Exactly. Some people take freaking forever to do a single combat encounter, or even a single round.

1:1 time seems like the sort of thing WotC would be pushing for its new subscription VTT environment.

Habituate daily log-ins (with the latest "limited time special" microtransaction popping up when you do so) and offer paid "speed ups" for things so you don't have to leave your character parked for a week on some needed downtime activity (crafting, spell research, etc.).

Quote from: SHARK on February 11, 2024, 11:33:21 AMMost people are involved with one or two groups, each composed of a small number of players, that show up regularly every week, same time, same channel.

Campaigns where every player shows up to every session are a minority of RPG campaigns. Most people would benefit from a system that didn't punish the other players when someone misses a session.

QuoteThere is no need to begin and end every adventure in a town. Narratively, how stupid is that? Like watching a film, wherever and whenever the game session ends, people take notes of the scene, what their characters are doing, and the 'pause" button is pressed. The game continues next week, right where we left off. Furthermore, in my campaigns, Player groups often embark upon crazy, epic journeys way the fuck out in the primordial wilderness, where the group may be weeks or months away from anything remotely resembling a "Town."

The situation where every new session starts from the relatively same point is exactly how the vast majority of TV shows work. Each episode, the crew of the Enterprise are starting off on a new adventure. It's advantageous for RPG sessions to work that way as well.

Yeah, the 1-to-1 timing is impractical for most things beyond immediate effect choices. Social and exploration are definitely a part of the game, and yet so much also defers to dithering that may not want to be played out in full. I love night watches when adventuring in the wilderness, but I am not going to do literal hour by hour for each leg of a watch, let alone we stare at each other for 8 hours night sleep. Similar with routine social conversations where an opportunity is not present (even basic conviviality to build relationship is an opportunity, if the player wants it, so just ask them). Even combat, blow by blow is too slow for 1 minute rounds, and for other games 6 second or 1 second rounds are too fast. To hold it as an immutable and ever-present rule is insane and asinine to promote such impossibility.

It really is a means to build tension and cut dithering. Once your players can immerse in the tension and stop thinking they can brain fart their way through it, then I have a good headspace to build a shared dream at the table. But I'm not gonna expect someone to choose between letting their PC die or pissing themselves at my table because sacred 1-to-1 timing. For fuck's sake, human sanitation takes priority, go do your business and come back. There's always an asshat who can't human very well and expects extremes, and that applies to life beyond gaming too.

Quote from: Omega on February 11, 2024, 12:10:00 PM

Quote from: Bedrockbrendan on February 11, 2024, 08:56:20 AM

I have been seeing this conversation play out a bit on twitter. The problem isn't really 1:1 time. Like I said, I use it sometimes. If people find a use for it and want to recommend it, I don't think anyone would object. But the conversation I have seen (and granted I am only catching glimpses of it when the algorithm decides its something I should look at) comes off as "if you aren't using 1:1 time you aren't even really playing AD&D". It reminds me of the crowd people used to call the OSR Taliban. I think you get way more people to hear what you are trying to say, if you show them why it is good, instead of attacking people for not using it or not agreeing with you (not saying that is what you are doing, just that is the general tone I see in the conversation). Also I rarely see people explain what they mean by 1:1 time in these sorts of posts, so half the time I think most people don't even know what the person is advocating for.

The ones I spotted in passing on Reddit once were pushing that you had to play everything freaking 1:1. which fermented my distaste.

Sounds similar to some of the posts I have seen on twitter

Quote from: GeekyBugle on February 09, 2024, 06:17:50 PM
Over in the Twatter someone told me 1:1 time is good because you need it to run several gaming groups in the exact same world, at the exact same period of in-world time and in the exact same in-world location.

Else you'd need to put the game time on hold until next session...

Now, I might be missing something but doesn't that mean that some asshole PC/NPC could just kill my PC between gaming sessions?

Also, if that's why people are using 1:1 time then it's a "solution" for a problem of their own making, one that has several other solutions, from the top of my head:

Run different worlds for each group
Run the same world but really distant locations/time periods for each group
Run different instances of the same world, multiverses where each group is in the same world in a different universe so they don't interact with each other ever.

There might be other solutions beside those that don't involve having the PCs atg risk of being killed while the player isn't there.

Do people really find that play style fun?

If you do, care to explain exactly where is the fun in having your PC murdered while you're not there?

Or having the GM run YOUR PC as an NPC while you're not there so it can get killed?

You are correct, there would be 0 fun in basically anything happening to your character while they're on auto pilot. That's why 1:1 time is only a good tool for specific kinds of games.

The problem with the solutions that you're talking about is that none of them solve the problem of how to run that kind of game, but rather amount to "don't play that kind of game". The reason I want to run a game with shared players in a concurrent world is that in open up opportunities for players to interact over time across sessions. Here's an example of such interation only possible in such a game. One party encounters a moster that's too high level for them, one of the characters makes a noble sacrifice in holding the monster off while the rest of the party flees, and lands a lucky shot injuring the beast, but still dies in the process, allowing the rest of the characters to get back to town. There, they tell of the beast, it's location and that it was injured. Within days, a group of more powerful adventurers, possibly even including a higher level character of the player that made the sacrifice in the first place, go back to where the beast was encountered, track it back to it's lair where it is trying to heal, and manage to slay it, in no small part because of the injury it had already sustained, and avenge the fallen character. That kind of emergent story woulnd't be possible if they weren't playing in a shared world.

I'm running an opentable westmarches, and 1:1 time is helping keep the players organized well. The most important rule that's foundational to the westmarches format is that the town is safe. You get back to town at the end of every session, then the character is totally safe until you play again and take them back out. This does mean that you have to enforce that sessions end with the characters back in town, but if you structure sessions around that limitation, it's remarkably easy to keep to it, and in the worst case scenario, a return roll can adjudicate issues on the way home.

I agree though, a lot of RPG bros selling 1:1 as a panacea are just huffing the hype. But it is a tool with some legitamate use cases. And if I was playing in a game with 1:1 time, and I got a text message from the DM that one of my characters was killed in his bed between sessions, my response would be a resignation from the campaign.

Quote from: Zenoguy3 on February 12, 2024, 03:18:19 AM
The problem with the solutions that you're talking about is that none of them solve the problem of how to run that kind of game, but rather amount to "don't play that kind of game".

P.S. Sorry if I'm totally reiterating something from earlier in the thread, I only skimmed it and wanted to drop my 2 cents.

1:1 time as in Game Time to Real Time is an overkill for most practical purposes, IMHO. If you are tracking when and where each character is and what they are doing, you will be OK even with multiple groups exploring the same locale. Just don't forget to never end the session inside the dungeon.

  I don't know where the best place to find information and discourse on 1:1 time is--it's not something that's ever terribly interested me, and much of the surrounding discussion has left me uncertain that the D&D line of games is a good tool for what I'd want to do--but I can safely say that wherever it is, it is not Twitter/X.  I catch some of the discussion there, and there are certain factors and parties that make having a discussion of the matter frustrating and counterproductive.

That is because it is a made up overstatement of what 1:1 was meant to do.

Tim Kask even noted it was not used for every damn thing. These idiots are just trolling people, again.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer on February 12, 2024, 08:31:20 AM
  I don't know where the best place to find information and discourse on 1:1 time is

This video by Questing Beast, Early DnD was a open-world tabletop MMORPG, is a decent on ramp for the topic. Note that the title doesn't mention 1:1 time, but rather a particular style of play. I think this highlights the biggest reality of 1:1 time that alot of people, especially those evangelizing it as a TTRPG panacea, completely miss. 1:1 time isn't a good rule for all games. It's good for the specfic kinds of games that Gygax had in mind when he wrote it, which Ben goes over pretty well in that vid.

1:1 real time is stupid.
In an RPG I play, combat and some other events get broken up into 6-second intervals.  There's no way I'd make the characters play that out in real time, with die rolls and all.

Quote from: Cathode Ray on February 12, 2024, 08:09:46 PM
1:1 real time is stupid.
In an RPG I play, combat and some other events get broken up into 6-second intervals.  There's no way I'd make the characters play that out in real time, with die rolls and all.

That's not what is meant by 1:1 time. 1:1 time refers to time between sessions, not during.

Quote from: Zenoguy3 on February 12, 2024, 09:28:39 PM
That's not what is meant by 1:1 time. 1:1 time refers to time between sessions, not during.

Since time still happens in session at any speed, these two are not actually separable. It's really confusing to me that people miss this.

As others have noted, the only way to avoid this is to restrict in-session time to being a fixed interval (e.g. "1 day"), which of course limits the options that players can actually experience during play.

I'll just leave this here.

If that's how you like to Play "Masks...", well, good luck to you.