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Last year, I got excited about the idea of tracking realworld time over downtime[a]. Shortly after I implemented it in my campaign, and it served the entire table, very well.
Real-time RPGs look strange if you look at them from the wrong end. Let me turn it around for you:
1. The players are just anyone who turns up on the day. This could be 3 or 6 players - we donāt know whoās free.
2. As a result, weāll have to wrap each adventure up on the night, because someone might not make the next session.
3. Time can become inconsistent over the course of sessions - different PCs arriving in different areas at different times threatens to make some deeply inconsistent and warped narratives.
4. We can fix this by making time pass at a rate which keeps everything consistent.
Using āreal-world timeā comes as a result of an open table. And the open table has some great benefits.
I didnāt have any scheduling problems, and if the memes are to be believed, Iām the only GM in the world.
1. If players A, B, and C arrive for the first game, all good.
2. For the second, B comes, and C brings along D and E, and they meet in the local tavern, and agree upon a mission.
3. Players A, B, and E can make it.
As long as 3 or more players can make the day, the game goes on.
I set my own campaign to run at 3 times normal speed, so 1 week of real-world time equals 3 weeks of in-game time. After ~9 months of gameplay, one player had made almost every session, and their character had gained a hell of a lot of XP. They began as a little gnome, and endedā¦well still a little gnome actually, but they were deadly. From the perspective of the gnome, this whole progression took two and a half years. That seems a little on the short side, but itās a lot better than so many campaigns where characters progress from zero-to-hero in a couple weeks of game-time.
The narrative of progression makes sense.
The game had maybe 15 players all in all. Iām an immigrant who knows lots of migrants and travellers. This makes consistent scheduling awful, because some of them arrive, bring friends, and disappear for a month, or forever. Nobody could guarantee theyād be at the table, even for a second session. But that never stopped me welcoming new people to the table - they could rock up, roll up a random character, and start playing immediately.
A player once had to leave after about three hours, which left the current events very unresolved, but I had to resolve them anyway. I did what I could. It was a little awkward.
Lesson learned: ask about peopleās leaving time at the start of each session.
The rest of the sessions wrapped themselves up naturally. Once everyone at the table understood that the mission would wrap up soon enough, it did. And I say this despite all of my stories going on mad, meandering loops, with NPCs coming in an out of focus, and mission objectives coming at the PCs so fast that they have to rethink their priorities every two scenes.
Getting PCs back to civilization at the sessionās end makes a lot more sense if they have a constant, recurring, need to return. This works well for BIND, since it has no healing spells. PCs will also want to return for rations, torches, or just because theyāre tired.
A game without any fatigue-system, where priests just press the āHP-reset buttonā every day before casting Radiant Light, may struggle to provide justification for the sudden endings.
Resource management alone wonāt make a sessionās end feel satisfying. The best ends come from resolving plots. Having many plot-lines on the go at once helps a lot, because the more threads you have going, the more likely each player is to remember something related from a previous session.
Some players may miss those ācliff-hanger endingsā, but I suspect that GMs enjoy them far more than players.
The standard fantasy trope of the journey will not work out well. The troop cannot travel to Mordor while swapping PCs in and out.
The setting should also come with plenty of resting areas, which BIND does. The entire world presents danger, but every few miles, people can find a town, bailey, or bothy to stay safe in.
This shouldnāt pose too much of a challenge, unless the troupe need to journey through 4 deadly encounters to reach a deep dungeon, where they descend through 7 more deadly encounters, grab the prize, then begin the ascent. But at that point, maybe just plan for a long weekend of gaming, rather than cutting the plot into pieces for 3 weeks.
I miss those long weekends of gaming. I wonder if Iāll live to see another 20-hour sessionā¦