This strikes me as untrue save for idiosyncratic styles of play - presumably any ones dependent on highly discrete scene shifts and frames. For us, the use of normal time durations helped set the pace of the narrative and helped determine when to shift scenes. When the wizard's polymorph self spell was about to run out, we shifted scenes from the war council he was spying on as a small creature to the scene with the rest of the PCs establishing the safehouse base of operations in the enemy city.
Frankly, I don't see why I should give you a pass on statements like this any more than 4e fans give a pass to critics' complaints about dissociative mechanics hindering immersion, 4e's encounter/skirmish focus hindering story development and role playing, or any other similar position.
To the best of my knowledge, based on your posting history on this site, you don't play narrativist D&D, and have little interest in doing so. If that's not true, I'm interested to hear what you've done, and especially how you've used AD&D or 3E for this purpose!
In case it's not clear, by "narrativism" I mean
story now;
Eero Tuovinen gives a nice summary of what he calls "the standard narrativistic model" of RPG play:
1.One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications.
2.The rest of the players each have their own characters to play. They play their characters according to the advocacy role: the important part is that they naturally allow the character’s interests to come through based on what they imagine of the character’s nature and background. Then they let the other players know in certain terms what the character thinks and wants.
3.The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.
4.The player’s task in these games is simple advocacy, which is not difficult once you have a firm character. (Chargen is a key consideration in these games . . .) The GM might have more difficulty, as he needs to be able to reference the backstory, determine complications to introduce into the game, and figure out consequences. Much of the rules systems in these games address these challenges, and in addition the GM might have methodical tools outside the rules, such as pre-prepared relationship maps (helps with backstory), bangs (helps with provoking thematic choice) and pure experience (helps with determining consequences).
These games . . . form a very discrete family of games wherein many techniques are interchangeable between the games. The most important common trait these games share is the GM authority over backstory and dramatic coordination . . . which powers the GM uses to put the player characters into pertinent choice situations.
You can play a game in this style without using extremely hard and overt scene-framing (although hard and overt scene-framing can be part of the style). But as the references to the GM's role and the power that the GM needs to exercise indicate, it is important to this style of play that the transition from scene to scene be constrained primarily by metagame considerations. Whereas a focus on the minutiae of ingame times and spell durations, detailed and long-term healing rules, keeping track of provisions, etc (that is, just the sort of things that Gygax emphasises in his PHB and DMG), tends to make considerations of ingame causation, rather than metagame considerations, the principal drivers of transition from scene to scene.
In the particular example of play you give, it's not clear to me what the point of the scenes was, and who was responsible for framing them. (I'm not questioning that they had a point. But it's not clear to me, from what you've said, what it was.) As I've tried to indicate, scene framing in the sort of play I am talking about has a certain function - provoking dramatically and thematically significant choices from the players, via their PCs - and this is achieved via a particular combination of techniques - GM authority over scene framing, in combination with faithful adherence by all at the table to the action resolution mechanics, once the scene has been framed. (4e incorproates these techniques via some of its mechanical departures from earlier versions of D&D: changes to spell durations, healing rules, the importance of mundane equipment, etc; its emphasis on the encounter, designed according to metagame priorities, as the primary unit of play; its use of the skill challenge as a non-combat scene-based conflict resolution mechanic; etc)
These two techniques, of course, can't be combined in a system in which action resolution typically spills outside the context of a particular scene. This is a further reason why the sorts of mechanics I've talked about, which encourage a focus on continuous exploration in play and make that continous exploration relevant to action resolution, get in the way of narrativist play.
A nice example of the sort of approach which prioritises exploration and fidelity to ingame causation, at the expense of the metagame-driven framing of scenes, is
this one, to do with time keeping and scene framing:
Metagame time is rarely discussed openly, but it's the crucial one. It refers to time-lapse among really-played scenes: can someone get to the castle before someone else kills the king; can someone fly across Detroit before someone else detonates the Mind Bomb. Metagame time isn't "played," but its management is a central issue for scene-framing and the outcome of the session as a whole. . .
Gygax's text [ie his DMG] perfectly states the Simulationist view of in-game time. It is a causal constraint on the other sorts. . . it constrains metagame time. It works in-to-out. In-game time at the fine-grained level (rounds, seconds, actions, movement rates) sets incontrovertible, foundation material for making judgments about hours, days, cross-town movment, and who gets where in what order. I recommend anyone who's interested to the text of DC Heroes for some of the most explicit text available on this issue throughout the book.
. . .
Concrete examples . . . [of] Simulationism over-riding Narrativism
. . .
The time to traverse town with super-running is deemed insufficient to arrive at the scene, with reference to distance and actions at the scene, such that the villain's bomb does blow up the city. (The rules for DC Heroes specifically dictate that this be the appropriate way to GM such a scene).
It's not entirely clear to me, in your actual play example, how the time on the wizard's polymorph spell was tracked, at the table. But it seems to me that you may be giving an instance of precisely the use of durations measured in ingame units of time to determine scene-framing, that
contrasts with a metagame driven approach to scene framing.
Which goes back to my opening comment: I have never got the impression from you that you are interested in or aiming at narrativist D&D. But, as I said, if I am wrong about this, tell me more!
(There are other, secondary elements of the episode you describe that I am not sure about from what you say. If the passage of time was counted out or calculatd minutely, with measurements being made on maps, and speeds being calculated, and optimal paths being determined - perhaps with all the other players declaring actions for their PCs in that intervening time - then that is precisely the sort of distraction from the focus on the scene and what is at stake in it that I am stating is an obstacle to narrativist play. My own experience of this sort of obstacle to narrativist play comes from both GMing AD&D and GMing Rolemaster.
Conversely, if the time was more-or-less handwaved, such that it would have made no difference had the spell duration been "one scene" or "one local spying mission", then it seems that the gametime duration is perhaps serving just as some colour over the top of a different mechanic. I have experienced D&D run this way, as a player rather than a GM, and it tends to exhibit that degree of GM force that I also identified, upthread, as inimical to narrativist play.)
