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

Again, we're talking Jeffro's rediscoveries.

This time, we're focusing on the timekeeping. A lot of the older D&D editions have mandated downtime for specific activites, starting with actually leveling up. Let's look over some of the usual ones. A competent Dungeon Master can and will get a lot out of ensuring that this is respected in terms of time and other logistics.

• Leveling: AD&D 1st Edition in particular has a hard-coded requirement of both time and treasure in addition to the Experience Point total to level up. This is time measured in weeks, not days or hours, during which that character cannot do anything else. Until that time is taken, and the gold price rendered, that character does not level up and his XP is frozen in place. As gaining XP is solely driven by recovering of treasure, this is the primary driver of play right here.
• Magic Research: A spellcaster seeking to create a new spell, or to recreate a known spell that cannot be gained otherwise, requires weeks or months of time during which he cannot do anything else. This also involves signficant monetary costs in coin in addition to any specific material component costs.
• Item Creation: A crafter will be out of action for anything else while spending the weeks or months creating (or repairing) the item in question. Be it making a new set of Elfin Chain Mail or creating a Staff of the Magi, the need for rendering coin, materials, and time remains consistent.
• Injury/Disease: Clerics and Druids are not 100% reliable remedies. They can be unavailable, unable, or unwilling to remedy a character's injuries or afflictions. Therefore such characters much resort to mundane treatment to recover from wounds, injuries, and diseases. This recovery also puts a character out of action for days, weeks, even months as he can do nothing else in terms of gameplay. He ususally renders coin and other compensation to ensure swift recovery.
• Building a Stronghold: While most think of this as being what you do at Name Level, this can be done as soon as a character has the means to do so. This too will take weeks, months, even years depending on the scale and scope of the project. (A proper castle will take years.)
• Travel: This is not a MMORPG. Travel time is not instant. A proper DM can and will check for random encounters while en route, even for a well-patrolled and maintained route, but even going from place to place can take days or more. Remember that teleportation magic requires Name Level spellcasters, and those characters are not going to be that common.

Now put downtime to realtime at a 1:1 ratio. One real day is one campaign day. Now this becomes easily playable.

The one objection to enforcing this is the incorrect presumption that a player cannot play while the character is out of action. No such rule exists.

The player in question not only should play another character, he should be prepared to do so. This is one of the reasons for having Henchmen, as one can be played during the interim. There is also the option of just having alternative characters to take up whenever necessary or desired, assuming they are available.

The result? You have multiple characters per player, each doing different things, and working at cross-purposes is not forbidden. This is a feature, not a bug.

Campaigns soon come to have players playing multiple characters, each pursuing different goals and agendas, whose actions easily generate plenty of scenarios to play out due to the necessary consquences that those pursuits have on others.

While Gary and Dave (and their peers) would have campaigns with a dozen or more players, each doing things with multiple characters, this effect can be had with just a handful of players. Each player will be asking questions of the DM, and the DM will be informing players of how much time this action takes, or that one will take, or what needs to be done before the action in question could be done, etc. and thus this contributes to the game continuing while away from the table.

There is no need to spend time at the table on logistics and certain strategic actions when they can be addressed while away from the table, monitored accordingly, and adjudicated thusly before play resumes at the table for that character. Drop the DM a line, say "I want my Fighter to level up" and get back "It will take your Fighter 12 weeks to complete training, and cost him 15K GP." Play someone else at the table for three months in the meantime, even if it means making a new 1st level character.

Do you see the wargame roots now? Timekeeping makes logistics matter, forces players away from One True Party insanity, and generates emergent gameplay.

This also means no player should get that attached to any character. They come, they strive, they live, they die and hopefully they leave their mark before they are gone. A high-level character, and successful strivers, can swiftly become patrons to other characters due to being unable to handle matters themselves; they need things done while they focus on a more important task at hand. This quickly turns fractal, and we'll talk more on that tomorrow.