Campaign News April 17

The circumstances of the campaign and conduct of the last session present a good opportunity for me to show examples of a couple of key concepts to how we play our game.

TIMEKEEPING

I've written a couple of explanations of our 1:1 time-keeping method in the campaign news in the past. It seems like everyone gets it, but I thought it might be useful to see what it looks like from the referees' perspective:

 

Time in the game world can run faster or slower than real world time during a game session. For example, it might take 20 minutes or more to play through a combat that lasts only 4 minutes in game time. Likewise, it might take less than 5 minutes of real time to play through two day's travel. Typically, a session will cover 2 to 12 days of game world time during the 4 or 5 hours we play it.

When characters are played in a session they advance their own timeline to however far game play took them. The character(s) furthest into the future create "slack time" for the characters not played. This is time that those characters are entitled to use however they like--we don't want one character to rob another of time since it is an expensive and useful resource.

Orders for downtime activities need to be issued proactively. For example, a player cannot say on game date July 25, 1480 that his character has spent the past week in level training even if the character had been otherwise idle during that time. Such orders start for a character on the game date the they are given, and so this character will be occupied in that training starting on July 25 and done on August 1. Characters with slack time may use that right away, but if not, they become unavailable for session play until that date is reached.

In the last session, played this past Tuesday, April 14th, the session ended on game date July 22, 1480. That was 3 days ago and you can see above that two of the characters that were played in that session are now at July 25, 1480, 3 days later in the game and in the real world. The other character played in that session, Shay McFarland, is executing post-session activities that take a week to complete. Because Shay's activities are happening between sessions and he has no slack time available, he is in "time jail" working on those activities until game date July 29, 1480.

Barry could still play Shay in a session before July 29, 1480 / April 14, 2026, however the other players would need to agree to advancing their characters losing whatever time they have between their characters' current date and July 29, and incurring whatever upkeep expenses and health checks are required during that period.

TACTICAL INFINITY, BY-THE-BOOK PLAY, AND THE IRON SPIKE

One of the most interesting and attractive features of AD&D, and TTRPGs generally, is that "anything" is possible, that players enjoy "tactical infinity." For example, the game rules mention a piece of equipment, the iron spike, which costs 1 copper and weighs 1 pound. Using a spike to anchor a piece of rope is mentioned as a possible use for the spike and it is described as one of the main tools used in dungeon expeditions. There are no other rules and few other mentions of the iron spike in the rule books.

In our last session, a player wedged an iron spike into the wall to hold up a portcullis to allow passage through a portal which otherwise would require a successful bend bars/lift gates roll to pass through. The referee had to decide if such a use was 1) permitted by the rules, 2) in the spirit of the rules body as a whole, and 3) sensible in the game world which generally obeys the natural laws of the real world. As referee in this session, it seemed pretty clear to me that this use of the iron spike met all three criteria easily. In doing so, I have committed us all to coming to an agreement for or against that ruling that will be predictably repeated regardless which of us is the referee in the session.

Ideally, we would codify and record all of these little rulings, but there are so many, so small and so specific, that this isn't always practical. As players and referees both, good sportsmanship dictates that we should all be helping each other to remember and follow all of the rules and rulings. Our aim is a clear, understandable system we can all follow, but also one which can be extended and modified as we learn more about the game during play.