us up to speed by having a 6 month 'break' in the story. We don't do much, there is no threat, just a brief downtime of what we have done in those 6 months, and then its back into the action.
We average about 1 Game day a session.
Thouhg it being set in a Comic Book Universe, real world events don't matter so much.
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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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We have a lot of personal plot that comes and goes, sometimes jobs are personal, sometimes jobs are handed down from NPCs. Players have long term plans that tend to get worked on during jobs (to get specific things/information) and then longer research that occurs in down-time between jobs. For example one character who had a bizarre alien experience (in 4th century france, about 2 years ago game time and real time) is still dealing with that plot in fits and bursts, although like many personal plots its grown to take over more of the character over time (see also: Renfield's cats and his occult knowledge, when he first joined DG he was a gun nut who wanted to shoot eeeevil, now he's obsessed with saving the human race possibly via mass murder and has recently stopped caring about firearms seeing them as pointless compared with harnessing dark forces of cosmic evil).
Since we have some non-personal plot coming in (NPC groups battling and also the end times), and a timescale of a year or so before things really hit the fan this means we can jump forward now and then to sync up.
However we are starting to get badly divorced from reality so real events are getting less and less important since all we really care about is the end of the world (and eating parents, ommy nom nom).
Although we did have a political debate the other day about the election, so the real world is still real enough to intrude.
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