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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7567979" data-attributes="member: 82106">I disagree, the majority of systems IME don't even really talk about time. Gygax obsessed about it, but even 2e drops a lot of the mechanical baggage that 1e has around time. For example, the 10 minute turn is mentioned, but no movement rates are associated with it in 2e. Traveler, IMHO, simply calls all time periods "1 week" in strategic play because Marc Miller wanted an 'Age of Sail' feel to his Fifth Imperium. As such jumps take a week, and he simply set all other activities to that time period. It makes play simple, Alan, Beth, and Carl take the Beowulf to Extremis while Eddie and Darla remain on Durant and spend the week looking for a patron. The GM can move both timelines forward, each group gets to make one check/decision/deal with one situation. Beowulf jumps back to Extremis, the rest of the party shops for the equipment needed to carry out the mission assigned by the patron, and play can continue both plausibly and in a dramatically satisfying way. At the time when Traveler was written this was basically a state-of-the-art playing methodology. It sure beat Gygax's 'track every minute for every character'.However, most other games, at that time or others, really didn't talk about time. Lets think about early RPGs. Boot Hill, no real mention of time outside of 'bullet time', and even that is rather vague IIRC. Metamorphosis Alpha/Gamma World, no mention of time at all, except maybe a healing rate (I don't have my GW softcover in front of me, it probably says something about hit point recovery). Other games I recall don't have a lot more to say than this either. I don't recall anything time-specific in RQ for instance. CoC doesn't really talk about time, except as a cost for recovering SAN after an adventure. This is a pretty common pattern for games in this time period. They may note some few specific situations where a time cost exists, but there isn't really a coherent concept in these games of time as a structured resource or some explicit way to manage it or use it dramatically (drama is rarely mentioned in these early games). It is generally just assumed that time is the purview of the GM and may come into play in whatever way he sees fit. Very few of these game diverge much from D&D's central concept of a GM as 'story driver' and referee all rolled into one.Sure, in real life, but even D&D has structures in which this is NOT the assumption. To whit look at the 1e henchman acquisition rules, which allow the PCs to declare (and pay for) specific activities which are then assumed to play out over a period of time during which they are repeated (IE the PCs go to every bar and dive in the town and post messages or something similar for a week). I think it is reasonable to assume that players often given fairly general and open-ended instructions about what their characters do. Traveling for instance, you don't require the players to constantly reiterate exactly how far and fast they're moving and every detail of what they do, nor describe the amount of time they spend. Instead its something like 'we travel down the road' and the GM says something like 'you arrive at the next town'. Maybe something else happens, a decision is required, etc. but barring that, there's no need for constant input. This is highly context-dependent but when the players state certain goals, say "we travel to the next town" then its pretty logical for the GM to assume that whatever time and resources are required to do that are expended and the goal is accomplished, or else the situation changes enough that the original instructions aren't relevant anymore or some new fictional element is present. I don't disagree that, in many cases, a GM is going to notify the players when he thinks a reasonable amount of time/resources is spent and that might justify a new fiction, but there are no hard and fast rules (in D&D anyway, some games like Traveler are bit more structured).But how do you know what 'long odds' are? I still have seen nothing justifying any assertion that you can tell what is long odds most of the time. Even when you can it is a product of decisions you have made yourself, so its not like those odds are 'natural' or unforced in any way.</blockquote>

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