In one of those bits of irony that suggests to me that Tony Lower-Basch is reading my mind (or that I’m reading his), he’s been talking a lot about today’s topic over on Story Games this week (How shall I create my character for this session?, Social footprint, and a number of other threads).
Roleplaying games still take far too long to play. The fact that a one-shot tends to take three to four hours to play through, and even short-form games like Primetime Adventures take fifteen to twenty hours to play through, makes the investment of time and energy to play roleplaying games extremely high.
This high time-commitment may very well be an outgrowth of story-oriented roleplaying. Consider how much time it takes to read an emotionally impactful novel or watch a moving film. Now consider how much editing it took to maximize emotional impact. Is it simply the nature of the beast that creating a meaningful story takes four hours if you’re lucky? I don’t think so.
One of the problems here, at least I see it as one, is that most roleplaying games are what I’ve seen Shannon Appelcline call ‘un-constrained games’. That is, they are games that just go on and on until someone calls an end to them. There is no mechanical ‘timer’ built in. So, in the interest of considering timers in roleplaying, I’m going to look at some timing mechanisms in games over the next couple of posts.
First off, some roleplaying games have them, or have something that could easily become them. Primetime Adventures has a timing mechanism in its Budget< ->Fanmail economy. The system constantly loses resources and has no way to replenish them. Eventually the system runs out of resources altogether. So this isn’t a totally new concept for roleplaying. Tomorrow and at least part (maybe all) of next week is going to be devoted to considering various timing mechanisms and how they work.
Tags: Applied, Snippet-post, Theory
I believe that the early indie-RPG Soap – which I unfortunately never played – had a time limit of 30 minutes. No game could last longer than that.
It’s important to mention that fixed plots or outlines tend to be the most common pacing element in traditional games. Just because it’s common doesn’t mean it should be left out, right?