Listen to the wisdom of the Cookie Monster: "Cookies are a sometimes food."

Honestly it can be great fun for group tension, coordinating players under stress, teaching players how to tactically coordinate before such stress, and a lively challenge to jaded GMs. But it is a 'sometimes food.'  If your players are treating a game like disposable fluff, or are not feeling at risk with their PCs, or want the extra rush of squad tactics twitch muscle memory unit cohesion, then yeah go for it!

If not, then you are the weakest link and deserve naught but a beating with the badwrongfun bat.  I keed, I keed...  or do I?

Downtime, smuchtime

Are you guys telling me you NEVER RP when the PCs are in town? I mean I get not roleplaying some parts of it, like shoping, but going for a few pints at the local watering hole is an oportunity for RP, same if you go visit some favourite merchant, you hear things, people ask for your help...

Quote from: GeekyBugle on February 10, 2024, 10:43:18 AM
Downtime, smuchtime

Are you guys telling me you NEVER RP when the PCs are in town?

I usually do that in text chat during the downtime, what was called "blue booking".

From yesterday, Friday (live games are Tuesdays):

Player:
In the morning before the group separates, Malen asks if the group is still in possession of the bloodstones? He mentions his plans to visit Lykonios and says "If the old wizard says we can fashion it into a weapon, I think that could benefit you Sharan. We could also use them to barter and maybe get you a special weapon for an affordable price." He then asks Draye if she would like to accompany him for a visit to Threshhold to see Lykonios the Grey.
Malen says to Sharan. "Well, we have made a respectable sum of gold in the short time we have spent together, more than I have had in my lifetime. I would be willing to contribute to the new sword fund. You have put yourself in harms way to protect us, your family has been a gracious host, and I am grateful for you risking your life to preserve ours. I will look for you at the smiths forge once business has concluded with Lykonios."

Me, GM:
The door to the Old Mill Tower is opened by a pretty young woman in courtly dress. "Good morning. I am Anna Halaran, Apprentice to the Wizard Lykonios. How may I help you?" She listens to Malen's request and frowns. "Lykonios is not receiving visitors. I'm sorry."
Player:
Malen gives a respectful bow and wishes her well with her studies. He walks off visibly frustrated.

(Player had failed a Persuasion check to meet the Wizard)

Actual live session time is generally seen as too scarce to spend on shopping & suchlike.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on February 09, 2024, 06:17:50 PM
Over in the Twatter someone told me 1:1 time is good because you need it to run several gaming groups in the exact same world, at the exact same period of in-world time and in the exact same in-world location.

Man this is the actual reason for 1:1 time (or really "proportional time"- each real world week could equal an in-game day or an in-game year).

QuoteNow, I might be missing something but doesn't that mean that some asshole PC/NPC could just kill my PC between gaming sessions?

Definitely not.  When you are doing downtime in some city, some other group doesn't get to go gank you.  The DM would simply say no to this, as this easily supercedes whatever he's doing by using 1:1 time.  Now, a more complex issue does arise if the groups are competing over something, say, at the domain level of play- but that seems pretty theoretical for most tables, and groups are hardly ever at odds, and pvp is almost never present.

Running multilple groups in the same world is basically the reason for 1:1 time, or any kind of setup like that.  It's extremely tough to do this any other way- one group will be operating in the past, and the number of things they can do will be greatly shrunk as a result.

Quote
Run different worlds for each group
Run the same world but really distant locations/time periods for each group
Run different instances of the same world, multiverses where each group is in the same world in a different universe so they don't interact with each other ever.

Ok, but what if you only want one world?  That's a pretty important detail, because you end up with one single history that represents all the players and their deeds, instead of two or three vastly diverged universes.  Maybe you like that; many do not. 

QuoteThere might be other solutions beside those that don't involve having the PCs atg risk of being killed while the player isn't there.

Is this common?  World of Darkness had what amounted to real time-ish stuff for years, and I never heard of anyone losing a character to PvP while off screen, and those guys did have pvp-ish stuff from time to time.

I'd never consider your concern to rise to any meaningful level.  No one is ganking you while you are afk, either no one or no normal people are running a pvp MMO like this.

I'm actually writing a post about my experience with 1:1 time over the last year. Why I recommend it and who I recommend it to.  I doubt it will convince people who don't like it but I think there are interesting things to say. No matter how much idiots like me try to explain how it works and importantly WHY it works, there are going to be naysayers who don't want to understand or discuss it in good faith. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. And stop trying to tell people who actually have experience with it that it somehow doesn't work immediately after we tell you several times how it does work with examples. Move on.

I have never run a game with 1:1 time.  I don't know anyone who did.  I don't see much point to it outside of a very particular edge case that will never be relevant to me.  I'm not even sure how it's supposed to work.  If the PCs do something that takes an hour, do we sit here looking at each other for an hour or make in-character small talk?  If they sleep for the night, do we hang around for 8 hours?  If we end a fight and then stop for the week, have the PCs been hanging around at the scene of the battle for a week?  Doing what?  Do you have to end every session in town?  They just hang around?  What if there is a time crunch in game?  It just doesn't really make any sense to me for an ongoing campaign.  Maybe for one-shot tournament style scenarios.  I don't run those though.

Quote from: King Tyranno on February 10, 2024, 05:03:14 PM
I'm actually writing a post about my experience with 1:1 time over the last year. Why I recommend it and who I recommend it to.  I doubt it will convince people who don't like it but I think there are interesting things to say. No matter how much idiots like me try to explain how it works and importantly WHY it works, there are going to be naysayers who don't want to understand or discuss it in good faith. If you don't want to do it, don't do it. And stop trying to tell people who actually have experience with it that it somehow doesn't work immediately after we tell you several times how it does work with examples. Move on.

I have been seeing this conversation play out a bit on twitter. The problem isn't really 1:1 time. Like I said, I use it sometimes. If people find a use for it and want to recommend it, I don't think anyone would object. But the conversation I have seen (and granted I am only catching glimpses of it when the algorithm decides its something I should look at) comes off as "if you aren't using 1:1 time you aren't even really playing AD&D". It reminds me of the crowd people used to call the OSR Taliban. I think you get way more people to hear what you are trying to say, if you show them why it is good, instead of attacking people for not using it or not agreeing with you (not saying that is what you are doing, just that is the general tone I see in the conversation). Also I rarely see people explain what they mean by 1:1 time in these sorts of posts, so half the time I think most people don't even know what the person is advocating for.

Quote from: yosemitemike on February 11, 2024, 04:02:45 AM
If the PCs do something that takes an hour, do we sit here looking at each other for an hour or make in-character small talk?  If they sleep for the night, do we hang around for 8 hours?  If we end a fight and then stop for the week, have the PCs been hanging around at the scene of the battle for a week?  Doing what?  Do you have to end every session in town?  They just hang around?  What if there is a time crunch in game?  It just doesn't really make any sense to me for an ongoing campaign.  Maybe for one-shot tournament style scenarios.  I don't run those though.

Yes, every game session starts and ends in town. Also every game session takes place within a single game day. 1:1 does not apply to time within the game session, only outside of it (and since the game session covers a single day of activity and is run in one RL day, 1:1 is preserved in the overall scheme). The 1E DMG covers what happens if one or more PCs decide to do something that takes many days (travel a long distance overland, craft a magic item, etc).

Obviously this only really works with a base ('town') and one or more dungeons a short walk away so the various parties can get to the dungeon, walk around inside it and get back to town all in the same day.

That seems really restrictive and stilted for no particular benefit that I can see for the great majority of campaigns.

At the time all of this was devised, there were only 2-3 campaigns and they all ran on this setup. The 1E DMG is, in large part, Gary's insights from running his campaign. It works very well for that kind of game-club campaign.

The game-club hasn't been the standard campaign for a very long time. Instead you have the story-arc campaign, in which the players each have a single PC and they play through the sequence of adventures leveling up together. I agree with you that none of the above makes sense for this kind of game.

To be clear, I was explaining how the setup works, I wasn't saying that it's the only way or best way to play.

Greetings!

Yeah, this whole breathless promotion of 1:1 Real Time, embracing multiple groups of adventurers, all operating in the same region of the game world sounds nice, but ultimately it is unnecessary, and generally not even very useful or appropriate.

It reminds me vividly of the various groups we had running amongst us at Junior High and High School.

In such an environment, with large groups of players, and many players coming and going on a daily basis, some of which not being reliable from one day to the next, again, embracing such an approach is useful.

*Newsflash*--That environment was forty and more years ago. Most people nowadays--whether older, seasoned vets, or even newcomers to the hobby and a likely gaming group--are not in this kind of environment, and are not playing this way.

Most people are involved with one or two groups, each composed of a small number of players, that show up regularly every week, same time, same channel.

I'm not involved with playing with groups of frenetic kids in Junior High school. I have five or six grown adults that show up promptly every week, ready to play. There is no need to begin and end every adventure in a town. Narratively, how stupid is that? Like watching a film, wherever and whenever the game session ends, people take notes of the scene, what their characters are doing, and the 'pause" button is pressed. The game continues next week, right where we left off. Furthermore, in my campaigns, Player groups often embark upon crazy, epic journeys way the fuck out in the primordial wilderness, where the group may be weeks or months away from anything remotely resembling a "Town."

I still don't get why some of these gamers promote this approach like it is some religious experience of searching for the "Holy Grail." It isn't. If you are somehow involved with a game club of frenetic kids in Junior High, then such an approach is useful. If you aren't, well, it is pointless, and not congruent with how regular game groups meet together and play.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: yosemitemike on February 11, 2024, 04:02:45 AM
Do you have to end every session in town? 

That's the intention, though not always possible. Between session time is in a non-adventuring environment.

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on February 11, 2024, 08:56:20 AM

I have been seeing this conversation play out a bit on twitter. The problem isn't really 1:1 time. Like I said, I use it sometimes. If people find a use for it and want to recommend it, I don't think anyone would object. But the conversation I have seen (and granted I am only catching glimpses of it when the algorithm decides its something I should look at) comes off as "if you aren't using 1:1 time you aren't even really playing AD&D". It reminds me of the crowd people used to call the OSR Taliban. I think you get way more people to hear what you are trying to say, if you show them why it is good, instead of attacking people for not using it or not agreeing with you (not saying that is what you are doing, just that is the general tone I see in the conversation). Also I rarely see people explain what they mean by 1:1 time in these sorts of posts, so half the time I think most people don't even know what the person is advocating for.

The ones I spotted in passing on Reddit once were pushing that you had to play everything freaking 1:1. which fermented my distaste.

Even if just going with downtime and travel. Exactly how many times will a travel time or idle time use up exactly one week? It works when you are hole up stuck in bed recovering from being brought to 0 HP. But little else seems to be readily applicable.

Quote from: yosemitemike on February 11, 2024, 09:54:59 AM
That seems really restrictive and stilted for no particular benefit that I can see for the great majority of campaigns.

That is because it is really restrictive and not even remotely practical.

I think 1-on-1 time came from Gygax's campaign where he had different groups going into the same megadungeon. I'm sure it seemed the way to go at the time (maybe very competitive groups?) but really it's not that hard to fudge things about and make it work. Probably far easier in fact than keep strict time records.

Also there is the Shadowdark 1-on-1 where an hour game time is an hour in the world for torches and stuff. I've not tried it but that seems daft as combat is unlikely to follow any kind of strict times.