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Message: <blockquote data-quote="timbannock" data-source="post: 9452670" data-attributes="member: 17913">Taken separately, sure.But I think the thing is that all of this stuff plays together:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Real-time puts a meta-game pressure on the players to move forward.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Real-time doesn't work when tedious tasks take loads of time but aren't especially fun to play out, so fast-forwarding the real-time counter may become necessary at points.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">A player's turn could indicate "tedious, long task starts now," so regrouping allows everyone to skip the boring part and reconvene, while preserving the turn order so players don't get skipped. This also has the effect of fast forwarding the timer.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Significant time passage messes with a real-time timer, and would theoretically result in loads of encounter checks (whether you use crawling rounds or real-time as the trigger for "when to make an encounter check"). Instead of having you roll X number of checks, you just group them into a single check with a higher probability of triggering an encounter.</li> </ul>So I think it exists the way it does because it's a complex problem to solve. Real-time torches are a bit of a gimmick, not a hard rule, and that's apparent because there are rules that are necessary to fast forward it. Turn order is equally a bit of a gimmick, designed to ensure player spotlight and a familiar, "board gamey" way of handling who gets to do stuff when...and like real time torches, has rules to circumvent or fast forward activities that would eat up time when a player tries to hog the spotlight or when the party splits up (this happens a lot with "I scout ahead").I think you can solve this all with a real-time system, or you can solve it all with a turn order system, but it's complex enough that in the case of Shadowdark it was solved with an amalgam of both, preserving turn order/spotlighting, preserving a (mostly) real-time pressure, and keeping it flexible enough to push either thing around to skip over any boring bits of the game.(I'd argue that I think some people take a lot of this stuff too strictly, and learning pacing might be a better solution. But that's very much a me thing.)</blockquote>

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