Has anyone tried a real-time RPG game? That is one where every minute of play was a minute of the game setting? Where if you'd played 24 hours of real time, you'd played one full day of game time?

RPGPundit

Outside of a LARP - no.  There's been times where we've approximated it however the simple facts come down to describing the action doesn't take the same amount of time as performing the action.   Combat is a simple example but travel times are the biggest.

I've always wanted to, but honestly my group is far to ADD-riddled for it. I have managed to pull off "segments" in almost realt time (usually things like hostage rescue in Spycraft or the old Delta Force game for example).

Quote from: RPGPundit;359869Has anyone tried a real-time RPG game? That is one where every minute of play was a minute of the game setting? Where if you'd played 24 hours of real time, you'd played one full day of game time?

RPGPundit

Andy: "I fire at the... uh.. his... uh.."
GM: "Andy? Why are you hopping around like that."
Andy: "I have to piss"
GM: "Then go before you wet the carpet!"
Andy rushes off.
GM: "Andy's character runs into the forest, leaving you guys vulnerable from the flank."
Mark: "Thimblebladder leaves us once again for the call of Nature!"
Sue: "Well, he's the one who refused to get a catheter like the rest of us!"
GM: (Rolls dice) Wally! The Nazis come upon your character eating a fistfull of Nachos. Roll for surprise!"
Wally: "Craph! I shoff fe reft of fe nashos in my mouff an graff my pifftol!"

-clash

Running a game that theoretically happens in 24 hours has been the goal of my FLASHPOINT series of Spycraft 2.0 one shots for cons and gamedays. But those don't nearly occur in real time.

You could get closer, I think, if each player controlled 2 or 3 characters that you jump between a la 24, to allow travel time and bathroom breaks for off-screen characters.

No, never at all, because the concept itself sucks real bad.

Quote from: Phantom Black;359880No, never at all, because the concept itself sucks real bad.

Please show us on the doll where the bad concept touched you.

Quote from: RPGPundit;359869Has anyone tried a real-time RPG game? That is one where every minute of play was a minute of the game setting? Where if you'd played 24 hours of real time, you'd played one full day of game time?

RPGPundit

I've got to say that my first thought when I read this was, "So when my game group is playing Traveller and they are in a starship jumping between systems, I should lock them in my apartment for a week to represent that?"

I can see this as an interesting and possibly fun experiment, but there are times when it is just very convenient to fast forward the game to skip over tedious parts that would generate disinterest in a real-time game. You know, people have real lives outside of gaming and those need to be accomodated.

Not to mention sleep. If I had to sleep at someone else's home to represent my character sleeping, I'd get pretty ticked off.

Quote from: jeff37923;359886I've got to say that my first thought when I read this was, "So when my game group is playing Traveller and they are in a starship jumping between systems, I should lock them in my apartment for a week to represent that?"

I tried a solo game like that once -- the extensive random tables in Traveller lent themselves well to that sort of thing.  It was really tough to resist the temptation to compress the out-bound/Jump/in-bound travel times and get on to starport action (usually a week and a half to two weeks).  I wonder if I still have those diaries somewhere.

To the central question, though, no, I've never been tempted to run a "real time" game session.  Hell, even after the first season of 24 the producers started to cheat and compress time a little here and there.  And, just as you see on the show, it's difficult to pad the intervening periods with enough believable and/or interesting events to make the experience successful or worthwhile.  And, of course, all it would take is one attempt at a "real time" combat to throw the schedule out the window.

!i!

Quote from: flyingmice;359874Andy: "I fire at the... uh.. his... uh.."
GM: "Andy? Why are you hopping around like that."
Andy: "I have to piss"
GM: "Then go before you wet the carpet!"
Andy rushes off.
GM: "Andy's character runs into the forest, leaving you guys vulnerable from the flank."
Mark: "Thimblebladder leaves us once again for the call of Nature!"
Sue: "Well, he's the one who refused to get a catheter like the rest of us!"
GM: (Rolls dice) Wally! The Nazis come upon your character eating a fistfull of Nachos. Roll for surprise!"
Wally: "Craph! I shoff fe reft of fe nashos in my mouff an graff my pifftol!"

-clash

The thing is, I don't think that the game would run that way. Just like in the series, what you'd have is extended scenes of things going on, while the boring stuff happens off-screen, but whatever happens in an hour of game time amounts to a one-hour period of play. Since you might end up taking a half-hour to run a 5-minute game-time combat scene, that means that you won't have to fill up the hour with space for boring stuff.

It would be a challenge, and you'd have to craft the game specifically to fit that mold, but it wouldn't be like you describe.

RPGPundit

Quote from: jeff37923;359886I've got to say that my first thought when I read this was, "So when my game group is playing Traveller and they are in a starship jumping between systems, I should lock them in my apartment for a week to represent that?"

I can see this as an interesting and possibly fun experiment, but there are times when it is just very convenient to fast forward the game to skip over tedious parts that would generate disinterest in a real-time game. You know, people have real lives outside of gaming and those need to be accomodated.

Not to mention sleep. If I had to sleep at someone else's home to represent my character sleeping, I'd get pretty ticked off.

Well, surely the answer would be to craft the adventure to represent (like the series does) intense events that happen over a period of a certain number of hours, where during that time there's little downtime. In between sessions you might have leaps of time the way you do in between seasons of 24.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Phantom Black;359880No, never at all, because the concept itself sucks real bad.

What he said. Sucks real bad just like the show.

Quote from: RPGPundit;359913Well, surely the answer would be to craft the adventure to represent (like the series does) intense events that happen over a period of a certain number of hours, where during that time there's little downtime. In between sessions you might have leaps of time the way you do in between seasons of 24.

RPGPundit

Then you might want to check out an adventure for Classic/d20 Traveller by Martin Dougherty called One Crowded Hour. It would seem to fit all of the criteria you have for a real-time RPG scenario.

I did something along these lines at a couple of conventions. Back when Origins was in Ft. Worth (maybe 1992 or -3? A long time ago anyway), I played in a HUGE battlefield command and control simulation (probably 100+ people) run by guys from Ft. Hood, using terrain tables and minis. They conducted enemy movements off-table until they were encountered and then moved them across the terrain while the "players" did the same. It was WAY fun and pretty damn confusing once you got past control of your own team (calling for artillery support, updates on enemy positions, air strikes, etc.). Lasted about two hours and our side was pretty much wiped out.

The other time was less "real time" but still just as intense; it was at GenCon in 2001 when I played the "National Security Decision Making Game" run by guys from Annapolis. Players take the roles of leaders and subordinates of various countries and play out political scenarios. I was the chief of the People's Liberation Army of China, actually. Lasted for about 10 hours I think, with no breaks, and it was non-stop action. We ended up overthrowing our warmongering Premier in a coup when it was clear he was willing to use nukes in a conflict with the U.S. I was the guy who got to meet with the U.S. Secretary of State and advise them just before we did it so they wouldn't over-react.

These are really more simulations, but the non-stop action and real-time elements made them feel quite RPG-ish. The intensity and split-second decision-making are something I've always wanted to encounter in RPGs since then, but to no avail.

Quote from: jeff37923;359886I've got to say that my first thought when I read this was, "So when my game group is playing Traveller and they are in a starship jumping between systems, I should lock them in my apartment for a week to represent that?"

No, but you could also rule that the jump drive doesn't work until the end of the game session. So when they return next week for the new session, that's it, they've jumped.

I always assumed this was the reason jumps took a week, to make game time and real time march along together, and to make sessions feel like tv episodes.

In my Osere - modern espionage - games, I have tried to make real and game time go along together, not second by second, but generally having the 3-4 hours of time at the game table represent 3-4 hours in the game world, and when the players return for the next session, a week has passed.

This works reasonably well in an investigative game, because you can say, "right, you spent three days watching Smith, and three days researching Jones, and this is what you found out." Real investigations are a lot of sitting around watching and ringing people up and sorting through files for connections. It's good to be able to gloss over that a bit, and save the game time for the intense conversations and action scenes.

I don't like it when 6 weeks of game sessions cover just a few hours of game time, as you get with some detailed systems or indecisive parties with GMs who don't know how to push them along.

So I don't usually do an absolute "the clock is ticking" kind of thing very often, but I do usually try to have real and in-game time match up roughly.

I've gone on the clock for a few thriller scenes, where the players know something nasty is going to happen one hour from now and they have to stop it. "We drive to town!"
"Right, that will take fifteen minutes normally. So you have until... 2054 hours to discuss what you'll do when you get there."
This fifteen minutes passes very quickly for the players.
"You're now one block from your destination. Decided what you're going to do?"
"Oh! Umm... I slow the car.... um..."