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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7568129" data-attributes="member: 42582">Agreed on all three points: that most systems don't talk about it; that Gygax obsesses about it; and that Traveller's system is state-of-the-art for the period (and frankly, remains state-of-the-art for any game that is going to track time in "real life" rather than dramatic units).Good point. Which in my mind just reinforces the point I was making, that an action declaration we look for sect members at the teahouse doesn't generally bring with it any particular assumption about how long is spent on the endeavour, and certainly doesn't imply a quick look for 10 minutes then heading off elsewhere.To me, at least, this connects to  [MENTION=5142]Aldarc[/MENTION]'s recent post about system assumptions and the like: what we see in a lot of late-70s/early-to-mid-80s games is a "cargo cult"-like emulation of certain features of D&D without serious consideration of why one would emulate them. So eg we get healing times in games like CoC, RM, etc which ultimately are mere colour in play, because the passing of time has no cost except insofar as the GM decides otherwise. (RQ is an exception, because time not spent healing can be spent training; and BW builds fairly extensively on this idea, further adding in a systematic living cost/maintenance system.)There are so many assumptions here, from the distinction between "downtime" and "in the field", to the method used to manage separate groups.For instance:Here, time is just colour. There's no reason it can't be colour "in the field" also. (D&D pretends that it's not, by specifying spell durations. But as soon as one moves outside of a highly structure dungeon-crawl environment with very rigid movement rules, wandering monster clocks, etc -ie as soon as one moves into the 2nd ed AD&D era - then all the external moving parts are decided by the GM, which makes the players' choices about time mere colour.)</blockquote>

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