Okay I have hinted at an idea I have had for another way to handle time skipping. I have talked to Heather about it and she has had some lively discussion about it...so I am opening it t othe floor for discussion.
My idea is to announce time skips like this:
"In the next 3 days of game time please skip forward at least 3 days to no later than March 11th."
So lets say your character is on Monday, March 6th, 2006
sometime before March 9th 2006 you need to skip forward 3 days.
So if you decide to skip on March 6th you jump to the 9th, 10th, or 11th
if you skip on the 7th then your character jumps to the 10th or 11th
and you could finish up your current threads through the 8th and then jump to the 11th.
now its a little more flexible...but as Heather has pointed out if you jump early and someone changes something by driving forward...then your past effectively changes...and you might have reacted differently.
Me, I don't see this as a problem. If you jump early everyone cn see it on the boad, and may have to hold back some things that they might have posted becasue the future has been set.
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This all seems a little technical to me. TO ME. I'm sure there are good reasons for this that others will see. So bear with our poor, poor, underpriveleged Sid as he struggles to understand.
I don't understand why we must skip forward, for example, "at least 3 days" and then give a limit to the jump. .....Hm, now that I wrote it, I can see that that would keep us all in the same general area, huh?, while remaining open to those of us who can't commit to a day.
I guess that's okay.
I'd rather not make things too complex. Personally, I prefer it pretty much the way it is now. There's always an official date that the game is on. I like the concreteness of that. However, I am also a believer in flexibility. So I'd like us to be able to say, "Though this is the official date for posting, you may write posts a day behind, if necessary, or a day ahead."
Yeah, yeah. That's probably just me. The idea of counting on my fingers and toes "no more than six days ahead but at least three" is unpleasant to me. But I'll do it if that's the consenus of the group.
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Even the way things stand at the moment, there's sufficient flexibility for posts to be made a little ahead or a little behind. The 'official' date is not so much official as it is just where the majority of posts are happening at the current time. Right now we're on Saturday, to all intents and purposes, but there are still the odd Friday posts showing up. That's fine. No doubt we'll also get Sunday posts creeping in before the bulk of people have quite done with Saturday, too. Again, this is pretty much the pattern we currently have.
The suggestion for the changing time jump system, though, is an attempt to avoid the situation where some people are hanging about waiting for everyone to catch up to the end of the current time before everyone makes the jump together (which is what we've been doing this season). Now, I do see potential timeline issues to the more flexible time jump approach and, as Dave noted for me, I can see times where somebody does something on a Tuesday, and someone else who's already jumped from the Monday to the Thursday looks at it and says 'shit, I'd have changed what I did Thursday if I knew that was going to have happened on Tuesday'.
But perhaps so long as everyone is careful about the timing of their jumps, and makes sure that nobody is going to post anything pertinent to their characters in the 'missed' time for that character, it might work. Though I have a feeling it's going to make for more confusing reading of the game board. The posts won't be quite so clustered in time as they are now. It might be possible to read events that are several days apart but are posted consecutively. I'm not sure how much of an impact that will have on peoples' understanding and enjoyment of the game.
The mid-season, for instance, was very haphazard in its timings... which tended to make the following of a particular thread somewhat difficult. And the mid-season stories weren't even trying to be integrated, developing towards a single Big Bad. It makes me wonder how confused a single-arc storyline will get if the times become higgeldy-piggeldy.
On a personal level I have some reservations, but I'm willing to give it a try and see how it goes. I can see points both for and against trying out a more flexible system - and we won't know if it'll really work unless we put it to the test.
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I needed the dissertation, Heather, thanks. I agree now. I can see it clearer, and I'm more willing than before to play along.
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If I may offer another opinion.
I'm not keen on this keeping the game board ESPECIALLY LINEAR. We do post anachronistically, all the time in fact. When I first came here, I was majorly confused (big surprise, right?). I didn't know how to read the board. I knew that what I read I liked, but then I was confused, trying to keep track of the timing. You told me about the timeline, and things got better.
So, we can be flexible on the board as far as dates, but it's NOT allowed to post character involvments out of order. So, for example, Sorrow can act on saturday, and Reah can act on Friday. No problem. Post these in or out of order. Friday can be posted after Saturday. But if that Friday post also contains Sorrow, the Saturday post must wait until Reah's Friday is done. You can't, in roleplaying terms, allow Sorrow to take action twice out of order.
If so much is out of order already, why make such a fuss? I think we should put more emphasis on the timeline. We should tell newcomers--NOT JUST POTENTIAL PLAYERS, BUT POTENTIAL READERS--to rely on the timeline. The timeline is wonderful, at any rate. I'm so impressed. Allow the reader to get her LABN posts that way.
And post virtually any way you want on the GAME BOARD. It's our palette. The TIMELINE is our canvas.
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You're perfectly correct there, Sid. Individual character's timelines should always be linear. Flashbacks are acceptable, but need to be identified as such by some means (as, for example, when Vicasha was relating to Galen how she'd tracked the dg's over the past few days).
What really shouldn't be done is to have two "current action" type posts containing the same character that are posted in reverse chronological order. The more recently dated post would have to go on the board after the earlier dated post. So, again, with the flexible time jump system being proposed, care would have to be taken that the character who's jumped is not mentioned in any posts set for earlier game dates that are posted after the jump has occurred for that character.
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Actually, I'm not "perfectly correct." I must not have been clear. i was wordy without being clear. My apologies.
What I feel is this:
It shouldn't matter about order on the Game Board. You'll put them in order for us later (a fact I'm ALWAYS amazed by). I think the order should be on the Timeline. I don't want to have to worry as much about order on the game board.
I see why you misunderstood me before, Heather. I do tend to ramble.
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Hmm, well I stand by my feelings on individual characters. It makes the game board nigh on impossible to read if, say Tash is doing something on Friday in one post, and then something on the Thursday on the next page...
Whichever system of time jumping we use, I would be adamant that individual characters remain linear.
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I accept it. 8) You're still my hero.
But, if pressed, I also accept that if you read the timeline, the Game Board becomes nigh irrelvant.
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although I see a need to make the attempt to be linear, it sometimes gets very contrived to come up with ways to present non-linear events.
I am mostly with Sid on this one. We have goten in the habit of date and time-stamping our posts (something we didn't do in the early days)
We have gotten in the habit of keeping our personal chronologies in order. And keeping rambling collabs (more than 2 posts long) in order.
And I realize you are the queen of the timeline and it is your responsibility alone...but
I don't see the need to be so rigid about chronological order. Try to ... yes...MUST? no.
Kind of like the deadline on the season, one might point to a parallell.
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I manage to file important documents with both the Federal and State Courts. People's lives and futures depend on my deep understanding of form and regulations.
I don't understand a word of anyone's instructions and I've read them several times.
So, however you guys decide to sail the ship, I'll be starboard.
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So, Dave, you're saying that it's perfectly ok to write a post for, say, Victor on a Saturday. And then two game pages later write a post (as if it's current) that takes place on the previous Thursday? No, sorry... I don't see that working. Flashbacks, yes, but NOT 'current event' posts.
I'm not saying we have to make the entire damn board chronological. :roll: Just that - as we are already managing quite well - individual characters should be kept linear. We're already managing that, so I don't see what the fuss is about.
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I have to agree with Heather on this one. YES we can be more flexible on posting procedure, so that say, if I had a series of posts for Kate that went from wed to fri, and it didn't interfere with other people's plans then I could post them even though technically most other people would still be playing on wednesday game time.
BUT I think the idea of just posting whenever the hell you feel like it in whatever time order you want (effectively going back and forth in time) is SO problematic it doesn't even bare thinking about.
Here's the senario for those of you (like me) who might be confused.
Post One: Friday 13th December
Sam has a conversation with Victor
Post Two: Wednesday 11th December
Kate sets up Victor's glamour
Now, you can see the problem here, if something like this had occured. Sam has a conversation with Victor two days after his appearance had changed completely and never mentioned it??
Basically, I feel this system wouldn't work, would make the story more confusing and players more disorientated. Yes, we can be more flexible but let's not lose something which keeps us moving together AS A WHOLE.
Basically what we need is a better system of communication between players. And lets remember this is supposed to be fun, not work!
Here Endeth the Lesson :D
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Thanks, Miss Thacker. Can I go to recess now? :D
Yeah. It could get confusing. So as long as we all keep our posts pretty much together, all should go well.
I still think we should go out of our way to encourage NON-players, people reading this site, to stick to the Timeline. I was mighty lost my first days here. I started getting into a story, but then it got wacky. I did not understand how to read LABN.
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When I was copying posts to make up the printable version of LABN I managed to reorder the posts in Midseason into chronological order (obviously because it's much smaller) people downloading that file to read should be able to read the midseason events in a nice ol' linear fashion :D
And yes, I agree, the timeline is an excellent way for visitors and newbies to keep track of what is going on in-game.
(BTW Siddy you can come out of the corner, take the dunce cap off your head, and here's a note explaining everything to your parents :D)
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You're the first teacher to ever let me out of the corner.
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That's okay, Sid. Sure there's a good reason for that. :)
Anyway, do have to agree with a lot that has already been said. This does seem to create some problems. Of course, when we do have communication between players about what is going on, don't see any problem with those of us who are capable making the time jumpt beforehand (the series of four posts with Lou while waiting for Heather and Dave comes to mind as an example).
For time jumps to really work, what I think we need to do is mainly pick a date for a time jump and stick with it.
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Okay...
Here's my two cents worth. I think that as a general rule, no matter when you are working things out, most of us will be keeping to a basic chronology for our characters. It's unlikely we will go ahead and post an event that occurs in the timeline before another event after it has gone on without using the flashback style...
I also think the problem is that we all really just need to space action out more...
Give your character a day or so off in a regular week...so, what I am wondering is, couldn't it be more like this
For the week of December 15-21, all character posts for a 7 day period, say August 3-9 per se, should be up by the end of that week...This way, whatever you want to get up in the week gets up and then we move on...The beginning of the next week begins the next week...
Well, what logistic problems does this create? Would it work? What do you all think?
This is a loose and fast idea. Feel free to make of it what you will.
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The main problem I see with this idea is if people needed to do collabs - it's not always easy to get people together and so we could see alot of time vanishing where nothing happens because people are waiting for other people to do collabs with.
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There's also a question of trying to find time in which to write various solo posts that have to go up. Life tends to get busy for us on occassion and starts to eat up a good chunk of time - and it's vary easy to get distracted talking to people on MSN, as I'm sure we all know.
Waiting for people to collab could cause another problem, especially depending on when you can actually get together. Heather and I just took 3 sessions to do a Mythic collab, because the only time we could get together left me ready to go to bed an hour or two after starting. Which could create more "dead time."
Of course, we assume that "life as normal" might go on over this period, but there are some times when slowdowns are necessary and we can't just zip through a month at a time, like a day or two when we have lots of important things that have to occur. The Vicasha stuff comes to mind as an example of this.