Ever since I've heard of the idea, I've been fascinated by it. How it the "one-shot" nature enforced? Does it never happen that real-life time runs out and the PCs are still in the "dungeon" or still in the wilderness?
It can be an issue. Folks have mentioned three of the top ways to handle it:
1. Just force the players to manage their time well, and/or extend the session until they make it back. This is how I often did it when I was running a game like this online during the pandemic. We were playing online, and usually weren't playing on a work night, so we could run late if we weren't done yet.
2. Handwave it.
3. Implement a table to roll on with possible risks and consequences to abstract it. The first of these I remember seeing was on
Jeff Rients' blog in 2008.
I have always wanted to find a way to pull off a Massive Multiplayer Tabletop RPG Campaign, where different groups explored the same map and had real impacts on it. The hardest part, I think, would be getting everyone on the same in-world time schedule.
I did this. Part of the original concept was that players had to schedule their sessions with the DM, so it was on THEM to organize expeditions (this also necessitates the DM having a pretty flexible schedule).
When I ran my open table/West Marches game I invited a couple of dozen folks, had a few try it out and then drop out, and had a smaller sub-set become regulars. They wound up shaking out into two groups who routinely played with the same folks (with a couple of rare crossovers), one of which usually played Friday nights, and the other usually Saturday nights. Having that regular appointment/time slot turned out easier for people in practice.
Believe that was what Gygax did. Believe he said that you needed to keep copious notes on times of each groups, so you could weave it all together (not sure where I read that though, may have been in Dragon).
It’s in the AD&D DMG. It’s where the idea of time passing at real-world speed between sessions comes from. And this is exactly why. To make keeping track of things that much easier. Group A played last Tuesday and cleared this dungeon to room 114. Group B plays tonight and is hitting the same dungeon.
Yeah, I mostly had the same real-world and in-game week pass between sessions and abstracted the time differential a little for the two groups playing on successive real-world nights. If the Friday night group, say, didn't complete their session within a single game day, I would usually just fudge time a little and still rule that they were back at home base by the time the Saturday night group set out. But they did spend a lot of time in the same big dungeon, cross paths and race each other to treasures. At least a couple of times a group would press their luck after a nasty fight, looking for a hidden treasure so as to avoid letting it fall into the other group's hands. Sometimes they would leave taunting or misleading messages written on the dungeon walls, try to hide clues, or plant false rumors in town.
At times the two groups would be adventuring in totally unrelated areas and dungeons, however, and eventually I let them pause and pick up where they were on longer adventures, when it seemed unlikely that they could affect or be affected by the other group. And once one group stopped playing, the remaining group basically turned into a regular scheduled game for another year or so of real world time.
The Pirate Borg Discord server did something like this last year, with multiple groups of pirates forming up and playing over the course of several months, and all of their actions affecting the map of the Dark Caribbean for everyone.
Obviously, you need to get a lot of committed DMs involved, but it's definitely doable.
I also played in a West Marches (converted to Shared World) OSR Discord server during the height of the pandemic with several DMs running in the same setting. It was a fun time, and characters could cross over.
