'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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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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