A Question of Time

In Reluctant Hero, I have to deal with issues of balancing the progress of time. On the one hand, I want the player to be able to be able to complete a single game in, say, less than 10 hours so that there is realistic potential for replay. On the other hand, I need to control the passage of time in each individual game such that players feel they are playing a life, and not rushing through it.

Key to this is the notion of time advances. These will always occur in connection with something e.g. a time advance might represent spending (say) a year with your spouse (which may also result in a child being born), or spending three months maximising the efficiency of your warehouse, or training the young thieves in your guild.

Now I've recently learned that the team has already implemented a rather neat system of seasonal representation - the world graphically changes through spring, autumn and winter. So there is a temptation to make the advances in time limited to seasonal boundaries.

Here's the question: assuming the life expectancy of the protagonist (barring magical intervention) is 70 years, and the game starts at age 18, we have roughly 50 years (or 200 seasons) to 'spend', what is the best model for time advances if we'd like the game to be theoretically completed within 10 hours?

Bear in mind we have a 60:1 time gradient i.e. 1 second of real time = 1 minute of game time, 24 minutes of real time = 1 day of game time. This means we can't play out the life without time advances - it would take almost a year of continuous play!

Here are some ideas to step off from:

• A Fibonnaci sequence starting with a 1 month advance e.g. 1 month, 1 month, 2 months, 3 months, 5 months, 8 months, 1 year and a month etc. This guarantees getting through the available time fast enough for replay, but means there is no pattern to the time advances.
• Quarterly advances, where time advances to the next season. This means 1-3 month advances. This is pleasing in that seasons advance linearly, but will be too slow for replay value to be reasonable.
• Annual and Quarterly advances - combining the above with several situations where a whole year will pass ("One year later..."), with the events of the year summarised in prose for the player.

I welcome your views on this knotty issue!

Comments

[Brett Douville]

It occurs to me that you might be thinking too mathematically.

When I think about my own life, in terms of how my life appears to me looking back, I think of periods of time when I was doing particular things (7 years at this job, 2 years on this project, etc), and I think of particular moments/days (birth of children, etc). Looking back on it, I don't feel an objective, evenly paced sense of time but instead a subjective flow -- a project I was on for 9 months felt like an eternity, time with my children seems to have flown by, etc.

I think this is reflected in other game designs; think tabletop RPGs. The subjective time of combat in D&D, for example, is quite long compared to other sections of the game -- you can dismiss crossing a cavern with a sentence but take half an hour or more resolving a complete combat, even though "objectively" the time might be the same.

In computer games, an early example I can think of is in Sid Meier's Pirates -- time spent in jail might be several years, but passed instantaneously, while ship battles took the bulk of the time.

Re-reading your design intro, there's no clear single thing that is the "bulk" of your gameplay -- there's any number of paths a character might take. I would focus time advancement on player choices -- what is the play involved in being an Alchemist? What specific experience does that bring -- do you actually mix stuff and follow recipes and what-not? Or is it an abstracted "you have the elements and mix them" that occurs instantaneously from the player perspective? If a player attempts to become leader of the town, does he do that via active campaigning? What activities put him in a position to do that?

I guess I don't have a clear understanding, even from reading the comments on the other post, of the content of play. But my sense is that you should avoid a specific progression of time entirely; perhaps you should ask players if they want to play the mini-games involved in attempting to become leader of the town? Letting them know that they stand a good chance of success if they do those mini-games vs. a poor chance if they do not (due to game factors like charisma, time spent in town, whatever) might be appropriate and give players the opportunity for meaningful choices. There are many possible outcomes in such a scenario -- play minigames well and win, poorly and lose; choose not to play and maybe fail, maybe win; opt out of trying to be leader of the town in favor of some other choice down the road.

You could limit the game in terms of the real-time clock -- perhaps players literally have 10 hours to play, regardless of what in-game choices they make. So, they can choose to run for town leader, but it will cost them real time if they do the mini-games. Perhaps they can play them long enough to change the chances of victory (up to the point of ensuring victory), at the expense of the real-time clock. Running out of time means that their middle-aged character has a heart attack.

At this point, I'm sort of grasping, because I don't have enough of a clear sense of the actual play from the intro post. Hope something in here is helpful.

[Craig]

An easy way to do it would be to open up "long term" actions as the game progresses. In the beginning, play is "real time 60:1" with some actions that take a few seasons, or something. But as you get older, you start getting the option to take actions which take several years.

I do know that if you try to force the "ten hour" issue, you'll piss off a lot of players. It's best to determine the length of the "average" play, and let the people who want to dedicate more or less time have the option to do so.

[Chris]

Brett: thanks for feeding back on this; I think you're right that perhaps I haven't given enough of an idea of the game to make this discussion fruitful, but reading through your perspective certainly set me thinking.

The way I see it at the moment is that the mechanics of the play details will be relatively simple, it is the temporal mechanics which will trip me up, so I'm focussing my attention there, but this is typical of me to attend to the most abstract issues first. :)

Craig: I think you may be right, but I'm concerned not all the careers will afford sensible options with time costs measuring in years - I guess this is the real stumbling block right now.

I have no intention of enforcing a "ten hour" time limit - that would be very odd indeed! I'm just using that ballpark figure as a yardstick in judging how to gear the temporal mechanics, if you see what I mean. Order of magnitude stuff, for sure.

Since time advances are selected, not enforced, it's perfectly possible for someone to play through the entire game without any time advances - although they will doubtless get bored before that happens! :D

---

Thanks for the comments! Any more thoughts?

[Patrick]

I'm surprised Craig didn't draw comparison from his own engineering of play/game time ratios. In his engine, you have a bending effect which makes encounter resolution equal to 15 to 30 minutes (game time), a quantizing effect which makes gossip resolution equal to 2 to 4 hrs, and then for complex actions we may decide to defer longer periods, to make for "narrative" breaks. I mean narrative in a strictly temporal sense, its a very problematic term when just left dangling. So what I'm suggesting is that you tier resolution along different layers (though you might not have a gossip system, but you do right?) and scale it as appropriate. I'm thinking Fianna takes place, on average, over a year and some change (hey that works on so many levels... two) so we're talking a... 60:1 ratio!

[Chris]

Patrick: some kind of tiered system is inevitable, I think (although I may have missed a subtely in your point). Looking at the obvious places for time to advance:

- camping: advances to the next day. Time cost: 12-24 hours
- healing: advances to a future point when the character is healed. Time cost: 1-6 months (probably)
- career and personal time advances: this is the area I'm currently working on.

I've got to soak up a lot of time to make the concept fly; time costs below the 6 months/1 year level aren't going to contribute significantly to the solution.

There is, perhaps, another option I have not explored. In order to generate recurrent activities, I have a card-based event system which effectively deliver disruptions to the normal order equivalent to quests to be solved. I had been assuming these would be delivered in a constant stream.

But what if these events occur in a manner more similar to, say, punctuated equilibrium?

In this way, we might be able to offer the player the option to settle down in a particular area as the basis of the wide scale time advances.

It would work something like this: When all the current problems in the player character's sphere of influence have been solved, and the player has done everything they want to do at that point in time, they go to where they want to settle down for a while and 'settle down'. This triggers a macro scale time advance, the end point of which is the occurence of new events that need attending to i.e. new 'quests'.

So, the player is in control of their world, they go to where they want to settle down and select the option. They then get a 'Three years later...' screen (or equivalent) and are greeted after the fact by news of the new events - I might need the messenger system drafted for an earlier version of the design to make this work. (Pseudo-medieval email :> )

This might hold water. I can make the progress in the Cultural paths (which deliver languages and so forth) primarily dependent upon the 'settling down' periods, and less upon live play, so that settling down is doubly rewarding: you get your progress in whichever area you choose to focus on during the settling down period, plus a big add to the Cultural paths.

This also suggests to me a solution to a problem I had about spending time with one's spouse. I didn't know to what skill path the player should be credited for this time. But looking at it from this new perspective, the logical thing to do is to advance all the player's current skill paths by a proportional amount during this time.

Hmmm... that's got me thinking. Thanks for the prod! If I missed something subtle in your comment (and I feel that I did!) please have a go at clarifying.

Thanks again!

[Mike]

I'm really against the idea of setting the "play time" to assume people are only willing to spend 10 hours on a game. lol I've probably spent 50 hrs playing Heretic Kingdoms: The Inquisition. I'd love a game that could be finished quickly for those who don't have/want to spend a lot of time on it but has the option to be able to play thru over a long period of time. If I'm investing 30-50 dollars on a game I intend to get some serious satisfaction from them. Playing repeatedly thru them in as many different ways as I can if necissary. A game that I could invest 50 or 60 hours in play time to get through it the first time gets my mouth watering lol I've done some tweaking to my install of HK (mostly the textures for the people). I added the Nude Kult patch to it and found I enjoyed it. I'm all for an adult oriented version of games and the raters can go suck egg for all I care about their ratings. But back to the play time issue. We're talking fantasy rpg so who says a "person" only lives to age 70? For those of religious bent in the old testament they lived 500 hundred or more years! And Elves are generally long lived too so who's to say how a Fantasy world "person" will age? Edgar Rice Burroughs had the people of Mars living basically forever and always appearing to be in their prime (about 30-35 years old) so why not the Reluctant hero?

[Chris]

Mike: thanks for your comments! The ability to adjust the game length in this game, coupled with the many different ways to approach it, should give you plenty of hours of play... I imagine most players will begin with a long game, and then follow up by playing shorter games.

The ultimate age of 70 years has been chosen for its iconic value - three score and ten, and all that. :) But make no mistake - it is possible for the player to live beyond this by using magic and abilities to extend their life. You can even become a lich and be immortal - although such benefits come at a terrible cost.

Regarding your issue about an older character being an adventurer, there's a tricky choice to be made with respect from aging - do we side with "realism" and make the player weaker as they age, or do we give the player a break and gloss over the negative effects of aging? We'll try and strike a balance between the two extremes as best we can.

However, as a historical comment, the noted general Huang Zhong of the Three Kingdoms period in China was still fighting on the battlefield with bow and sword at the grand old age of 72! While a certain amount of embellishment has probably occured with his tale (the account of his death in the famous novel about this period is probably fictionalised), he's not the only Chinese figure to be shown as a capable warrior in his elder years.

Thanks for taking an interest!