D&D General Younger Players Telling Us how Old School Gamers Played

[overgeeked]

Vox Day, yup.

The most hated man in science fiction. Which mirrors the RPG industry's most hated and despised man, the Pundit.

You'd have to be utterly devoid of both ethics and conscience to throw in with those people.

 

[Lanefan]

Its there in some of the older books. I do recall some tables making use of it. I have used it myself, and the main reason I would suggest doing so is if you have a campaign world where you are running different groups of players and their actions share an impact on the setting (i.e. if group A kills Strahd, Strahd is dead for group B too). This gets even more thorny if your groups of players can have an impact directly on one another. I've run these kinds of campaigns using real time, and run them not doing real time. Doing it the latter way is a book keeping nightmare because you are not just tracking details but tracking them across time too.

Ayup - but I wouldn't do it any other way. Keeping multiple parties somewhat aligned in time is one of the biggest challenges I've had over the years, but it's way more realistic than arbitrarily messing with in-game time.

It gets even more daunting when there's the possibility of communication and-or travel between my setting and someone else's also-active setting, as is currently the case, because now two DMs have to at least vaguely keep track of time in relation to each other's setting as well as our own so as to know who arrives/leaves when in which game world.

If you simply go with real time, suddenly it is much more manageable (though going real time obviously introduces its own difficulties). It is also good for managing downtime.

Even downtime is tracked as in-game time as opposed to real time, in part because a party might finish an adventure at the start of a session, spend half the session doing downtime stuff for a few in-game weeks (e.g. training up), and be back in the field by the evening's end.

If I used strict real-time=game-time I'd have had a party sailing in circles on a ship for 2-and-a-half years and counting. When covid hit and things shut down they were en route to an adventure by ship (about a week's voyage, tops), and that group hasn't resumed yet.

 

[Lanefan]

I think in order for a real-time rule to work, you pretty much also need to end each session back in town (a common feature of West Marches, which I think is part of why this idea appeals to the same people who enjoy that type of play). That would also require either for everyone to commit to keeping the session going for as long as it takes to get back to town, or for there to be some kind of retreat rule, where if you’re still not back in town by the end of the session, you can resolve the whole process of retreating from the dungeon and making the trek back to town in just a few rolls.

Yeah, that just wouldn't work for us. I mean, sometimes we don't just end in mid-adventure but in mid-combat; and a single adventure takes on average about 8 sessions start-to-finish (with a LOT of variance) so playing till it's done isn't really an option.

Were I doing a West Marches, the party would have a PC for every player and those players who showed up for a given session would be tasked with looking after the characters of those who didn't make it. They'd pick up wherever they left off last session, even if in mid-adventure.

 

[S'mon]

If I used strict real-time=game-time I'd have had a party sailing in circles on a ship for 2-and-a-half years and counting. When covid hit and things shut down they were en route to an adventure by ship (about a week's voyage, tops), and that group hasn't resumed yet.

The way I do that with a 1:1 time system is to have the adventure resolve off-screen, and we pick up years later in game time as well as real time. If something is unresolved for years I'd generally regard it as a 'dead adventure' and move on.

 

[S'mon]

The most hated man in science fiction. Which mirrors the RPG industry's most hated and despised man, the Pundit.

You'd have to be utterly devoid of both ethics and conscience to throw in with those people.

OK, well ethics & conscience don't affect whether 1:1 timekeeping is a good idea.

 

[Guest 85555]

Ayup - but I wouldn't do it any other way. Keeping multiple parties somewhat aligned in time is one of the biggest challenges I've had over the years, but it's way more realistic than arbitrarily messing with in-game time.

It gets even more daunting when there's the possibility of communication and-or travel between my setting and someone else's also-active setting, as is currently the case, because now two DMs have to at least vaguely keep track of time in relation to each other's setting as well as our own so as to know who arrives/leaves when in which game world.

Even downtime is tracked as in-game time as opposed to real time, in part because a party might finish an adventure at the start of a session, spend half the session doing downtime stuff for a few in-game weeks (e.g. training up), and be back in the field by the evening's end.

If I used strict real-time=game-time I'd have had a party sailing in circles on a ship for 2-and-a-half years and counting. When covid hit and things shut down they were en route to an adventure by ship (about a week's voyage, tops), and that group hasn't resumed yet.

When I do real time, just to be clear, I don't run it like 24 (where because they got on a plane, and each episode is 1 hour in real time, the drama for the next four episodes must enfold on the four hour plane ride). I'll elapse time during the session, especially for things like travel. It is just real time in terms of the time between sessions. So you could have session covering months of time, but a week passes between that session and the next one in real time and in game time). And it is not something I do in most campaigns, just some.

 

[Lanefan]

The way I do that with a 1:1 time system is to have the adventure resolve off-screen, and we pick up years later in game time as well as real time.

If I was strict about resolving such things "off-screen" they wouldn't get to do much adventuring in play!

They leave town during session 1, reach the adventure site, and wade in; we leave off with them three rooms in.

A 1:! week passes, duirng which time in-character they'd have either finished that adventure or died trying (there's no way in hell I'm going to violate both setting consistency and player agency by arbitrarily saying they go back to town or just sit tight for a week for no reason). So they're back in town again. Lather rinse repeat. End result: the players get lots of practice at travelling to adventures, but that's aobut it.

If something is unresolved for years I'd generally regard it as a 'dead adventure' and move on.

If I knew that group was never going to resume then yes, I'd mini-dungeon* the adventure to its conclusion; mostly to free up those characters for later use in other adventures by players still involved, but partly because that party's success or failure in that particular adventure has, in theory, some long-term story implications there and elsewhere.

* - mostly for use when updating long-retired characters who have done some adventuring in the meantime, a while back I developed some charts and tables that could boil an adventure down to just a few dice rolls - how "big" it is (i.e. is it a one-and-done hit job, a massive megadungeon, or something in between), how rough and tough it is, how lucrative it is, how mission-successful you are, and how long it took in game time - with corollary rolls jumping off from there if needed e.g. if an adventure comes up as "tough" then the PCs involved need to save or have Something Bad happen e.g. death, level loss, major curse, that sort of thing.

I've got long-term data showing what the odds are of each of the various Bad Things happening in an adventure - ditto for Good Things e.g. suddenly gaining a level or stat point, a major blessing, finding/gaining a wish, etc. - which I used to make up these tables. Before that, I did these mini-dungeon things by the seat of my pants, which worked but wasn't as successful or varied in outcome.

 

[S'mon]

If I was strict about resolving such things "off-screen" they wouldn't get to do much adventuring in play!

They leave town during session 1, reach the adventure site, and wade in; we leave off with them three rooms in.

A 1:! week passes, duirng which time in-character they'd have either finished that adventure or died trying (there's no way in hell I'm going to violate both setting consistency and player agency by arbitrarily saying they go back to town or just sit tight for a week for no reason). So they're back in town again. Lather rinse repeat. End result: the players get lots of practice at travelling to adventures, but that's aobut it.

I occasionally have a group end in media res, in which case I'll do a double time jump at the end of the following session.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

You know... Gen X actually seems to have gotten away scot-free in the Aging Wars. You don't see anyone hating on them or blaming them for anything.

I feel that we are the generational equivalent of the sitcom character that was prominent in the pilot episode, but never was heard from again in the rest of the series. We peaked at Reality Bites.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

It's an important thing to keep in mind, that the vast majority of gamers right now are younger. Totaling up all the players in my gaming groups, other than the one guy that started gaming before I did, and my brother who started at the same time, every single player got their start with 3e or later. Heck, when I include the other groups those players are in, that statistic remains the same.

With all due respect to anyone who played in the 70s and early 80s and still plays today, you guys are huge outliers. Adding the additional selector that you’re still so engaged with D&D that you spend considerable time on EnWorld talking about it makes you very exceptional people, but not at all representative of the common casual D&Ders of yesteryear who ran epic dungeons for anyone in the neighborhood who they could wrangle for a couple years and then didn’t anymore cause life and got a giggle seeing it on stranger things 40 years later. Would love to know how that guy played.

Ugh! While I've been recording my own music and vocals for years now, I wouldn't know the first thing about making a YouTube video.

You should definitely make a Youtube video about it !

It also bears mentioning that without a cleric, and sometimes even with, healing back to full HP at higher levels could potentially take weeks or months of in-game time, if you wanted to be a stickler about HP. With a large group of rotating players AND probably rotating characters as well, saying "well, it's been two weeks of real time since Ranulf came back from the dungeon, so you've recovered 14 HP," is a fairly elegant solution to the problem of tracking recovery. It's either that or keeping an in-game calendar. And as someone that once did that in 2e, I can say that I would prefer not to.

Exactly. It’s being talked about as a means of tracking in game time for large-group games or rotating players and characters. How do you know when group A went into the dungeon compared to group B? Keep strict time records, have each group head back to town at the end of the session, and have in-game downtime match real-world time. It’s not meant for a single party game with a set group of players and characters. That’s the bit of context people are missing, which Ben talks about in that video. It’s a means to keep people engaged by introducing a ticking clock time element to play. Group A wants to keep coming back to the table so they can get the loot before group B. It works great for that.