I brought this subject up in the Tavern, looking to get a couple of quick ideas. It turned into a bit more of a discussion than I expected and it's always a shame to see the Tavern become too on-topic. As a result, I bring you this thread. I'll start by recapping what was said in the Tavern posts relating to this subject.
Quote from: TheMeanestGuestMy immediate opinion is probably its probably unnecessary....
You can mess with weeks/days/months, but I would keep clear of seconds and minutes. The cool-to-confusion ratio of such a change is skewed in the wrong direction.[/quote]When changing weeks, months and so on, better to simplify than to complicate. Unless you can tie-in some cool numerological symbolism you'll end up with a detailed and utterly UN-compelling setting element.
Better to tweak weeks/months/years, then give them funky names. Like maybe the year is divided into ten months, and in each month a member of the divine decadarchy is free to walk the world.[/quote]You might be able to alter the hours *if* you make them simpler - using something along the lines of medieval canonical hours can work but will throw things if you need tight timekeeping for spells, etc.[/quote]On second thought, you could change seconds/minutes/hours,but mostly by doing away with them completely. Instead, you could divide the day into abstract but recognizable time units (solar hands, candle marks, dusk/dawn).[/quote]I'm not sure exactly how that would work. Is this topic deserving of a thread, maybe?[/quote]Trigalactic[/i] and I would like thoughts on the subject in relation to that
but I feel that there is potential for a much larger discussion here and that is even more important to me.
Quote from: CJ CalendarThere are 7 movements (about half an hour) in each period (about 3.5 hours), 7 periods in each day, 7 days in each week, 7 weeks in each season, and 6 and 2/7 seasons in a year (corresponding to 2Ï', the number of radians in a circle).[/ic]
This has some familiar similarities to Earth time (7 days in a week) and isn't totally arbitrary, which is a plus, but I don't believe for a moment that absolutely everyone would (or should!) accept this system if they were playing a game in the setting. Whenever I use "movements" and "periods" in the wiki I always add the equivalent in "earth time" parenthetically. If I or someone else were to ever play CJ, they could make the choice whether to use my time units or not.
The problem is that we spend our whole lives living with one type of time standard. After awhile it becomes automatic for us, understanding this. You know about how long an hour "feels" or what a couple days is going to be. If you start messing with time it's like messing with language. If all of the sudden something is no longer an orange, it's a foogawut people are going to get confused. They automatically can place a picture to the word when you say orange. When you say foogawut now their mind has to make an extra translation. This slows things down, and the more you do it the more they have to remember and translate and the more difficult it gets. It's even worse with time than language.
With language the translation is a simple x=y issue. When I started taking Japanese counting from 1 to 10 was a chore as I had to translate each number between English and Japanese as the subconscious meaning of the number is ingrained into my head as an English word. By my second year though I could toss out numbers 1 to 10 in any order in Japanese and understand them. I was still doing the translating but it was happening much quicker as I adjusted to it. With time it's the same thing, but harder. Now it isn't always x=y. What if your day is called a Moolu is 18 hours long but broken up into 8 segments called Ahms. So an Ahm is 18/8=2.25 hours long and now if you say it's 2 Moolu and 7 Ahms until the troops arrive I have to crack out a calculator or some scratch paper to understand as I can't make the translation in my head unless I'm the Rainman, it's just too much information. I can't just leave it as 2 Moolu and 7 Ahms as those are terms my brain isn't wired to comprehend, I have to translate that into hours and/or days so I can "feel" how long it will be.
This sort of thing can stop a game dead in its tracks. With time I think the best thing to do is to modify minor things that your players can quickly translate to terms they understand without slowing the game down. The best way would be to simply replace one thing with another or with a very slightly different version. For example Vreeg uses the Hawaak instead of the week in Celtricia. This works because a Hawaak is only slightly longer than a week (8 days instead of 7) and everything else is pretty much the same. Celtricia has days so if Norm says you've got 2 hawaak it's a quick x=y translation... 1 hawaak = 8 days... 2 hawaak = 16 days. And now you know how long it will be. Try to keep most of your time the same, spice it up by changing a thing or two if you want but leave the base units in place. Looking back at it I'd say start large and work small. So consider changing year length before month length/quantity in a year before week length/quantity in a month before day length/quantity in a week and so on. Leave the base units to allow for translation.
I agree with Superfluous Crow - weeks, months, years, etc. those are malleable and people accept them being changed. You can't really change hours, minutes and seconds because it generates more confusion than immersion. When you have to sit down and calculate how many Phuts go into Gio and how many Gios go into Ngya... It just gets too difficult. Time is a very fickle thing because our society, in many ways, is defined by how we measure the passage of time.
Having said that if you create an intuitive time measurement system then feel free to run with it. Most players will eventually wrap their brains around it, at least enough to keep immersion.
When we're talking other worlds, day length will always vary. What I'm currently looking at for Trigalactic is sort of the standard calendar for a massive empire. There will usually me some sort of universal translator (at least for the type of people looking to go on adventures and that sort of thing) and I suppose those can be designed to automatically convert to the native measurement of the person hearing it.
Quote from: Ninja D!When we're talking other worlds, day length will always vary. What I'm currently looking at for Trigalactic is sort of the standard calendar for a massive empire. There will usually me some sort of universal translator (at least for the type of people looking to go on adventures and that sort of thing) and I suppose those can be designed to automatically convert to the native measurement of the person hearing it.
I think the concept of different species having different measurements of time is widely accepted as a natural element of the (Sci-Fi) genre.
It much.I want a baseline for the government, though. Also, how far do you take that? I haven't come across that before. Far too often everything is just in English and our measurements. Sometimes names are changed but is that worth it or does it just cause confusion?
It's only worth it if it contributes to the players' experience. It's not enough that it doesn't take away from the experience, because you could have used that creative energy elsewhere; and it doesn't matter if players eventually wrap their heads around it if their experience doesn't profit from it.
Anything you require players to know or do should be in some sense rewarding.
Speaking strictly of a setting for gaming, I can agree with that. What if it isn't strictly for gaming?
Touch and go. In terms of storytelling It can add atmosphere if you make reference to your atypical timekeeping, just don't make it important to the plot in such a way that readers have to remember it.
That is, unless you go really far out and make the strangeness of your timekeeping significant. If the fundamental unit of measurement in the setting is a fraction of a second because its inhabitants have an unusual perception of time, and the setting focuses on a fish-out-of-water modern earthling, there is room for some interesting conflict.
Even in the absence of the earthling you could get pretty evocative, if for instance the entities involved think extraordinarily swiftly but are constrained by conventional humanoid physiology. I wouldn't make a whole novel out of it, but it could make a cool short story.
IDEA: a spaceship gets caught in some sort of deep-space temporal flux, causing the crew to experience moments as hours. This lasts so long that they develop a unique timekeeping system, as well as a far more concise written and spoken language.
I think an issue with the "lesser time units" (seconds, minutes and hours) is that they relate to the most intuitive of our temporal concepts: the day. A day is, in layman's terms, not defined by an astrological calendar or complex mathematics: it's the intuitive span from dawn to dawn (or perhaps dawn to dusk depending on interpretation). It's for the same reason that you often catch yourself saying "tomorrow" when it's past midnight and you're actually talking about "today".
So when you mess around with the lesser time units you are in a way messing around with our intuitive concept of the day. If you want to succesfully replace the lesser time units, I think you either have to relate them directly to the intuitive day (dawn/dusk) or make the time units themselves intuitive.
As an example of a substitution I think worked, take the Long Price books by Daniel Abraham. Here we are introduced to time units and social formalities the hard way, with little or no exposition, but still the author gets away with it. He uses candle marks to keep time and his characters would say "the first candle mark after dusk" (or something close to that) to convey a specific point in time.
This works because, even though we don't know the exact span of a "candle mark" (indeed it might vary a lot depending on make and thickness) we have an intuitive understanding of how long this might be. It takes longer than a second, more than a minute, but less than a day. So probably around an hour or so. Mind you, this is not a rigid timekeeping system, partitioning the day into a definite number of portions, but it is a practical and comprehensible one.
You could have a small group of people who used a rigid timekeeping system. An astronomical society perhaps. They would probably base this unit on something they perceived as taking constant time. Perhaps an apprentice sits in a small well-lit chamber counting tar-drops as they fall into a small basin? Or they take the year and divide it into portions of equal size?
(trivia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_drop_experiment)
I do want to throw in a brief idea here - most systems have a set time for how long a "round" lasts (for example, it's 6 seconds in DnD.) While that would be renamed for the unit of time (Call it a dunor instead of a round), this has the advantage of giving a timeframe the player's can understand. By the same token, this can feel artificial and forced (I generally feel the more you are aware of the rules, the more that hurts immersion...but this might be one way to meld the two without causing that damage.) However, other than that widescale overhaul of time feels like it's going to be a headache for both players and DM, and players will likely ask "So how long is that in real time" and then just start referring to it in terms they understand - if a unit of time in a fantasy setting is roughly the same as 2 seconds, then the players are going to call that length of time 2 seconds. This will likely become more pronounced for minutes and hours.
All that being said, if you can do it well it would be an awesome thing to add. I just have trouble seeing it work well.
(Crow's suggestion of a small sect using an alternative timekeeping section is the best way to do it if you want to include it - it gives this group a different feel depending on how you handle it.)
A lot of systems, usually ones that I prefer, use one second as one round. That makes such an idea not work as well.
Especially with how high-powered and heroic D&D is, I think it's strange that that game's rounds are so long.
Quote from: Ninja D!A lot of systems, usually ones that I prefer, use one second as one round. That makes such an idea not work as well.
Especially with how high-powered and heroic D&D is, I think it's strange that that game's rounds are so long.
I've always thought the 6 second turn was developed to explain how long it would take for a character in full plate to hustle 20 feet and swing a Great Axe while carrying the normal amount of kit.
Relevant: http://www.overthinkingit.com/2011/01/10/fenzel-on-dragonball-5-the-passage-of-time/
Also, couldn't you totally mess with all of this in a time traveling sci-fi game?
Quote from: SDragonRelevant: http://www.overthinkingit.com/2011/01/10/fenzel-on-dragonball-5-the-passage-of-time/
Also, couldn't you totally mess with all of this in a time traveling sci-fi game?
Cool link!
Wouldn't a Time Traveler have some sort of "Standardized Time Traveler Time" ? The Travelers needs to relate time to what they are used to, it would be quite difficult to switch to a different mode of time keeping each time they travel through time... Unless you're a super genius like the Doctor.
Quote from: Elemental_ElfQuote from: SDragonRelevant: http://www.overthinkingit.com/2011/01/10/fenzel-on-dragonball-5-the-passage-of-time/
Also, couldn't you totally mess with all of this in a time traveling sci-fi game?
Cool link!
Wouldn't a Time Traveler have some sort of "Standardized Time Traveler Time" ? The Travelers needs to relate time to what they are used to, it would be quite difficult to switch to a different mode of time keeping each time they travel through time... Unless you're a super genius like the Doctor.
Well, the Doctor is who (ha!) I had in mind with that question. Presumably, when actually traveling, time is sort of "frozen", set aside and irrelevant beyond being the destination. In which case, time would only be kept track of while actually
in time. In any case, I'd imagine characters would have to develop a certain sense of "sea legs" for time travel, since the actual passage of time would be so different. Just how relevant is the passage of a minute if you can just go back to the beginning and start it all over?
If you bring time travelers in, you create a whole new set of problems. I avoid time travel in settings unless they're all about it or it's just a rare freak happening that can't be duplicated.
The Doctor somehow tracks his personal age but never seems to acknowledge or even consider his age relative to the time he currently exists in. Obviously, somewhere and somewhen out there, there is a Doctor that has yet to jack that particular Type 40 TARDIS and go off across space-time. That's probably from a sort of time-sense, unique to Timelords and developed from prolonged exposure to the untempered schism or whatever it's called (just like everything else odd about them).
Quote from: Elemental_ElfI've always thought the 6 second turn was developed to explain how long it would take for a character in full plate to hustle 20 feet and swing a Great Axe while carrying the normal amount of kit.
That makes some sense for that but there are two problems with it. First, D&D really doesn't shoot for any sort of realism. Second, what about those wearing leather, cloth, or even no armor? Why can't an agile but stationary rogue in a silk vest with two daggers get off AT LEAST six attacks, probably twelve or more, in the same amount of time?
Quote from: Elemental_ElfQuote from: Ninja D!A lot of systems, usually ones that I prefer, use one second as one round. That makes such an idea not work as well.
Especially with how high-powered and heroic D&D is, I think it's strange that that game's rounds are so long.
I've always thought the 6 second turn was developed to explain how long it would take for a character in full plate to hustle 20 feet and swing a Great Axe while carrying the normal amount of kit.
If you bring time travelers in, you create a whole new set of problems. I avoid time travel in settings unless they're all about it or it's just a rare freak happening that can't be duplicated.
The Doctor somehow tracks his personal age but never seems to acknowledge or even consider his age relative to the time he currently exists in. Obviously, somewhere and somewhen out there, there is a Doctor that has yet to jack that particular Type 40 TARDIS and go off across space-time. That's probably from a sort of time-sense, unique to Timelords and developed from prolonged exposure to the untempered schism or whatever it's called (just like everything else odd about them).
Quote from: Elemental_ElfI've always thought the 6 second turn was developed to explain how long it would take for a character in full plate to hustle 20 feet and swing a Great Axe while carrying the normal amount of kit.
That makes some sense for that but there are two problems with it. First, D&D really doesn't shoot for any sort of realism. Second, what about those wearing leather, cloth, or even no armor? Why can't an agile but stationary rogue in a silk vest with two daggers get off AT LEAST six attacks, probably twelve or more, in the same amount of time?