Universe - (SMS A-RPG) - Continuity...

[KorbanDream]

Hi all.
Sorry I've been away.
(I've been refining my life).

This post is mainly aimed at M. J. Young who offered help on the Universe's Continuity dilemma but it's open to anyone...

The Dilemma in question is one of timescale.

If two people are playing together in the physical world, each having their mobile phone, basepack etc on the same table and arrange to meet in game, there are several element drawbacks within the game's constraints which hinder this kind of play.

Ignoring the 160 character limit of the sms in general as I've found a route around that, I can see three major problems...

(Plus countless minor ones that could be fixed via gameplay itself).

The three major limits are as follows;

1) - The Delfinian Calendar (Basepack Sheet), is duel purpose, allowing for soloplay or teamplay - Not a mix of the two?

2) - The game, in order to facilitate the sms network, is time-lead based.
Players moving from location to location have a timescale of ten seconds. There are also the same ten second rounds for Percom, (Personal Combat), craft to craft combat and craft manoeuvrability.

3) - When mixing the two ie; Percom vs. Craft combat, it is not always an exact ten seconds, as player one pulling a gun out from holster and firing may only take seven and a half seconds whereas player two may complete a full ten second round. The end result is that player one is now two and a half seconds behind player two?

Include the fact that the EMP, (Emotive Perception), stat on the CAES has the ability to extend percom rounds upto thirty seconds long, (one second advantage per stat increase), and the whole thing kinda gets confusing...

Now primarily the game itself is not run under any direct time constraints as later in the game there is actually an element of time travel.
(After the year 7426, the Temporal Co-Ordinator career becomes available - Player's can change time, yes I know the implications... :-) ).
It is because of this I had to have it controlled by time modules.

A module is automatic ie; If a player leaves an Envocon to board his craft, the second he/she is aboard, the craft time module kicks in and the game, (for that player), is based on the craft time scale, ie; what you can do in ten seconds with a craft is quite a bit more than walking or Percom.

To answer any questions on the kind of play from the previous link, I have discovered the closest would have to be Interactive Fiction, which is why I've changed the name to Universe A-RPG - (A = Adventure)...

(Hope I'm still eligble to be here, as the Universe is not strictly an RPG?).

ANY help gratefully received... KorbanDream.

[M. J. Young]

I seem to be the target, so let's see whether I should dodge or parry.

Last things first, I don't see an inherent problem with calling this a role playing game, in a general sense. Although it is designed for the constraints of its medium, it is not different in kind from forum or e-mail campaigns, which are generally agreed to be role playing games. "Adventure role playing game" adds something, just as "fantasy role playing game" does, but it's only a clarifier concerning the types of game experiences you anticipate creating.

You identify three aspects of the timescale dilemma.

1) - The Delfinian Calendar (Basepack Sheet), is duel purpose, allowing for soloplay or teamplay - Not a mix of the two?

Assuming you mean dual, I think this is the big problem, but I don't know that it can't be remedied. I'll get back to it.

2) - The game, in order to facilitate the sms network, is time-lead based.
Players moving from location to location have a timescale of ten seconds. There are also the same ten second rounds for Percom, (Personal Combat), craft to craft combat and craft manoeuvrability.

The problem is not a matter of what a character can do in a ten-second turn. The problem is that the game allows players to adjust timeflow to suit their actions, but doesn't provide tools for keeping everyone together. I'm reminded of John Kim's comment on another thread that in what is being dubbed virtuality play the players can all agree that it takes a week to travel to the next city, the trip is uneventful, and they're there now, instead of playing out hour by hour the uninterrupted journey. That's a valuable tool to give your players.

Yet I'm reminded of an episode of It's Garry Shandling's Show. They'd made a gag out of how Garry had a gadget in his apartment that let him speed time forward so he could skip over the unimportant things and get to the next part of the story. An episode opens, and Garry is going fishing with his friends for the weekend, and his wife is going to be home alone doing nothing. After she does nothing for a minute or so, she decides that this is boring, so she uses the machine to rush past the weekend--and Garry realizes as he comes in the front door that his entire relaxing weekend has just passed in a flash because she used the plot advancer machine.

If the question was only that you can do a lot of different things in ten seconds of game world time, depending on where you are, that wouldn't be a problem. The problem arises because you can use one text message to say you're going to make a three week round trip journey to some other star system and back to pick up a friend, while at the same time someone else standing in the spaceport gets to throw one punch between the time of your departure and the time of your return.

3) - When mixing the two ie; Percom vs. Craft combat, it is not always an exact ten seconds, as player one pulling a gun out from holster and firing may only take seven and a half seconds whereas player two may complete a full ten second round. The end result is that player one is now two and a half seconds behind player two?

This isn't really a problem. If you're talking about discrepancies of seconds, it's only a matter of who gets to move first. In Multiverser, we note that all rounds are "a minute", but that attacks are always rounded to the nearest number of whole seconds (either seconds per attack or attacks per second). This results in minutes being between fifty and seventy seconds when counted by actions per second, but being one minute when counted by actions per minute. This is not considered problematic, because let's face it, in a real fight you don't have a referee with a stopwatch and a bell measuring the rounds. Time is an approximation in combat--a valuable and useful approximation, but not to be taken too strictly. So if there's a significant difference of a few seconds in a situation in which it matters, you let the faster action occur first, and assume that it then rounds out at the end of the round.

Concerning time travel, a lot of what we use for resolving that in Multiverser is available on the http://www.mjyoung.net/time/">Temporal Anomalies site. I don't know if it will help you, as having multiple universes allows us to let the chips fall as they will, even if it means an entire universe is destroyed.

So the problem is the fact that there is a unified calendar for the entire universe, but players can burn up as little as a few seconds or as much as a few months with a single text message turn, putting them out of sync with each other. Here are some potential solutions for this.

[*]Get rid of the unified calendar. Make it impossible to know the "real" date somewhere else merely from time elapsed. This can in part be complicated by such features as an inability to accurately calculate time warp effects of long distance travel (thus you may know how long you were on the ship from your perspective, but not how much time has elapsed anywhere else in the universe). Make it so that there's no reliable real-time communications across the galaxy, such that there's always a time delay (something that could be calculated, perhaps, but is not worth the effort, as the constant movement of all objects in the universe mean it's going to be constantly in flux). When you're on Alpha Prime, you can't really know what's happening right now anywhere else in the universe, nor indeed what time right now actually is wherever that is. Thus whenever two characters meet, there is no way that they can really determine that it's not the same day for them, and by default it is the same day for them.[*]Reduce the discrepancy by adjusting resolution at the extremes. Don't let combat be blow-by-blow; resolve it in chunks, preferably one message for an entire fight, three at the outside. Meanwhile, don't let one message cover more than two weeks of rapid anything. If someone wants to do something for the next year, let them commit themselves to spending twenty-one messages on it, to which you will reply with items that hopefully are of some interest or diversion along the way.[*]Don't be afraid to declare that something that seems quite reasonable simply isn't so. In the example of the character who rushes into the theatre to find his friend, for no reason given he cannot find his friend. The real reason is that on the friend's timeline, the play ended two turns ago and he's home in bed. The ostensible reason is that he went to the bathroom or was sitting somewhere else or the ushers wouldn't let him inside.[*]The big problem that the calendar creates is that one player gets several months of activity while another gets several minutes, although they are interacting both before and after that separation. Make it clear up front that this will happen, and that everyone in this universe accepts it as normal. It doesn't much matter that the event we shared I remember as yesterday and you remember as five years ago; what matters is that we were together once before and we are together now, and that's just the way the universe works. (This may throw a wrench into your time travel concepts, but since I don't know how you're doing that I can't address it.) All of time divides into "then", "now", and "soon". "Now" is all that exists at this moment, and its relationship to "then" and "soon" is extremely relative, such that it cannot be measured in absolute units, since we're all moving around the universe at different velocities in different directions and thus suffering unpredictable time distortions.[/list:u]
This ideas should get you thinking. I mentioned a game run by a guy who had no problem inserting several years of play for one of his player characters into a four week hiatus taken by the others. If your players are willing to accept that as a normal part of the world, it shouldn't be a problem. Similarly, if a player misses turns, he's still in the same situation, but once it's resolved he's on the same time frame as everyone else.

--M. J. Young