My Life As A Gamer: How Asychronus Time Restores RPGs To Their Wargame Roots

Last time this week I'll build out on what Jeffro rediscovered.

This time it's about how what Jeffro rediscovered results in a major (for most) paradigm shift: time in the campaign. Specifically, there is an asyhcronus aspect to it.

The common player thinks that (a) time only passes at the table and (b) time only passes specific to what the players' characters do. There is synchronicity between what players do at the table and what time passses in the campaign. Because there is One True Party, there is only one actor in the campaign, so only one agenda matters for all intents and purposes- such that having Non-Player Character antagonists act independently of them is too often perceived as cheating on the part of the Dungeon Master.

Proper wargame play does away with this. Therefore proper RPG play also does away with this. The reason is obvious: there are multiple actors purusing separate and distinct agendas, each of which may compliment or conflict with one or more others, and not all of them are present at the table.

By breaking that long-held expectation of how time works and restoring the wargame norm, which is what strict timekeeping permits and encourages, the magic of the medium opens up. You can now do things like this:

• Your Fighter is training; he's out of action for six weeks. Mark that off on the campaign calendar.
• Your Magic-User is researching Stoneskin, taking him out of action for five months and needing several thousands of GP value in perfect diamonds before it's over.
• Your Assassin is trailing an Orc warlord, feeding information via a patron to another player's Ranger, because the warlord is in thrall to an Illusionist that is the actual target for your assassin.
• Your Dwarf is an armorsmith trying to piece together the materials to make Mithril Plate Mail, so you're waiting on a Sage NPC to report on an inquiry about legendary mithril mines.
• You son's Ranger wants to go after that Orc Warlord, so he has to track the warlord using intelligence provided and will be on the trail for a week or more.
• Uncle Bob's running an Open Table to delve into the crypts that your Cleric unearthed a month ago on Saturday, so you get the wife and kids together to roll up a fresh group to show up as a unit playing under your Cleric's patronage.

Various characters will be in and out of availability at the table, and time away from the table passing at real-time rates means that a month on the water is a month in real life, so campaign actions advance independently of one another. They may or may not have effects on one another right away, but they will sooner or later. As a result yet another norm of Fake D&D gets broken: there is no need to presume that players can't work at cross purposes.

The DM has the burden of tracking all of this, due to the need for timekeeping, but that's really just a matter of plotting things on a calender and putting trackers down to remind relevant parties when the timer expires. If there is a need to track for possible complications--random encounters, for example--then those can be checked as required by the DM and he sends notifications as necessary.

The end result is that the campaign creates the illusion of being an ongoing series of events, far more like the pulp adventures Gary and Dave drew from--or their real-life historical counterparts--than anything like (badly misunderstood and copied) Tolkien.

Which leads to one other major change, the one most damaging to the commercial viability of the hobby business: the irrelevance of official settings and modules.

Because this can be done entirely as needed, the campaign need only start with one location to base operations from and a surrounding area to explore and adventure within; this is the empty sheet of hex paper with one hex marked "Town" and only the six surrounding hexes shown (or at all fleshed out). There is no need to make more than what is required when it is required, and information gained by one (or more) characters need not be shared with others- it can be concealed, deliberately or otherwise.

Thus did asynchronicity of time also become asymmetry of knowledge, both of which become more complex over time as actors make their moves and countermoves, rising and falling as the interactions are adjudicated.

None of this is in the Fake D&D that Stupid Seattle Clout Farmers want you to believe is what RPGs are. They want a paradigm of play that consoles and PCs do better, faster, and easier that they can centrally control. The actual RPG medium is inherently decentralized and focused on the users--the hobbyists themselves--and as such neither wants nor needs the commercial end further than necessary, and thanks to advances in production and distribution that is now reduced to zero.

We can--and should--save the hobby by tanking the "industry".

Restoring RPGs to their hobbyist wargame roots will do exactly that, and the side effect of driving out clout-chasing Death Cultists by depriving them of the source of that clout is hardly one to ignore.