Passing Time

[santovendetta]

A common situation for all my group's BW campaigns is that we are forever unable to pass any significant length of time. Reading Thor's thread about his Burning THAC0 character I was amazed when he said they passed a year of study time, in my current game my character has been trying to find 2 weeks to study a tome and has been trying for three sessions now. On top of that nearly all the characters have wound penalties that we haven't spent the time to recover from.

The reason for this that there is always something happening, an execution in the morning, an army marching down on you or a full moon about to drive your lycanthropic friend mad, for example. I don't know if it's the number of players (all the games we've played have had between 5-8 PCs) or just something with our play style but there is always some pressing engagement for some, if not all of us.

While the game is still fun I can't help but wonder if we're doing something wrong by never being able to use resource cycles, practice times, proper wound recoveries and long term projects.

Is are always in motion gameplay that bad and if so what can we do about it? Does anyone else play like that?

[Dwight]

Right now I've got one game (Burning THAC0) that is at the other end. They keep taking 6 months off. :p Yeah, it's got 2 characters. Maybe that is part of it. Although in that case I think it might be that one character is a sorcerer and the other is trying to climb the social/economic ladder. Both of those lend themselves to longer timeframes.

So all these things happening, is that the GM feeding the conflict engine or is it the players doing this?

Either way maybe take a look at the Beliefs. If they are mostly talking about things that happen on a short timeframe that might be the answer? Hitting on those are going to preempt the long timeframe stuff.

[santovendetta]

I think less people helps even if it is not the root problem, just less people who need to have a lull at the same time. It's a combination of player and GM I think, we're rather impatient players so we don't want to put things off, in addition we screw up a lot so are very often putting out the fires of our last failure (sometimes that's a metaphor).

[Thor]

Getting that year off was a huge battle between the characters. We typically go go go until we're beat down, wounded, starving, and broke.

Then we generally take a few months to Recover, Get a Job and Practice. A year is a pretty extreme amount of time, but sometimes Wizards need to practice!

[zabieru]

This means you're doing it right! You have passionate, driven characters! Good work!

If you need time off, make that a priority: "I want to find us a nice cushy garrison contract." "I want to spend next session consulting my father's seneschal and making some circles roles to hire someone to take care of these lands so I can go be a hermit in my tower of magic. What's the resources Ob to buy enough vicious, slavering wolves to fill the woods around the tower?"

You'll probably need to talk the other players into it, too. It depends some on the kind of game, too... Some games have off-camera time in a way that others don't.

[Thunder_God]

Two things:
1. I was in a D&D game where we had too many choices, we came back from the dungeon delve to restock, and had 3 different parties approach us with missions, and the dungeon was not done either.
Sometimes you have to say no.

2. There's an illusion that's occuring here, one that is affecting your GM; things happen all the time, it doesn't mean they have to happen with no break between them. Suppose there's an army marching on you, the fact that it happens immediately after something else in the session in real time, doesn't mean it has to happen immediately in the game-world. So the army is marching on you, and will arrive in a couple of weeks. The Execution had been postponed till the Lord could be present, till they could hear the plaintiff, till they could verify his claims, blah blah blah.
You can have things happening non-stop in the session/campaign, but they can happen with pauses between them in the game-world.