Passage of Time IG

Larry Fitz · Apr 3, 2003

How is your game paced? Do the characters Roleplay every waking moment? Are they just there for the combats? Do they winter somewhere or adventure year round? How much IG time passes for every 5 levels your players achieve? This is a question I've been wondering about quite a bit lately.

Skade · Apr 3, 2003

You would not belive how much time my players have spent buying clothes in my games. They also go to a bar, a cafe, and the library quite often. That might be an inidication of how time is spent in my games.

I have a timeline for my games but quite often there are occassions where the players do whatever it is they wish to do, and it is roleplayed out fairly often. If I, or they are not really in the mood we gloss it over and move on to the next scene, getting the machanics covered without too much roleplay. Obviously if nothing is happening I skip forward, but we do often play out small scenes that might not make it into many games.

s/LaSH · Apr 3, 2003

It's generally the new and exciting that gets air time in my games. If the PCs teleport to Buda-Pesht and go into the Orc Quarter looking to buy poisons, you bet we'll roleplay it. If they stay in Venice and pick up a couple of arrows before leaving for Parts Unknown, that's not so exciting beyond the first time. So generally, only RP the juicy bits - but beating up monsters isn't the only juicy bit.

Silver Moon · Apr 3, 2003

Well, if you've been following my current Story Hour you will see that a lot of the detail is role played. In this module we've now covered exactly one week of character time in nine three-hour game sessions, so it isn't every winking moment.

As for the passage of time, for the first decade of our group we kept a 1 year player time = 1 year character time ratio, so that player and character memories of who long ago something took place would be the same. We did that by having the characters adventure from late spring until early fall, and staying home and relaxing on their island the rest of the year.

We then did a campaign restart, with a second group of characters on the same continent, and playing alternating groups then slowed down the timeline. The groups are also now doing far more adventuring off-season. Last year we began a third campaign, which has slowed things even further. It's now taken us 12 years of gaming to cover the past 5 years of character time.