Downtime, or skipping time

[beingfrank]

I'm wondering what purposes people see being served by dowtime, or skipped time in a game.  By that I mean deciding 'we're going to advance the game world by 6 months, please make a list of how the PCs spend their time, and then we'll start again.'  I can see that getting to the fun bits is one motivation, but I'm wondering if people have come across others.

I ask because I'm in the situation where the GM and the only other player of a game I play have decided that we need to skip 6 months of game time.  At at time when my character is possibly falling for the love of her life, when she making important decisions about the shape of an organisation that will influence politics in the setting, and when she's drastically reshaping relationships with family and other important people in her life.  For me, that's the meat of the game.  But the others feel that there's nothing to play with until 6 months have passed.  I'm trying to work out what I've overlooked that makes downtime so appealing to them, because I respect these people enough to know that they'll have a good reason and purposes to be served.  So far, asking them hasn't enlightened me (before anyone suggests it, and I'm still working on it) but I thought that other people must use such techniques on occassion, and I wondered about what role they play within the game, and the theoretical implications.

Hmm, not a very well framed question, but I can't think of a better way just now.

[Doctor Xero]

I've always used downtime as both a 'breather' and as a way to catch up time (since it can take six weeks of real time to play out one action-packed day).  It gives the players a chance to let their player-characters take a breather as well.

But downtime during such a crucial time in one player-character's life?  That makes little sense to me.

It sounds as though the campaign might be better served if this were instead a time for individualized episodes (with everyone playing the NPCs for each individual's "solo").  Or I might claim time has passed for everyone else but run "flashback time" for the one character at such a crucial juncture.

However, it seems to me to be unfair to abbreviate her player-character's time merely because no one else is at such a juncture.

Doctor Xero

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I'm with the Doc on this one. It seems very reasonable to me that you present your case to the others - "Sure, we'll pick up with group stuff six months later, but let's play some serious stuff for my player-character that takes place in the interim."

And who knows? Perhaps that will inspire the other players to be involved, not only through playing NPCs or similar, but even through bringing in their player-characters as ensemble-support of yours.

Best,
Ron

[ethan_greer]

Yeah, definitely state your case at least to the GM if not the whole group. Perhaps the GM would be willing to play a one-on-one session with you if the rest of the group is adamantly opposed to playing out this 6-month period. While it's good that you trust your fellow players, this sounds pretty important to you. I'd at least get the reasons.

As for the appeal of downtime other than "nothing's happening," the D&D group I'm in did an in-game year off between modules as a sort of thematic thing - we defeated the big evil in Night Fang Spire, and then the party went their separate ways. One of the guys got engaged, the ranger got himself a new animal companion (who was the son of the druid's old animal companion), the fighter bought a house in Waterdeep and that sort of thing. Then, when a new threat to the land reared its ugly head, we "got the band back together" to kick its ass.  There was some in-character letter-writing, some cool roleplaying of the reunion of characters, and a wedding. It was fun. So, that's one reason to do downtime.

Actually, thinking about it, this was a way to serve the multiple creative agenda at the table. We took a break from Gamist hack-n-slash to do a bit more character and story-oriented play. So perhaps it wasn't really downtime so much a temporary shift in the focus of play.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I was thinking a bit more about this, and one thing popped out: I think the problem that might arise, and perhaps already has, is that one might perceive the choice as dichotomous:

EITHER we play out all freakin' six months in a linear, day-by-day way,
OR we skip it all and start up six months later

I think the task at hand is to break this dichotomy. You aren't arguing in favor of the first option in hopes that sometime along the way, your character's romantic issues arise. You want to get those issues into play, that's all, and the "six months later" seems to violate that because it's too long.

So I strongly suggest agreeing with the GM that some kind of time-cut is desirable, and merely presenting the case that the skipping focus on your character's immediate conflicts. Perhaps a two-step skip is the way to go: (1) to a situation relevant to your character's immediate conflicts, and then (2) to the six-months-later point.

Best,
Ron

[Mike Holmes]

Ron beat me to the dichotomy thing. Have they considered a structure in which between each and every scene the consideration of how much time passes is precisely how long it takes to get to the next interesting thing?

Actually they have. In fact everybody does this on some scale. When you say, "I'm going to the Tavern," does the GM always describe everything between point A and point B? He can't actually, but does he even try? Or does he just say," OK, ten minutes later, you're walking into the tavern." ?

Has he ever said, "Three days later, you arrive in the next city." ?

He's doing cutting right there. The question is what his priority is in cutting. Some GM's in order to get a more immersive feel have to describe everything even potentially significant that a person encounters in at least some small detail. That is, if he has on a map that there's an impressive temple on the way to the tavern from where the character is now, he'll feel that he has to mention to the player that they're passing it, in order that they player feel like they're in-world.

Similarly, to you, it's important that this family stuff gets worked out. If the other players prefer Gamism to your mode of play, then perhaps they see all of that as just backdrop for the real challenges, which are killing monsters or something.


There are loads of reasons why long breaks make sense. If there is not plot left dangling out there, no challenge, nothing particularly interesting left to explore, then what the break does is provide a more plausible place to introduce the next "plot" or "adventure." Otherwise you get what I refer to as "Magnum PI" syndrome. I named it that because when I'd watch that show, way back, I'd always think to myself, "Sure Tom Selleck is good looking, but that's the fiftieth girl I've seen him fall in love with only to be gone by plot or fiat by the next episode." I mean, in Law & Order, you buy that the plots are just their day to day work - it makes sense. In other shows it really stretches belief that the things that happen to the characters happen with such frequency.

RPGs are similar. How many "adventures" did Frodo go on? One, and it was enough. How many did Conan go on? Loads and loads. And between each, you have a sense of him wandering the world, doing different professions, time passing in general. No author writes characters having adventure after adventure with no explanation as to why this person lives in such interesting times.

So breaks are good for plausibility. In Aria, this is built into the system, actually. In Pendragon, you adventure for a while, and then you have to return home and run your estate for a season. Ars Magica has seasonal rates of play as well. These are all ways to make pacing more plausible. They also allow the issue of age to become a potential issues. If characters go on "adventures" every day, then their story potential gets reached well before they ever age at all. That's not bad, but it's fun to have the other option as well.

In Hero Quest, downtime optionally results in character advancement in broad areas. This is genius, IMO. In play, you can only advance specific abilites. The character doesn't change professions, or cultures during detailed play time, or even get substantively better at them in a broad sense. They only get better at very narrow things. It takes lots of time to become good at something in a broad sense.

In this way, advancing time allows players to start playing relatively "inexperienced" characters, and eventually become "experienced" in a plausible manner. It's an unusual paradigm, you make decisions that are important to the character in the short terms that have effects that could be achieved in the short term, and decisions for the long term that have appropriate effects.

The effect on play is that players realize (I hope, much of this is speculative at this point) that they're not out to "power up," but rather to just make interesting choices about their characters in the short run. "Powering Up" then is given during downtimes for free to punctuate this point. Meaning that the power up reward isn't seen as a goal. So you can have characters played at different power levels with the different themes appropriate, and stil not have players informed that the game is about gaining power.

Make sense? For a group that wants plausibility, often downtime is used to post facto make plausible ability increases. For example, if there's a year before the next adventure, in which the character is said to be studying magic, then when he gets the level in play and buys Wizard, then there's an "excuse" for why he was allowed to do that (AD&D1E said that after gaining a level that PCs had to do training downtime before getting the effects - I can't speak to later editions).

So, does any of this seem like it's plausible as the sort of reasons that the players seem to want downtime?

Mike

[M. J. Young]

I hope this is more than a "me too" post.

When I'm running games, time speeds up and slows down often. It has to do with the level of detail that matters in the current events. That in turn has to do with the degree to which the players are interested in those events as objects of play.

Mike mentioned training time in OAD&D, and we had that a lot in my games. Even though we shortened it significantly, when a character had to train for the next level, play was always on this order:

[*]Character X leaves to train for so many days.[*]While he is gone we are going to do these administrative things such as resupplying, making repairs, and organizing.[*]The time has passed, and we'll begin the next adventure.[/list:u]Many weeks could pass inside ten minutes, because those were all things no one particularly cared to play through. Just like no one cares to play through the part where you're sitting at the table in the inn eating dinner, because gee, unless something happens, that's boring, so we skipped the part where we were all waiting for X to return.

I've got a player in one of my Multiverser games who sometimes tries to push things forward. He will begin some grand idea that is going to make him wealthy or powerful or something like that, but which has to run concurrently with something else that is happening, and he'll suddenly want to jump the game forward a year to when the fruit of his labor lands in his lap. Generally I hold him back, because those concurrent events are happening, and I expect them to be interesting and sometimes dangerous--I don't know that his character will be alive in a year to enjoy the fruits of his efforts, and unless I know how he responds to some of the events in that time I'm not going to find out. He becomes so focused on this grand scheme that he wants to do that suddenly all the other things in the game can't hold his interest.

On the other hand, I had a player character attend seminary once. The in-game effects were primarily going to be stats on his sheet, hopefully some wisdom, and increased respect from some of the characters around him. We took about a minute for each month that he was in seminary.

Do you want to do anything different this month? Roll the dice to see how well you're doing.[/list:u]Once in a while he'd throw something special in, and once in a while I'd create a problem for him, but we went through a couple of years of theological education in maybe ninety minutes during one night, and got it all statted on his sheet.

What bothers me about the story you've told is that you've come to a moment at which you, as a player, have a wealth of possibilities in front of you that really grab you and make you excited about playing, and the other members of your group are saying, "This is all boring, nothing of interest is going to happen for about six months of game time, so let's skip it all, report the minor insignificant things that we need to know, and get on with the interesting stuff." Your interests are being set aside in favor of theirs, and they seem completely oblivious to the fact that there could be anything at all that would interest anyone in what you see to play.

I won't go so far as to say it's a creative agenda issue; I think it might be. It's certainly an issue of what the various members of the group want from the game. Either what you're after doesn't interest them at all, or they aren't aware that there's anything there that might be interesting.

I think I would recommend being a bit confrontational about it. Don't ask, "Why are we skipping six months?" Ask "Why are we glossing over all these things that I am really looking forward to playing through, in favor of getting back to the boring part?" or something like that. At least make them aware that this is something you wanted to play.

--M. J. Young