Time and Travel Map.

Ideas and suggestions for game mechanics and rules.
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Stormbring3r
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Time and Travel Map.

Post by Stormbring3r »

I was wondering if there was a way to increase the time speed during the overland travel from place to place. I am currently on TSM and to get from SM to HH only takes an IG hour when realistically it should take at least a day.

Just a thought.
ALFA NWN1 Notable PC's
Jenna Steel (dead)
Marcus Agent of Mask (dead)
NWN2 PC's
Current PC.... Merin (Merry) Gwinkill
Will Menen (Dead)

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Rotku
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by Rotku »

Time, I beloieve, is server wide. So increasing time speed for people on the travel map, would have the same effect on everyone else.
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klandearlas
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by klandearlas »

Just RP it out I guess yeah? If i was awandering the map I would just rp i got to where i was going a day + later...if meeting a party all can agree they just hang for a day +
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Rotku
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by Rotku »

klandearlas wrote:Just RP it out I guess yeah? If i was awandering the map I would just rp i got to where i was going a day + later...if meeting a party all can agree they just hang for a day +
Bingo!

Comic book time.
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t-ice
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by t-ice »

Yeah, server time flows the same for all observers, so unless there is only one party in the game traveling together, speeding it up with a travel map script is a no-go. And even when there would be only one party (not that unusual), time between logins is kept track of, at least for the rest & spell recovery system.

It does beckon the question if there's a ALFA-wide policy on a DM using the DMFI tool to zip forth server time? Often this would be extremely helpful to storytelling: The vampires attack at night, or the caravan travels during the day, but server has the opposite still for 1 RL hour, so what's a DM gonna do?
If the only thing server time zipping messes up is the rest&recovery system (allowing PCs to rest more frequently than they should), then my feeling would say DMage in correct time of day is more important, but...
zilvai
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by zilvai »

Personally I'd like to see the OM go and instead have the bits filled with roads for a more realistic feeling.
t-ice
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by t-ice »

zilvai wrote:Personally I'd like to see the OM go and instead have the bits filled with roads for a more realistic feeling.
Yeah, this seems to be a matter of taster. I don't see the narrow strips anyhow realistic. They are waaay too short to remove the need for abstraction all the same (and we don't want them to be long enough so that travel takes hours and hours RL time, even with the 7:1 comperssion), and more importantly they don't allow stepping off at all - so what's the point of forcing PCs to walk along these ducts? If anything, travel system by roads removes 99% of the IC world from the places PCs can RP going to. Having a world map makes it possible for PCs to travel to any point in the IC world, albeit with abstraction. But abstraction and imagination is what the whole RP and IC world is about. (In fact we have made it a grave offense to refuse to accept this kind of abstration and playing with it - it's called metagaming)

World map is far more like a group of players sitting at a table with your source materials and your DM (the party travels to this forest *points world map*, produce a detailed map grid of a random forest area) -and reproducing this kind of gaming on the computer is arguably the very core of our stated mission.
Sandermann
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by Sandermann »

The reason for originally using a world map is the module size limit, using areas as we did in NWN1 just wasnt possible.

Changing the flow of time also isnt really possible as time runs server wide, this is the reason that spells which have this effect can cause so much grief for scripters.
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Stormbring3r
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by Stormbring3r »

Rotku wrote:
klandearlas wrote:Just RP it out I guess yeah? If i was awandering the map I would just rp i got to where i was going a day + later...if meeting a party all can agree they just hang for a day +
Bingo!

Comic book time.
That being said most of us are RP'ing its a long walk that takes a while.. But then there are some that simpley ignore the fact that your toon just walked a great distance. It kinda ruins the RP immersion if you know what I mean.
ALFA NWN1 Notable PC's
Jenna Steel (dead)
Marcus Agent of Mask (dead)
NWN2 PC's
Current PC.... Merin (Merry) Gwinkill
Will Menen (Dead)

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t-ice
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by t-ice »

Can't force good PR. But to be fair, we have a specific timeflow rate as game time, and don't tell players how long a trip ICly takes. Walking from Rivermoot to Silvy might take in RL 30mins, and the game tells to your face that means 3.5 hours in the game, with nothing to tell you opposite. So one step might be to start naming ATs to tell people how long trips usually take. E.g. "South on the road (5 days travel to Rivermoot)" at Silvy, "South on the road (2 days travel to Rivermoot)" at the Great Oak, etc.
Stormbring3r
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by Stormbring3r »

Hmmm.. That is true.. And area that mention how long you travel is a sound a awesome Idea T-ice.
ALFA NWN1 Notable PC's
Jenna Steel (dead)
Marcus Agent of Mask (dead)
NWN2 PC's
Current PC.... Merin (Merry) Gwinkill
Will Menen (Dead)

DM MS
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Heero
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by Heero »

Silverymoon to Rivermoot is a good 100 miles or so (as the crow flies). This is a good 3-5 day walk IRL, depending upon how fit one is and their motivation to reach the destination. Even per d20, a creature with 40ft movement speed may only travel 32 miles/day on foot over favorable, un-hampering terrain.

Just an FYI.
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I-KP
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by I-KP »

I’ve done a bit of dashing from AT to AT on MS and been told off for it. It’s not always bad RP but more often because there’s absolutely no in-game information about how far away any given AT landing point is on a server that doesn’t have an OLM. For example, the AT from Corwell to Lowhill according to the campaign map (which isn’t in the game) is just as good as being next door, whereas there is no information anywhere that I can find about how far away the Grove is. The TSM and Amn OLMs might be a bit (cf. a lot) broken from a travel time point of view but they at least provide a measurable in-game gauge of relative distance between locations.

I have before suggest within the MS improvement thread that a travel time in Leagues* and Days be added to AT tooltips. For example, the AT at Corwell to Lowhill might read "Lowhill (2 Leagues)" and the AT from Corwell to Dynatt might read "Dynatt (1 Day)". Presumably not all AT destinations are a day or more away. CNS for one liked the idea so maybe something is in the pipeline as we speak.

* A League is an old fashioned unit of measurement that approximately indicates the distance a person or horse might travel in one hour in normal conditions :. ~3 miles.
t-ice
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Re: Time and Travel Map.

Post by t-ice »

Or the world map area could maybe be rigged with on_enter and on_exit scripts that leave tags where the PC comes in and leaves the map, then measure the distance between them on the map, multiply with an appropriate number, and send the PC a message about how far away / estimate how long time did she travel.
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