Emergent Experiences, or How I learned to relinquish control and embrace the BrOSR 3- Strict Timekeeping
YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT
- Gygax, ADnD DMG
From this line and the surrounding paragraphs the BrOSR worked out a system. You can call it 1:1 time, strict timekeeping, Jeffrogaxian time, it all boils down to the same thing. For each day in the real world, one day passes in the campaign world. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?
Probably not, because there’s a bit more to it than that. Time during play passes at the rate it needs to for a session. Players might travel a week to a dungeon, spend another day delving, and make the trek back. 3-4 hours of gameplay. 15 days. However, this party is then 15 days in the future. Let’s say they set out on the first of June, the day of the session. They get back on the 16th. Until real time catches up to them they’re still on their adventure, and you can’t play those characters.
This is the motor that does the heavy pulling. Suddenly it becomes trivial to keep straight where every character is at all times, and who gets somewhere first. Adjudicating all of your Patron’s actions in the Braunstein becomes simple to do in conjunction with sessions.
But what am I doing if I can’t play my character on game night?
Simple: you make a new one. Part of what these rules help do is take the spotlight away from a single party, to a troupe of player characters. This is a great side effect. It gives you a natural and easy way to try out new characters and classes. If your magic user is spending 7 weeks casting a major ritual or researching a new spell, maybe that’s a great time to roll up that cleric you’ve been itching to try out.
Troupe play also gives you a bigger cast of characters to choose from. Maybe your cleric wouldn’t be happy about robbing a temple, but you have a fighting man with less scruples who’d be happy to join.
What about at the end of a session?
General wisdom: don’t be caught out in the wilderness. You know the length of a session. Plan for getting back in time. Alternatively, which is what I do at my table, is that if a party is still in the ‘future’, you can still plan a new session before time catches back up to them, and we’ll pick right back off where we left off. Since ‘datum time’ hasn’t caught up to them yet it doesn’t throw any of the timeline into disarray.
Downtime
Another advantage of this is the amount of downtime this mode of play enforces, unless you manage to play daily, in which case: well done. Downtime is severely underrated. Players can go out on their own in downtime, and attempt to find information, or research spells, gather rumors, or additional hirelings to venture out with. They can even spy, or attempt an assassination attempt, en potentially fail and die out of session.
And how does it help patrons
It gives you leeway handling Patrons, because you can give them real-time updates. If something’s going to happen in a week, you have a week to figure out what’s going to happen, more, probably, since news takes time to reach people in a pre-industrial pre-internet world world.
Are there other, less stringent ways to do this?
Yes, there are, though they make it harder on you. Another reading of Gygax’ explanation of the timekeeping rules, either from ODnD or ADnD, it doesn’t matter much, except for length of explanation and some minor differences, would be to keep a separate timeline for each character. Advance game-time as needed and advance game-time by one day for each day of downtime. This decouples the game and real-world calendar, allowing game time to advance at a much more rapid pace, since you can ‘fast forward’ to where every character is.
I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this though. Between patrons and parties there are too many disparate elements moving at the same time, and unless you have a degree in science fiction time travel plots your head may explode keeping everything intact. The 1:1 timekeeping is what keeps everything manageable.
Time becomes another resource to manage
We’ve all had games where each session basically goes over fifteen minutes. When you look back over the last six months of sessions and tally up the days you realise only 2 weeks have passed, and the party has gone from first to sixth level.
And even though so little time passed, it never seemed to really be an issue. Theoretically there were plots going on in the background, but because the game time was stopped and started, and fast-forwarded as needed tracking those plots became a hassle. The party could just do what they wished, and if two weeks passed: who really cares? Since there’s no real consequence to the players it becomes overly trivial to skip ahead.
With 1:1 time it doesn’t. Players become aware that spending two weeks doing something means that those characters are gone for two weeks, and they’ll have to pick up what they were doing later. Their decision making becomes more tactical.
This is obviously only usable in big groups of many players. Why would I do this if I only have a single group of four players?
Because even with four to eight players it’ll make your game better. The rotating cast of characters takes focus away from the One Party. The focus of the game shifts from the Party to the Campaign due to this troupe play. Some might not enjoy this style of play, but it heavily reduces strain on you. Characters aren’t the focus, so there’s no expectation of creating a narrative arc for each one of them.
The Campaign as focal point
As the focus of the campaign shifts so will the scope of what you can do with it. It becomes less focussed on a single group of individuals and expands. Instead of a biography the campaign summary will come to resemble a history book. Multiple threads going on at the same time, interweaving and influencing each other in ways that are only clear for an outside observer looking back. Each little element in it doesn’t have the birds-eye view required to see their part in the whole.
You and the players have that birds-eye view. You can view your characters more dispassionately; you have more of them. You still get invested, but your investment is distributed not only over your characters and henchmen, but also the world. Spotlight time becomes less of an issue, since the game isn’t about that one character.
Try it out
Run with this for a few months at the very least. See how it improves your game, even on its own. There are many things that will help increase this improvement in a non-linear way. Patrons are one, and I will discuss some minor elements they took from ADnD in a later post too, but even this one single element is a huge gamechanger.
Next time, I will try to explain in a brief overview how I put my Border Baronies together and walk through scenarios and things I ran into, to explain how both 1:1 time and the simultaneous Braunstein improved my game.
Until then, count your torches and keep mapping.