Time collapse questions

[ideasmith]

TIME COLLAPSE QUESTIONS

In hopes of sparking discussion on realtime/gametime interaction:

Question 1. (Assume one or more fantasy-setting campaigns you have been involved in.) Assume a gameday in which the PC’s spend 12 hours walking, 8 hours sleeping, 2 hours preparing and eating food, 1 hour telling tales by the campfire, ½ an hour eliminating wastes, and ½ an hour fighting monsters. How much time would the players and GM spend roleplaying each of these activities?

Question 2. Given the above gameday, what do you consider a good amount or real time to spend roleplaying each activity.

Question 3. (Assume one or more campaigns of any setting you are or have been involved in.) Describe a typical gameday. List the activities engaged in by the PC’s during the day, the amount of game time the PC’s spend on each activity, and the amount of real time spent by the players and GM roleplaying each activity.

Question 4. What do you consider a good selection of gameday types in a campaign? Describe it as above.

Question 5. What do you consider a good method of describing the relationship between gametime and realtime in a campaign?

Question 6. Describe one or more campaigns which you are or have been involved in using the method you described in question 5.

Question 7. Describe a hypothetical campaign with what you consider to be a good gametime to realtime relationship, using the method you described in question 5.

 

[DumbPaladin]

That's ... an awful lot of questions. And the last two could be an essay in and of themselves. Sorry, but I'm just gonna answer a couple.

#1 --
12 hours of walking: almost 0 RP time; there's nothing worthwhile to roleplay, unless a character wants to start a discussion, in which case I'd say give the characters as long as they need. A random encounter may interrupt this.

8 hours of sleeping: I'm not sure how you'd roleplay this; everyone is unconscious.

2 hours prepping / eating: Eating can be interesting roleplaying, but usually not the standard meal of iron rations and the like -- I'm thinking fancy restaurants or dinners given as a reward for good deeds done. So I'd say this falls into the almost 0 RP time category also. If it's a special meal, maybe 15 minutes.

1 hour telling tales by the campfire: I'm fine with this actually taking 1 hour of RP time. But a lot of groups don't have 1 hour worth of talking in this manner to do. If yours do, then you're probably fortunate.

1/2 hour fighting monsters: This takes up most of the game time, because combat can be rather slow.

Question #2: I think a good amount of roleplaying per session is at least 1 hour each day, though I'd prefer 2 or 3. The more, the better. I want a little combat with my roleplaying experience, not a smidgin of RP with my hack-and-slash marathon session.
Other people prefer the opposite.

 

[Nagol]

1) Assuming a typical game session (i.e. no special dream sequences, NPC visitors / omens, lengthy PC to PC dialogue, etc.) probably 10 minutes on everything prior to the combat and 5 - 180 minutes on the combat. -- depending on amount and difficulty (in many games 30 minutes of combat is huge).

2) For each non-combat selection, 0 - 15 minutes, depending on player interest and required detail needed to adequately develop a common understanding of the situation.

3) Ugh. Too much like work.

4) What is a gameday type?

5) A Dramatic License Drive powered by a Player Interest Extractor.

 

[amerigoV]

TIME COLLAPSE QUESTIONS

½ an hour eliminating wastes

I usually spend about an hour on this one, especially if the game is a bit slow. "Don't go in there."

 

[MatthewJHanson]

As a general rule we roleplay the interesting stuff, where there is danger to the PCs, or when they have a chance to make a major impact. Combat is probably the most obvious, but also interactions with key NPCs or solving in game challenges, like how do we get this 3000 pound magic table back to our base camp.

The boring stuff like sleep or marching through the swam usually gets a hand wave.

 

[ideasmith]

4) What is a gameday type?

In this context, what I meant was 'category of game day based on game time and real time spent on each sort of activity'.

 

[the Jester]

Basically, the answer to most of your questions is, "It depends on the group, whatever we find fun."

That said, a few notes:

The "half-hour adventuring day" drives me crazy. Generally, on an adventuring day, the party spends several hours fighting/planning fights/exploring a dungeon/etc.

The amount of each day spent on each activity also depends on the day; most adventuring groups take days off, many have families or business interests, some are involved in politics or religious hierarchies, etc. And some of these things get roleplayed out a fair amount in some campaigns.

My personal preference is for a fair amount of attention to the personal, nonadventuring elements of the campaign. I like it if my pc (or the pcs in my campaign) has a father and mother, maybe a girlfriend, husband or lover, etc. I like some entire sessions to be combat-free, sometimes even dice-free, while others are almost entirely combat. I guess basically I prefer a game where the pace and focus vary.

 

[jmucchiello]

The problem with this is there are two kinds of RP. I'll call them story RP and character RP. Story RP is anything that furthers the story: meeting with the king, the BEEG's soliloquy, the thief telling the party his version of what he saw while scouting out the smuggler's hideout, strategy session (in character), etc. Character RP is any RP that has nothing to do with the story: ordering dinner at the inn, chatting around the camp fire, negotiating prices at a market, etc.

Neither is better than the other but all players will have a preferred proportion. And that isn't necessarily a fixed proportion. Some games, I don't mind having an hour of game time go buy ordering dinner at an inn in character once maybe twice in a whole campaign. But not every week. For me the first time character RP takes place in a novel situation, it usually cool. The second, not as much, and after that it can induce snoozing. OTOH, story RP is what non-combat/non-investigation situations should be about.

Even breaking it down into two halves in imprecise. RP at the king's ball will be of both types. The balance is what matters there. The trick here is that like there are people who like 90% combat/10% RP versus 10% combat/90% RP. Similarly a ball could be played 10% character RP/90% story RP or vice versa.

 

[steenan]

I won't answer the questions stated in the OP, because it would be completely uninformative. I could try to calculate average times we spend on various things - but what is important is that there is a lot of variation. And the variation is not random; it depends strongly on the system used and the style of the game.

Things to consider:

1. Travel may be skipped in one sentence. Or it may be used to build mood through colorful descriptions. It may be full of rolls if characters need to overcome various obstacles and avoid getting lost. It may be the time when PCs talk, learn about each other and build relations. None of these is better or worse than others. Each has its place.

2. Combat may be hard, but not important to the story as a whole, and play in 20 minutes. Or it may be a minor engagement that does not need rolls, because the opponent is no challenge at all. Or it may be the final confrontation, with many enemies, the BBEG in three forms, a lot of cinematic stunts, in-combat talk and surprising personal reveals - two hours at least, if not four. Once again, each has its place and a good campaign needs a little of each.
Here, I have a personal preference, though. Both as a player and as a GM I don't want any unnecessary combats. And by "unnecessary combats" I don't mean random encounters. I mean combats that are played with detailed mechanics while nothing important is at stake. If, barring an extremely unlucky string of rolls, there is no chance of defeat, such combat should be skipped. If the only thing the encounter is to achieve is using up some resources, even more so.

3. Preparing food is, usually, something that is summed up in a few sentence description, maybe with a single roll to decide how good it was. If the game is of the high action type, I won't waste any time speaking of food. On the other hand, if the characters come from different backgrounds and cultures, and it ia an important part of the game, preparing a meal will be a perfect opportunity for them to talk about tastes, eating habits and taboos. And if the game is rather gray fantasy, just finding and preparing something edible in a harsh environment may be a challenge no less than fighting monsters.

4. Some games use a conflict resolution mechanics for more than just combats. For example, in a game I ran not long ago we had a conflict representing tracking and pursuing someone through a desert (a few days of travel, a sandstorm, a poisoned oasis, negotiations with desert spirits) and a conflict representing looking for treasures in an ancient city, home to a chaotic spirit (navigating the ever-changing streets and maze-like dungeons, finding strange books, confronting the host and trying not to get insane through the process). The system we used allowed us to resolve them in a way very similar to how it resolves combat and made them much more fun than a few skill rolls would be.

5. In the similar vain, it is possible to wrap a long travel into a single description or, if there are real difficulties on the way, into a single mechanically resolved conflict. There won't be any correspondence between each single day of the travel and the session time, though specific obstacles, combats and other activities may be used as parts of the description or the conflict.
Thus, we spend an hour of play on a travel that takes several months: monsters, raging rivers and mountain snowstorms are GM's attacks; finding good paths, taking shortcuts by boat and negotiating with local tribes to hire guides are players' attacks; good meals eaten and stories told by the campfire are actions taken by players to replenish PCs' stamina.

 

[Haltherrion]

As other's have noted a proper answer the questions would take a lot of work, and maybe some spreadsheets

Answering the spirit of the question (I hope), I've never played or ref'd with a rigid schedule. We cover the interesting stuff and leave the rest off-scene. So no bodily functions, little on eating except implied as part of making a camp and so on.

A day may be as simple as: marching order for the day, camp/shift arrangments for the night. If the day travel involves multiple different types of terrain that requires different marching orders or otherwise requires player decisions then we spend time on that as needed.

If there are no encounters during the day or night, it goes super fast. If the party is travelling through pretty much the same terrain over multiple days, then we use the first days setup for multiple days and days can pass very quickly. This can easily happen if the party are in a large caravan that doesn't get bothered by many things or the like.

If they are in a place with lots of different terrains, situations and the like than we spend a lot of time on the day and get more involved with the moment to moment.

It is not so different from a book or a movie. Neither of those genres tolerate a rigid schedule for the passage of time. The author/director may pass over days or months in seconds at one point and at another take a real ten minutes of screen time for the same amount of story time. It's whatever serves the game/story needs.

I never allocate session time to "game time" in the manner you imply. I do have guidelines for mapping session time to combat, RP, setup, dinner (that's real-live people dinner, not character dinner ). These aren't rigid either but I strive for some proportion. Proportion is another concept you'll find in novels and movies as well.

Long ago I probably tended to cover more of the everyday, no matter how boring but that was when I was trying to run a fantasy world simulation. These days, my group and I are looking for entertainment. That's not to say we don't have standards of verisimilitude (we do and they are high) but in the end, there are trade-offs to be made in terms of where session time is spent and touching on the day to day minutiae is one area we ditch. Most groups probably do I imagine.