Timekeeping in TTRPGs, Part 2
The crossroads on the TTRPG horizon
In Part 1, we established session time as the ultimate tool for managing gameworld events in a campaign’s temporal canon. We examined two different methods—cinematic time and reference time—for constructing a campaign’s calendar from sessions.
Our goal in Part 2 is to answer a question: which of the two session-juggling methods best serves the TTRPG player trying to get the most out of their game? To avoid generalities, we will focus on the perspective of the elite player—one who energetically utilizes their agency.
Cinematic Time (Pause Time)
The fundamental technique behind cinematic time is connecting the end of the previous session to the beginning of a new session. Thus, the campaign history is a seamless run-through of all the sessions played in that campaign’s gameworld.
Upside: Ease of Implementation
Cinematic time is straightforward to use for two reasons. First, it’s easy to execute—the referee glues the last event from the previous session to the first event of the new session. Second, it’s easy to explain to others! “Last time, we left off with everyone peering down the stairwell…”
There isn’t a conceptually easier way to string sessions into a campaign history. It’s no surprise that in the telephone-game transmission of historical TTRPG instruction that people ended up playing this way.
Upside: Player Focus
Cinematic time puts the players in the role of important movers and shakers in the gameworld (rather than mere cogs in a giant machine). No gameworld activity happens unless the players are at the table, and their PCs (Player Characters) are threatened only by risks they explicitly take. The players are up-to-date and well-informed on all gameworld events because—apart from a few NPC schemes run by the referee—their PCs are the cause of most of those events!
On appearance, this serves the elite player’s goals. He is always in control of his character, and every outcome he encounters is a direct consequence of his decisions. But a sea of subtle problems threatens to drown this technique’s potential.
Downside: Relentless Pacing
If we look back on the campaign history, we see something like a movie. The individual sessions of play form one uninterrupted flow of hands-on action.
However, whereas movies are densely clustered (for efficiency) and tightly organized (for linear storytelling), TTRPG sessions tend to be a jumble of action at all scopes of play interspersed with waiting, ephemera, and accounting. This does not make for good viewing (i.e. efficient storytelling). Additionally, even an excellent movie is a chore if we must watch it in pieces separated by days or weeks—TTRPG campaigns and movies are structurally incommensurable.
But stronger players intuitively detect this problem. When table time is on the line, they will tend towards preferring action rather than resolving “boring” activities.
The result? Cinematic time will tend towards minimizing downtime and individual activity, increasingly pushing the movie towards the density of an action scene. The elite player gets to flex his smart reactions, but he rarely gets to enact smart planning and strategy.
Temporal Dissociation
We can spend 5 world-time hours playing out 1 hour in the campaign, but we can also spend 1 world-time hour playing out months or years in the campaign. These facts are a reflection of how session time works.
But cinematic time will glue these sessions together. Over the course of two (world-time) weeks of play sessions, players could cover 3 game-time days in the first week and 300 game-time days in the second week. With repeated applications, the disorientation leaves the gameworld feeling like a distant abstraction.
If it takes the same eye-blink to skip a day as it does a hundred days, that’s one thing. But if the latter doesn’t come with some kind of reckoning, we lose the sense of consequences necessary to create investment in the game.
Downside: Party Focus
Nothing ever happens except when the players are at the table! The campaign world is unable to breathe or to get a foothold. In practice, this becomes a mounting violation of diegesis1. When “out of sight, out of mind” is implemented (even unintentionally), the world vanishes right up until the moment it is needed—a merchant with the necessary item shows up, an inn with the right level of protection becomes available, a drunk blathers a convenient story about an old hermit etc.
This descent into “convenience downtime” cheapens the feel of the gameworld and leaves the elite player with a dulled sense of failure and achievement. Even if we start out with a serious attempt at a real gameworld, this pattern will inevitably slide into narrativism and steal what would be valuable, high-impact downtime from our elite player.
Modern games informed by conventional play tend to have designs that accelerate this problem rather than providing tools to avoid it.
Downside 3: Scene vs. Gameworld
Consider the example Dungeon delving from Part 1.
(Session 1)
The dungeon is filled with dangers, including defense systems and malevolent creatures. The evening (world-time) grows late. The PCs backtrack to a room with one entrance and cover the door.(Session 2)
The PCs are covering the room’s entrance with their rifles. They continue exploring, eventually finding a path below after many fights and much resupplying.
Imagine we had four players and four PCs in Session 1 but only three players in Session 2 (this is what actually occurred in the campaign I lifted this example from). Having four PCs in the room at the beginning of Session 2 is a problem because the various solutions will essentially be “errors” in the movie.
What are these solutions?
Pretend the PC isn’t there. This violates causality from both ends!
Treat the PC as injured/unconscious. What injured him? Why can’t he be revived? This creates more problems that bring more questions.
The referee plays the PC. Whole articles could be written about why this real, working solution would be hazardous at conventional tables—for example, if the referee is “against” the players. The PC being “downgraded” to NPC is a problem because this works against the Player Focus aspect of cinematic time.
Another player plays the PC. This is a real solution, but it directly conflicts with the Player Focus that cinematic time inculcates. What if Bob gets Tim’s character killed?
The pattern of play at the table constructs situations where Tim doesn’t have the real choice of letting his character leave the scene!
The same problem is encountered when an additional player arrives for a session—their PC must somehow appear with the rest of the party. In many situations, this is fine—but what about the example given? Does a fifth PC magically pop into the room? Is he found in the hallway?
These are real solutions, but the questions demonstrate a fundamental friction between party-centric “scenes” and the elite instinct to seek gameworld-centric explanations for phenomena.
Reference Time
The method of reference time (also called 1:1 time, 1:X time, or Jeffrogaxian timekeeping) is syncing the game-time calendar to the world-time calendar. Durations between the two are easy to compare because for each day that passes in world-time, one day (or some fixed number of days) passes in game-time.
When a session is finished, players “snap back” to the time the session started; thus, the events that took place in newly finished sessions represent a mined out future space. Campaign participants can see and contemplate these events on the public calendar. In upcoming sessions, the calendar-marked events are a tool used to maintain consistency and allow for persistent phenomena.
Upside: The Self-sustaining Campaign
It is simply not possible to establish and run the Grand Campaign2 using cinematic time. Reference time’s treatment of characters, place, and time creates a constant stream of events. These calendar-marked events inform further play and allow for the organic creation of a campaign timeline via player input.
Using reference time opens the game up to the possibility of more players and even more tables of players, whether they are fully independent (another group of people merely experiencing the same gameworld) or interdependent (groups affecting each others’ outcomes through their impact on the gameworld). There are even possibilities for players that never show up at sessions—only acting during downtime!
With more players and more tables, campaigns can evolve via a relentless explosion of events setting off other events3—much like the fusion process that produces the light and heat of the sun.
This setup has every possibility of serving the elite player’s goals.
Stable of Characters
When planning out sessions, some PCs will be in “time jail.” This is a state where a PC is, by the calendar, still finishing an adventure or task that will be completed in the future. This could result from something as simple as, “I’m going to spend the next 12 days training with my master to gain a class level,” or it could be that the character went on an adventure that ended on a date (in game-time) that is ahead of the current (world-time) date.
In such cases, players need to play another character. Over the course of the campaign, this results in a cluster of PCs gathered—between sessions—at some central campaign locations. When the players meet for a session, they can strategically decide which roles to adopt by choosing from among this stable of PCs. This opens up a whole aspect of gameplay deserving of its own writeup. But in summary, it complements and supercharges the self-sustaining capacity of the campaign.
More characters and more goal-oriented session planning are rich infusions of agency for our elite players.
Breadth-Density Interplay
Elite players want to play in areas where things are happening. Some places on the map will have higher interest density. But if a specific area has a future already carved out (i.e. from a session that was played, completed, and had its events marked on the calendar), it is sometimes necessary to adventure elsewhere to avoid creating a paradox (more on this later).
These two elements combine to create high levels of interest in certain events and then have those events “seeded” all over the map with second-degree investigations or other supporting events. The matters of highest interest in the campaign start somewhere and naturally leak across the campaign map in a rich texture of activities and reactions.
Conditions like this cannot be forced by a single campaign author! They only happen organically with a substantial focus on multi-actor interaction and high downtime utilization—both aspects which require calendar syncing.
Upside: Gameworld Primacy
When using cinematic time, the gameworld pauses when players agree to leave the table. But with reference time, the gameworld clock is always ticking. Late at night we’re sleeping, but schemes are coming to fruition in the gameworld! This makes the gameworld of a campaign a primary object; it elevates the gameworld to be above any party. It is not something that players control but something they aspire to have an impact on.
When the gameworld is something that happens to characters—when it is something that PCs are confronted with—then every activity takes on a whole new meaning. Our elite player sits at the table and asks, in review, about what has already happened and how best to get involved in it. This is a revolution in TTRPG gameplay, and it comes nearly for free after implementing reference time.
A rich, diegetic gameworld is a feast and a proving grounds for elite players.
Downside: Complexity Hike
Simply put, reference time takes work to maintain. It is an explicitly collective effort that requires organization tools, note-taking, and sharp-eyed participants to catch mistakes.
With only a handful of players, the amount of work is enough for one person to easily track. But when there are multiple tables and multiple referees, no single mind can possibly hold the fullness of the campaign in perspective. An organized system of tracking and effective communication is necessary to remain true to the campaign.
Downside: Causal Stability
Cinematic time does not truly support multi-actor player-driven adventuring in a diegetic gameworld, but it also does not support time paradoxes. Two movie sets can simultaneously film two scenes, but what happens if the scenes contradict one another? One gets sliced up or cut in the editing process.
When playing with reference time, it is easy to imagine creating a frustratingly incompatible set of events. Consider the example from Part 1.
A mysterious island
It is August 1st (world-time). … The players decide to investigate the docks, renting a boat and necessary equipment. They shove off on the second night and end up lost in a deep fog. They arrive on an island. For two days they wander, stalked by shadows. The next day, they find holy water and defeat the shadows, lifting the fog around the island (August 6th game-time). Far off in the distance, they can make out the shore. They head back and end the session in town. On reflection, 6 game-time days passed.Lights in the mansion
It is August 3rd (world-time). The same players gather at the table to play. … [They] roll up a new batch of characters and decide to pursue the lights in the mansion.
What if the players on August 3rd (Threes) decided their characters would also investigate the island? They would likely run into the August 1st (Ones) characters.
But there’s a problem: the Ones have already created a campaign canon and committed their actions and events to the public calendar. Nowhere in the first session of play did the Ones run into the Threes—thus, it could not have happened except without the Ones’ knowledge. The amount of constraints, hard and soft, on the Threes is too demanding for them to really achieve player autonomy—our elite players are not fully participating in a TTRPG and are instead part of some heavily constrained inference calculation.
If players in a session mine far into the future and shake an NPC’s hand, that NPC must survive up to that moment as a matter of campaign canon. Additionally, no outcomes that would cause his death can be allowed to happen!
Players → Causality Technicians
What is the solution? In truth, we don’t really know. Reference time is a long-lost technology newly unearthed; in absolute terms, there is very little research and testing on this topic. AD&D consistently advises reasonability gut-checks but doesn’t provide a full treatment.
Causality constraints necessarily limit player agency, and this downside appears logically inescapable. But here is a solution from our present best understanding: dodge the problem!
Limits on Future-delving
Because session time has (a priori) no imposed limits, it is possible to leap dramatically forward on the campaign calendar during a session. Consider visiting a large number of places and creating highly specific outcomes contingent on assumed conditions. With enough places visited and enough outcomes determined, this session’s events could place enormous constraints on upcoming “past” sessions.
Mining too far into the future has inherent downsides for all parties involved. Characters very far in the future will be stuck in time jail for a long time—players are basically giving up those characters as campaign intervention tools. For upcoming play sessions, characters will have their agency limited by the need to “protect” the canon already established. This is a scenario where no one wins.
This can be solved by having “reasonable” limits on how far forward in time a session can go; we circle back to Gygax’s advice. Therefore, we pose this problem as an additional challenge to elite players that want the benefits of the “Always On” campaign. Here is an opportunity for them to flex and contribute to researching solutions.
Events from two sessions must collide in time and in space in order to create a paradox. Thus, elite players can keep their sessions tightly focused on “there and back again” play. By both minimizing their geographic footprint and efficiently using the “currency” of game-time, they can create sessions with a small time-and-place footprint.
More for More
Cinematic time is easy to communicate, agree upon, and execute. Reference time demands more buy-in from participants, more skill and organization to execute, and more willingness to submit oneself in service to the campaign. But for an elite player wanting to get more out of the hobby, there is no real choice!
Those who are satisfied with where the hobby currently stands—those who do not see decay and decline in every wider corner—will stick with conventional play using cinematic time.
But if the hobby is to move forward—if the TTRPG is to reclaim its rightful throne as the ultimate diegetic second-world experience—then it has nowhere to move but directly into campaigns that have or need to have reference time as a foundational element.
Thank you for your readership! Primeval Patterns thrives on the basis of the sincere interest and support of hobbyists like you.
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See more on diegesis and the problems with party-centric gameplay.
Gelatinous Rube’s video on The Grand Campaign (youtube link) is concise, informative, and has the correct aesthetic focus on aspiring to excellence.
See The “Always On” Campaign by Jeffro Johnson.