Heavier Expansions And Dilations And Abstractions Of Time Space, or: Why I Should Not Write Things at 3 AM

[Zundy]

I prefer the 4 hours to an IRL hour idea so that progressions isn't too fast, if you want to speed it up, make it eight hours.

Personally, hour to a day seems a bit overkill.

 

You'd think, but 1 hour= 1 day means the character ages by 24 years an IRL year which is perfect. 4 IG hours to 1 real hour means they'd only age up by 4 years in an IRL year which is actually very very slow when you think about it. A sec cadet would only be able to be an Officer Level One in a 1 hour-4 hour, while with 24 days an IRL day they could be a HoS with a kid who's doing a cadetship after a IRL year.

[Dreamix]

When every round is the future round.

+1, I guess.

[Xelnagahunter]

I'm actually against this Idea. The standpoint has a few implications, DOs would be changing their DO characters every few years and constantly making younger ones. IRs would take over a year to complete. "You have 7 days to respond to us or you're getting fucked for not doing so" become "you have 6 months." IR interviews now take half a day or more to complete when all you had was a few questions.

Beyond DO stuff, what about people who play once a week? "Dude? Where have you been for the last 6 months?" Better yet, I play my captain for a day. then I don't play him at all for a few then play him straight again for a few days. Where is that consistancy?

DTG would be fucked and I'd be constantly looking up the date/time for faxes IRs, and the like.

In the longrun it turns into book keeping for the player. I'm not willing to play a game that I have to put more time into preparing for than I do when I run DnD games. Not happening at all.

Also, I type slow. So you get a sentence from me every hour or so in game. Nah.

[Zundy]

I'm actually against this Idea. The standpoint has a few implications, DOs would be changing their DO characters every few years and constantly making younger ones. IRs would take over a year to complete. "You have 7 days to respond to us or you're getting fucked for not doing so" become "you have 6 months." IR interviews now take half a day or more to complete when all you had was a few questions.

Beyond DO stuff, what about people who play once a week? "Dude? Where have you been for the last 6 months?" Better yet, I play my captain for a day. then I don't play him at all for a few then play him straight again for a few days. Where is that consistancy?

DTG would be fucked and I'd be constantly looking up the date/time for faxes IRs, and the like.

In the longrun it turns into book keeping for the player. I'm not willing to play a game that I have to put more time into preparing for than I do when I run DnD games. Not happening at all.

Also, I type slow. So you get a sentence from me every hour or so in game. Nah.

 

Have you had the same character for an IRL year? Do you expect to have the same character for two IRL years? If so fair enough. I don't mind rolling up new characters myself as I like to keep it fresh.

IR's already take over a year to complete :^) gg ez

It's just about suspension of disbelief. In this system you won't be saying to the Captain "MUH GAWD I HAVN'T SEEN YOU IN MONTHS" because we know about the system so we'd just deal with it in the same way we don't keep saying "WOW WE ONLY WORK TWO HOURS A DAY THIS IS A HELLA SWEET JOB BRUH" or "HOLY SHIT THIS INFECTION IS WORKING AT AN ACCELERATED RATE" and my fav', "THAT COMPLEX SURGERY TOOK TWO SECONDS, YOU MUST BE A SUPER SURGEON". Don't draw attention to it.

In the case of the IR's, again just don't draw attention to it like we already do with the other numerious unrealistic things.

I've already been using it IG with Andrew Grimes and now one's noticed either.

[Xelnagahunter]

I dunno. I just like it as is I guess. makes dates simple. If YOU wanna accelerate your character's growth like that then fine, but to make it cannon puts a lot of strain on date relevant roles, such as CCIA. As for working 2 hour shifts, that's already been justified, not sure if publicly or not, by lore staff: we aren't meant to jump on every single crew transfer. The infection and doctor thing is a bit of a big deal, but computer aided medical stuff and thinks like the gel that mends bones should make medical stuff faster. Infections could simply be keeping up with our advancement in medical science. There's a lot there that can be justified as is. There's pros and cons to both sides and I get where you guys are coming from, but I feel that the cons, from my perspective, outweigh the pros.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

While we can have every hour be a day and have that be consistent, and thus become like SimCountry, in which they've been continuing forward and currently are in the year 3819. All worlds in the game run six game months per 24 hours. They actually went scifi recently, pretty cool for a browser game.

Anyway, we addressed another method. The station reverts back every round reset. It starts on a monday, we play 4 hours, and thus advance 4 days to friday. Then when the round resets, the next round starts on monday again.

DO time can easily just use "Galactic Standard Time". GST is the IRL server time (I forget where it's based) and it's used for lore articles where we want to remember the date for it happening. So you can just start using IRL time and say it's GST, and if you want to tell the time on station, just say Tau Ceti Relative Time.

So if a Captain orders all clowns to be executed at 9pm on a Wednesday, but it's Tuesday IRL, just put Tuesday 9pm GST Wednesday TSR.

[Carver]

This system would certainly make those occurrences of people meeting and marrying within 2 shifts slightly less retarded. But overall I do enjoy a more slow-paced, realistic progression of time. It's more interesting to watch the people who very slowly progress their characters instead of the lads who rush through it all within a few days.

[MoondancerPony]

This seems to add unnecessary complication. It's... a nice idea, and would be fun, but this implementation at that speed seems bad for those who don't want to go at that pace.

[TheGreatJorge]

I think, that while this may help explain tons of stuff, it will also make tons of stuff take a lot longer than needed. Usual things like writing a fax, taking items out of a locker, talking to someone (mainly talking to someone). All that will take sometimes ridiculous ammounts of time, at least how I see it. And I would say, that there are other things that could get adressed, instead of changing the time flow. I think I would agree to this, if this was not that drastic change in flow, however fitting it may be. 1 hour to 4 hours would be probably fine to me.

[Zundy]

I mean, this seems to work fine in other games (the sims for example). I guess everyone would just need to further suspend their disbelief. You don't have to change the way your characters act at all.

I'm running two characters on it now with ease.

[MoondancerPony]

Suspending disbelief any further takes away from the game, in my opinion. It's really just not necessary.

[Zundy]

Suspending disbelief any further takes away from the game, in my opinion. It's really just not necessary.

 

In what sense? Personally I think this change would be good, but am OK with it not being implemented as it doesn't stop me from speeding up my characters progression. Likewise having this wouldn't stop anyone keeping their character forever young, it just allows for swifter technological progression and geopolitics.

I mean people tend to already retcon age their characters so they can be heads of staff and this causes no roleplay issues what so ever.

[Nikov]

People retconn their age as their own private decision. It causes one disruption and then its done. For us to make a policy of time compression will force everyone into it, and not everyone wants to be aging. Some people play a lot of characters like mayflies and kill them off, others play a few characters slowly and build them up. Time compression doesn't affect these two groups equally.

And the number of "I haven't seen you in a month!" "We talked two days ago" converstions I had to endure on previous time compression servers...

Look, Hypatia did this. Do you want us to be like Hypatia? DO YOU?!

[Synnono]

I'm personally for leaving things as they are.

While I can appreciate the potential for some characters to believably progress out of their starting roles using accelerated time, that's just about the only thing I like about the idea. Age, if completely unacceptable for a job, is one uncomfortable retcon away from being fixed, and while those aren't great, I think they make a better per-character solution than placing everyone onto a new default speed setting. It already happens. The person who wants to try playing doctor with their nineteen year-old nursing intern is not going to wait for the requisite game years to roll by at any speed. They're just going to change their age and play, or try to play it at nineteen, get poked by staff, and then change their age and play.

Thinking in short-term, workday terms, I feel like several elements of our rounds just don't play nicely with some of the time scales proposed here. It just mechanically does not work for me, for a miner to be out for 24+ relative hours in an exosuit, or for a raider team to spend a relative week on the station hiding from (the same four) security officers, or for a casual conversation between work tasks to take half a day. Things like paperwork get confused. The already-terrible DTG will get even terrible-er.*

* Disclaimer: DTG comment was maybe a joke don't hurt me CCIA

Our rounds feel short-form for a reason, and to me that's because most of them are showcasing sudden, stressful periods of emergency conditions that impress some degree of urgency on the crew. I feel like making everything take place over longer time periods diminishes that a bit, and it doesn't pay back much. Nikov pointed out that Hypatia did it. I think it worked better there, because Hypatia was a peaceful server without antagonists. When all there is to play with are the characters and their relationships with each other, it makes exploring them over an extended term a bit more appealing to me.

By comparison, we have a lot to distract us here. It takes even longer to explore simple relationship-building interactions when ninja are slashing the place up, and glossing over even more of that by saying "time's passed, we can assume X Y and Z" feels lazy and dissatisfying. As things are, enough canon stuff takes place during the shifts of a RL day that I can stitch together a story of what my character has learned or done for that day's canonical workday, while cutting out all the non-canon stuff. And I still get to have my head blown off by a traitor now and then! It's a pretty good deal.

Thinking longer-term too, there are things worth considering.

By default, I like to play a slice of life, rather than the whole life, or whole career. Unlike my real life, where the value of what I'm focused on or interested in constantly gets reassigned based on my goals and needs, usually my characters exist for certain narrative purposes. The rebellious eighteen-year-old leaving home, or an expectant or new mother, or the corrupt police chief a year away from retirement, or someone coping with the fallout of a divorce, or the death of a parent all lose a lot of relevance after a few years pass. Zahra's 'long-term' goal might realistically take a couple of years at this point. It's a driving force behind why she is where she is, doing what she does. Without it, she'd want to leave NT and pursue something else. Reinventing that motivation in-character every so often so that I have a reason to keep her on a space station, and simultaneously re-evaluating why I the player would want to roleplay that new motivation feels a bit too forceful.

And once you can't do that anymore, and that character's natural story is over and they go away, it all becomes a concern for every character that comes afterward, too. It's too much of a trade off for some job-mobility between roles. We get twenty character slots. Time itself does not need to change for someone to experience the mechanical, work side of the game. If you want to not play an intern, cadet, or assistant for the real time it would take to gain job skills and experience, employ an adult and not a teenager. Write in partial training, or a recent demotion that they're trying to work back from.

The slow burn is a good burn. Carefully planning a character, and finding ways to invest in who they are and why they exist in that specific time in their lives, will always win out for me.

Edited October 7, 2016 by Guest

[Guest Menown]

I played security cadet for the better part of two and a half months. God damn it.