How to do Day and Night

[twztdwndpipe]

For my Rpg, I'm going to need players to go from Daytime to Night. What are some ways of doing this. The only way I can see it working it, just doing it real time. Say, "we have 4 hours of gameplay. 2 hours will be day 2 hours will be night." or every other hour will be day, and vice versa. I'm just worried that they might consider this to constricting.

[Eero Tuovinen]

You know, I like this game project of yours. Very ambitious, I'm glad you're taking the time to think up a new system for it.

An obvious method that comes to mind is having a Time Pool, which starts with a number of tokens. Then the players spend these to act, and when they run out, you switch from Day to Night and vice versa. 30 tokens, for example, and doing something like resting for a full night takes 25. Cooking and eating takes 2, repairing a broken weapon might take 2d6... lots of possibilities for different rules, depending on where the rest of the system is going. Depending on the focus of the game you might even switch the pools around based on the season, so you only get 15 tokes during the winter days and 45 during winter nights, that sort of thing.

A really cool way of doing this, one which I developed some time ago, is to have each player get his own Time Pool, and use the pools to track the position of each character in time. With Time Pools it'd be easy to figure out whose character is still doing whatever the player announced before, at which point the others get to do some more stuff while waiting for him to finish, for example.

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A different, more lightweight way of doing this is to say that there is a range of actions that automatically switch from day to night. Then it's up to the players to postpone stuff like repairing their equipment until they're willing to let the night fall. If you feel that there should be a possibility for the night to fall in the middle of something, make up some sort of random check to see if the characters are surprised by nightfall. That's certainly be a potentially interesting use for some sort of perception ability, to determine whether the character is managing to keep track of time and avoiding getting surprised by the slowly creeping sun.

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Still another way is to have the GM outright decide when night falls. Perhaps he has the option to declare another time of day after each scene, beginning with morning and going up to evening. So it's up to the GM to pace the day so it's interesting.

[Paul Czege]

An obvious method that comes to mind is having a Time Pool, which starts with a number of tokens. Then the players spend these to act, and when they run out, you switch from Day to Night and vice versa.

Not spend to act. Make them a commonly held pool of bonus dice. And when they're gone, you switch to night. So, the character can "take his time" picking a lock, or whatever, to improve his chances. See Jared Sorensen's Time To Kill

Paul

[Vulpinoid]

Eero,

My gut reaction says that I really like that Day-Night token thing.

Each token could represent half an hour of game time (or 15 minutes...it depends how detailed you wanted to get with the system).

A good scene of roleplaying combat or intense discussion could only take a token or two. But fixing stuff afterward, or going into a deeply introspective meditation afterward might take far more.

I can see a system like this involving long periods of preparation to face the horrors outside, followed by brief and intense encounters facing the menace.

Players would have to time their actions carefully to ensure they can act together when facing the monstrous unknown.

V

[Callan S.]

For my Rpg, I'm going to need players to go from Daytime to Night. What are some ways of doing this. The only way I can see it working it, just doing it real time. Say, "we have 4 hours of gameplay. 2 hours will be day 2 hours will be night." or every other hour will be day, and vice versa. I'm just worried that they might consider this to constricting.

But does it hit the nail on the head, in terms of your design goals?

One thing I really like about your suggestion is that there is a real time pressure! Other peoples suggestions have been about spending points, but in terms of real time they could sit around, mulling that choice over for whatever time they want. This tends to reduce a games fun over time ratio.

One idea that comes to mind is to use your system, but they accumulate a point or two points each day. Once the two hours is up, they can spend these points to extend the daytime/night time (say 1 point equals 15 minutes). That way there is a real time pressure, but there is some flexibility.

What's your goal with this? Or is it to make a well liked game that's enjoyed play with further inspire your creativity?

[twztdwndpipe]

At first this whole. Real time idea was worrying me. Honestly, I really like this "time Token" idea. This is brilliant. With that incorporated, It could almost be like a Survival / Defence Horror. One thing I'm kinda confused about. If they spent Time Tokens on Fixing their safe house, how would time be spent if they ran outside. I wouldn't want them to be far to constricted on this though. Also, Say they were doing something that could be done faster with multiple people, if it costs 1 person 20 tokens to fix the car, it could take 2 people 10 each, Without modifiers on things like auto mechanics or something. hmm, This could be severely interesting. I like where this is going. I think if they had to spend to many tokens on going outside or something, it could cause this to lose it's action aspect. It would be far to turn based. Almost like fallout 2 or something. But then again...Fallout 2 did get huge. I'm not sure, this could be interesting.

-Will

[twztdwndpipe]

I'm going to incorporate hunger into the game too. That way, their characters will have the need to find new food sources. BUT! I have this so far.


During the "daytime" A character will get Time Tokens.

48 each representing 25 minutes OR
132 each representing 5 minutes

Tasks cost tokens to do. When all players spend their tokens Time is set to night. In which we switch to the Stamina Token System.

During the "Night time" players get stamina tokens. The amount of stamina tokens is based off their character Stamina.

When players use all Stamina Tokens their character falls asleep. When all players fall asleep. You advance to the next day.

I've been kinda thinking. Integrating Hunger Into Time...  Thats where I'm getting some problems. How can I "Make" A character Hungry? I can honestly say, I haven't had ANY luck on putting the two together. Maybe some of you have an Idea. You've proven to be quite helpful so far.

[Willow]

Less is more.  During day, maybe you have 24 tokens, each representing a half hour.  Use one for a bonus die.

During night?  The GM gets the tokens, and can use them for bonus dice.  But once he uses them all, it's day time.

[Eero Tuovinen]

Yeah, the number of tokens can easily depend on how much granularity you want. That part is simple.

Hunger could easily be represented by having the players pile their spent time tokens on their character sheet into a special Hunger box - get a set amount of tokens in there and you go hungry, ticking off some sort of nourishment track on the sheet. Perhaps make at most one tick per day. Then when you start collecting ticks, the hunger starts getting impairing; if you're being realistic, it'll take several days to really cause trouble, but you could as well let the characters get weak and distracted after just a couple of days of hunger.

I like integrating hunger, makes sense for the topic. Perhaps thirst could be tracked separately too if you want to make a point of finding clean water.

[masqueradeball]

How about instead of spending tokens to perform actions... actions "eat up" tokens depending on how well the characters perform. Assuming your using randomization (like rolling dice to see if you can fix the car) you can have any roll result in a "yes... if" result. That is to say, on a high roll you do the job efficiently and spend the minimum amount of tokens, while on a low roll you either spend more tokens (try again, keep working at it) or give up and accept failure. This option might not work for all tasks (if your using task resolution), but it could add some interest into both the resource management and the random elements of the game.

You could do a similar "yes... if" thing with stamina at night time, i.e. do you push yourself harder to get the job done or do you accept defeat.

Also, I would suggest having the actual amount of time represented by the time tokens be abstract, and perhaps varying the amount depending on the time of year and the amount of daylight available.