Inquisitor Tremayne
Friday 12-12-2008, 06:40 PM
From another thread:
This illustrates my point about time in games effectively. You've progressed time 1 year over the course of 7 levels of gameplay. I don't mean to corner you into assuming all of your games will mimic this same style, but even if you jumped time double or triple that rate, you still wouldn't hit human age categories much, if at all (unless someone built a character with an age right at the cusp of an age category).
I agree that it's fun, if you're reading a book or a biography of your character. How do you make it fun, in practice, with a group of players sitting around a table, and span 50 years? 600 or 900? I'm not questioning how much exploration you can accomplish in that time. I'm just wondering if you'd have fun during a session where you're macro-managing your character across great leaps of time instead of playing the specific fun parts in a micro-setting.
First there isn't any sort of macro-managing the time jump. Unless the characters level, which I usually give them a free level or two during a time jump depending on how much time passes. A decent description of the time that passes, what the PCs do, what they want their PCs to do during this down time, and keeping it adventure-lite, is sufficient enough to enact a time jump.
So there is very little time spent on what goes on during the time jump, it is more of a cinematic wipe or montage and then boom it is x years later. This way you get back to the fun parts of the game, playing out what happens during that particular time in the PCs life.
This illustrates my point about time in games effectively. You've progressed time 1 year over the course of 7 levels of gameplay. I don't mean to corner you into assuming all of your games will mimic this same style, but even if you jumped time double or triple that rate, you still wouldn't hit human age categories much, if at all (unless someone built a character with an age right at the cusp of an age category).
I agree that it's fun, if you're reading a book or a biography of your character. How do you make it fun, in practice, with a group of players sitting around a table, and span 50 years? 600 or 900? I'm not questioning how much exploration you can accomplish in that time. I'm just wondering if you'd have fun during a session where you're macro-managing your character across great leaps of time instead of playing the specific fun parts in a micro-setting.
First there isn't any sort of macro-managing the time jump. Unless the characters level, which I usually give them a free level or two during a time jump depending on how much time passes. A decent description of the time that passes, what the PCs do, what they want their PCs to do during this down time, and keeping it adventure-lite, is sufficient enough to enact a time jump.
So there is very little time spent on what goes on during the time jump, it is more of a cinematic wipe or montage and then boom it is x years later. This way you get back to the fun parts of the game, playing out what happens during that particular time in the PCs life.