Canon and starting date

Wynna · Post by **Wynna** » Mon May 12, 2008 4:49 pm

1375 sounds right to me. I can get with Cipher and/or AL about changing the game clock to reflect that.

dergon darkhelm · Post by **dergon darkhelm** » Mon May 12, 2008 5:14 pm

Wynna wrote:1375 sounds right to me. I can get with Cipher and/or AL about changing the game clock to reflect that.

Just an FYI --- the in game clock is tied to passing 9:1 ratio time.

Meaning it was probably set to "January 1, 1373" at live and has been ticking at 9 days to 1 .

Also, any time a DM advances the hours (to bring dawn more etc) it affects the game clock.

What people have been "chatting" IC is that the day (with some wriggle room for comic book time) is actually the Faeurnian calander of the current day in our RL gregorian.

example: Right now would be 12 Mirtul (May) 1373

I /think/ (better ask someone more techy than me) that if we set the game clock 1375 now it will just end up way off in a couple months anyway.

In summary after all that babble ----

we should just tell everyone "Ignore the game clock. It's 1375, approximately the same day in the Faerunian cal as it is on the RL gregorian." Done

Mikayla · Post by **Mikayla** » Mon May 12, 2008 5:22 pm

The problem with just saying its "1375" and the equivilant real-life day is that in game, 9 days pass in the space of 24 real-life hours. Its really immersion breaking to have all these days pass, literally an entire Faerunian week, and then the next day say something happened "yesterday" - when in game, it happened 10 days ago. Personally, I very much like the time-compression. It means that a good chunk of my PCs life is not spent adventuring, or doing the soap-opera thing with her boyfriend, but, presumably, sleeping, eating, bathing, etc. All that "lost" time in the time compression is her 'daily' life, or something to that effect.

Anyway, it just doesn't work well to say only one day goes by when in game, 9 are going by. We do too much during that time. I think popping the clock forward to 1375, to correspond with our start date, and then just letting it go is the best plan. Yes, time will go by but thats alright. In game, its October/November - fall is here, the trees are brown and yellow and red, etc. If we were to say "its May!" how do we explain all the past time, past days, and the fall-colored trees? So, I strongly suggest we just go with the time and the time compression.

dergon darkhelm · Post by **dergon darkhelm** » Mon May 12, 2008 5:55 pm

Yeah --I can see Mik's pov...

But that'll make it 1376 next week... and 1377 by July 4th.

We end up with a big can of worms of humans/ half orcs aging, keeping up with canon events flying by faster than we can play 'em, ...

I personally far prefer the "one year RL = one year IC" with a healthy dose of suspenion of disbelief "comic book time"

Mikayla · Post by **Mikayla** » Mon May 12, 2008 6:04 pm

The life of ALFA in NWN1 was about 5 years of live. In game, that means that 45 years passed if you use 9-1 compression. If your human PC started at age 18-20, that means if it played from day one of live for 5 years, it would be 63-65 years old. Basically, you would have the opportunity to play out the character's entire adventuring life! Thats pretty cool I think.

Plus, the comic book time thing .. well .. so, in one real life day, its possible (and plausible and it happens) that people will go on a patrol from Rivermoot, fight something, come back, eat, drink, rest, be merry, walk to high hold, hang out. Camp, talk, sing by the campfire. Get up next day, hunt some monsters. Come back, eat, drink, rest, be merry. Get up next morning, go to Quervarr. Shop at the smithy. Scout the woods, kill a few gobbos, come back, sit up near the waterfall. Camp, eat, drink, rest, be merry. Get up next morning, go to Silverymoon. Shop. Take some classes at the University, or watch friend/boyfriend/lover/rival take some classes at the University. Do some more shopping. Come home. Eat, drink, rest, be merry. Get up in the morning, walk from Silverymoon back to Rivermoot, with a brief stop for lunch at High Hold.

And ... well ... if we use the one-real-life day equals one-game day, then ... all that happened in ONE day.

And we have to suspend our disbelief about the trees turning brown/yellow/red.

I dunno, I don't see how we can be hard-core RP and ignore the in-game passage of time.

Brokenbone · Post by **Brokenbone** » Mon May 12, 2008 6:18 pm

DMs control comic book time, all the time. Some want to set some kind of ratios for their campaigns, and it usually ends up a pain in the ass. Offline for a week, means it's been two months since you've seen your partymates who also play only one night a week? Yeah right.

It is also not mandatory, absent DM command, to say "your 18 year old human farmhand-turned-warrior is now 60." Especially since monarchs and other key NPCs sure aren't flipping generations either (ah, good, Cormyr's regency is over, the boy king is mature enough to take the throne!).

Odds are it'll be 1375 forever, much as NWN1 was pretty much 1373-5ish forever (i.e., Azoun IV's dead, Steel Regent doing her thing, and NOT for 45 years of waiting for a prince to grow up, if taking Cormyr as an example). How long have people of any given race been adventuring together? Why several, um... "seasons" of course. Doesn't end up mattering, except as decisions get made relating to what canon gets adopted or declared to be "not yet."

Mikayla · Post by **Mikayla** » Mon May 12, 2008 6:28 pm

Why keep it 1375ish forever? That seems to fly in the face of both creativity and role-playing. If we allow for the passage of time (and understand that once ALFA goes live, we begin to deviate from canon as the DMs wish) then the DMs can actually DO something with the world. They can change the monarchs. They can fight wars, and see the war's aftermath. They can start castles - and see them built. And fought in. And razed. And rebuilt.

Keeping us in some sort of never-ending year seems like an artificial restriction that impinges on both role-play and creativity, for .. what? I don't see the upside to keeping ALFA artificially time-stagnant.

Mulu · Post by **Mulu** » Mon May 12, 2008 6:54 pm

Depends on your play frequency. As BB pointed out, if you're only logging in once/week, that means your PC is only active once every 9 weeks in game, and you have this prolonged absence to explain every time you log in. I've been there personally and it wasn't fun.

I see a fast time progression working too, but one thing it would mean is that once the clock starts ticking, you completely abandon official canon and make all in game events campaign canon. We would blow past the last canon date fairly soon anyway, and after that there won't be any reference materials to draw on. We would have to maintain a chronology of ALFA canon as we go for new and current players to reference, and the DM's would have to track the date in their own campaigns and reference all other ALFA canon events that may impact on those campaigns. In other words, it takes a lot of work to do it right. The ALFA NWN1 way was just to handwave that all away and play on comic book time in game with an RL yearly progression. They both have their problems, but the time compressed version requires a lot more diligence and hard work.

In a single campaign it's easy. In a gameworld with many parallel campaigns, soon on different servers, with an ever changing population of DM's and players, it gets real hard real fast. I tried having a rigid clock once on a single server project, but couldn't get the other DM's to participate enough to make it happen. I've only ever seen it work in non-persistent worlds with one primary DM running all campaigns.

Mikayla · Post by **Mikayla** » Mon May 12, 2008 7:08 pm

Mulu:

... you completely abandon official canon and make all in game events campaign canon.

I think that is a big PLUS side to this. I am all for WotC canon - right until we go Live. Then, from our Live date on, I think we should go by "ALFA" canon which is what we develop in game. Sure, everything that happened prior to the start date for Live is as per WotC, so people get the Forgotten Realms they were expecting, but everything that happens after the start date would be up to the DMs (who could include WotC canon if they wanted, or not).

Mulu · Post by **Mulu** » Mon May 12, 2008 7:10 pm

Mikayla wrote:Mulu:
... you completely abandon official canon and make all in game events campaign canon.
I think that is a big PLUS side to this.

I do too, but ALFA has a lousy record of actually recording in game events in an accessible format. I can google FR timeline and get plenty of references, but there is no ALFA canon timeline I can reference. It would require updating weekly, and would probably need it's own "team" to make sure the work actually got done.

Mikayla · Post by **Mikayla** » Mon May 12, 2008 7:14 pm

My recollection was that going into NWN2 we were going to try to have a more coherent "plot" or "feel" to ALFA as a whole. I encourage this - it would be great if there was an "ALFA Timeline" of events that had occurred, and if the DMs of the servers cooperated on the big meta-plots (so we avoid the problems we had with things like the Shade war in NWN1).

ç i p h é r · Post by **ç i p h é r** » Mon May 12, 2008 8:07 pm

Couldn't this be accomplished by having each DM write up a quick PLOT summary on the server forum, or perhaps even in an "ALFA Timeline" forum? Not the nitty gritty of every event, but rather just the things that everyone *should* know about? Doesn't seem like it would be overly taxing, but it might not be a discipline/routine everyone has or can get into.