Travel Times - Enforced?
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@faraday said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
But OOC inconvenience is definitely a thing. @RnMissionRun brought up folks who wouldn't tolerate a 40 minute travel time. I would assuredly be in that group myself. I have a limited amount of time to play, and I'm simply not going to burn 40 minutes of it twiddling my thumbs waiting to play.
Any OOC delay is absurd, IMHO. Either you are IC able to be present for an event, in which case you should just take your PC to the room it's taking place in and that's it, or you are not. It's one of the issues I'll both agree with you on and bring up a point you've raised an objection to in the past in my WoW-to-MUSH analogy, as Blizzard made the deliberate decision to not have their world shrink down by making travel instantaneous; sure, you could get from A to B conveniently, but you still had to sit on a mount and wait while you flew through all the lands in between.
We can do the same thing on a MUSH but we don't need to use the same mechanism (delays). There are better ways to do so @Coin raised a good point by presenting resources, including time, which you can invest - any 'interesting decisions' offered to players are great, as far as I'm concerned.
Similarly I don't have high demands before something is handwaved. If an +event is supposed to be, say, a day's horse ride away from a character then dammit, be there. But if it'd have taken a month... that's different. And it's an essential difference, too; a borderland can't be lawless if every PC with a zip code in the well policed capital goes back and forth constantly unless there's a damn good IC explanation for why they get to do it, but the police/army can't do the same thing.
How come PCs get to fight White Walkers with Jon Snow then show up for dinner at King's Landing but the Watch is always undermanned? As much as I'd love to have my cake and eat it, at some point theme begins to break down because everything feels like it's next door to everything else.
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Hell I remember back in the day on some WoD games where all the sudden a person would be ambushed, and miraculously people who were all the way across town at the time it happened showed up!
Travel times are important, not only to prevent OOC BS in some cases, but also for a level of immersion depending on the setting.
As for MMO's, they /used/ to have travel time, but there is so many ways around it now it's not even a thing anymore on most games.
Which is bad.
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@lithium said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
Hell I remember back in the day on some WoD games where all the sudden a person would be ambushed, and miraculously people who were all the way across town at the time it happened showed up!
Ugh, this happened to me on Serenity, which made me quit the mush in its infancy. Dodged a bullet right there.
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Some of my best RP has been "enroute" somewhere. It's okay to RP being bored and throwing a ball at the wall. It's okay to RP that your rump hurts sitting on top of that horse and whine to someone that you want to rest for a bit. It's okay to get caught up by random bandits/pirates/whatnot enroute. It's okay to RP random gossip along the way.
Think Lord of the Rings. Can you imagine how short those books would have been with instant travel? How much adventure would have been lost along the way?
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@lithium said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
Hell I remember back in the day on some WoD games where all the sudden a person would be ambushed, and miraculously people who were all the way across town at the time it happened showed up!
But that's BS even if the person happened to be in the next store over. It's not an issue of travel times, it's an issue of people abusing OOC knowledge in a metagamey way. And it's easily regulated by storytellers/GMs/admins saying "Uh yeah... no."
Either a scene is open or closed. Either it's plausible for your character to be there or it isn't. If the scene is open and it's plausible for you to be there - then there should be no reason to prevent you from joining, even if you happened to log off across the galaxy.
Now "plausible" takes many forms. Is your character's bank account tapped out because you've made three trips to Coruscant already this week? Were you RPing on Yavin IV earlier this morning and couldn't possibly make it back there in time for this scene? Do you have no sensible reason to be in a backwater cantina on Tattoine? These are all valid reasons to keep somebody out of a scene. But "you didn't press the right keystrokes to get to the right place at the right time" is a BS reason for preventing someone from telling stories on a storytelling game IMHO.
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@faraday It is part of /enforcing/ the travel times though.
Either they are enforced, or they are not, I'd rather see them enforced.
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@lithium said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
Either they are enforced, or they are not, I'd rather see them enforced.
We enforce lots of things without code. If a game wants to enforce travel with keystrokes, I find that absurd and just won't play there. Just like (one of the reasons) I stopped playing WoW is because I have better things to do with my time than sit on a griffon watching fake scenery go by. My character exists in the world even when I'm not logged in. There's no valid reason (IMHO) to say they can't be traveling when I'm not logged in.
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@firepuff said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
Some of my best RP has been "enroute" somewhere. It's okay to RP being bored and throwing a ball at the wall. It's okay to RP that your rump hurts sitting on top of that horse and whine to someone that you want to rest for a bit. It's okay to get caught up by random bandits/pirates/whatnot enroute. It's okay to RP random gossip along the way.
Think Lord of the Rings. Can you imagine how short those books would have been with instant travel? How much adventure would have been lost along the way?
I agree, travel RP can be enjoyable. I recall after a fire on Sweetwater making a voyage to Laramie I believe (nearest US Fort) and playing out the time.
However, an issue with travel time isn't having a good group en route and enjoying the RP, its have people segregated from each other and forced to wait to RP. By quick example, John's friends all decided three days ago to make a journey, but he got left behind as he was off line/out of town at the time, and instead of hand waving his offline time, he's forced to wait hours or longer to RP with his friends/regulars due to travel times (which realistically he could have been traveling with the group the whole time).
ETA: I understand the abuse of hand-waving/no travel time as indicated, the metagaming to join fight/action when it happens and/or the person that goes to five events in one day despite each being weeks of travel time apart.
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This is my primary issue with travel wait times, as @Lotherio puts it. I'm perfectly happy to RP a month of road adventures with an active group (I have done voluntary road trips on games with no enforced travel and they're fun). But when everyone else in your ship/party is inactive and you're cut off from the rest of the game for a week, what do you do?
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@three-eyed-crow Yep, ditto. It's not the travel itself that's the issue, it's the inability to do the thing that the game is about... roleplay. Whether that's because you're stuck on a planet/ship by yourself (my first experience on a Star Wars game was being stuck alone on Shesharile for weeks waiting for an IC shuttle pilot... ugh) or because you're twiddling your thumbs waiting for a travel timer to expire.
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@firepuff said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
Some of my best RP has been "enroute" somewhere. It's okay to RP being bored and throwing a ball at the wall. It's okay to RP that your rump hurts sitting on top of that horse and whine to someone that you want to rest for a bit. It's okay to get caught up by random bandits/pirates/whatnot enroute. It's okay to RP random gossip along the way.
Think Lord of the Rings. Can you imagine how short those books would have been with instant travel? How much adventure would have been lost along the way?
I don't think anyone is arguing that "enroute RP" is a problem or can't be fun.
The problem is that at any given time, if I say, "Anyone wanna RP?" its because I want to RP. In a game set in a city, my possible RP partners are for all intents and purposes everyone.
If I'm on a ship which is enroute to Mars then my possible RP partners are only those people on the ship. That's vastly smaller; unless we all have exactly the same predictable schedule there's a very good chance I'm not going to RP being bored, I'm going to just be bored and not RP. And on any decent sized game, there's a good chance someone else might have RP'd with me.
IMHO & IME, mushes just don't work unless they are set in a fairly localized space. You can do plots to run off in far distances, and for all that plots are important, the meat and potatoes of what happens on a mush is more casual, unplanned RP. That's not really viable with travel times in a large setting. The travel times actively mean you can't RP with a significant portion of your playerbase.
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I tend to be on the side of enforcing travel times but not with code.
As @ixokai just said I think MUSHes work best when the grid is the central hub for most game rp, but I also think it is completely fair to say to a player, well you are in plot x taking place off grid so no grid rp until that is over because it is too far away. Just do that before you start to allow the player to make that call.
I know this happens on WoD games fairly regularly as I have been off grid on two different games within the last four months due to plots. Yes it can suck when you are wanting to rp with a character and can't but if you have the knowledge that that will be a consequence before you entered the plot that becomes a choice you willingly made.
Now if you have a game that has a grid that represents a large travel time from one part to the other I think it will almost always result in headaches and while I would prefer to see travel time enforced I can also see why they likely will not be or will be highly cut down on since the purpose is to rp.
Also one of my thoughts that will likely upset some is that major off gird travel should be run by staff as well. Take a wild west came for example. Let say it is set in Deadwood. Having a group of players head to Rapid City for a plot no big deal that is a day's travel with on a horse. (41 miles) heck even someplace as far away as Fargo or St. Paul wouldn't be that big of a deal as long as it wasn't an every month thing, and both were still pretty frontier during the wild west era, but someone going to NYC or StL should definitely go through staff, not only are they a longer journey by geography but also by theme, by the 1880s St. Louis and NYC were both Urban not western so I think if you have people jaunting back and forth willy nilly it does harm theme, because if you can jump back and forth between the center of civilization and the grid then you are not really on the frontier and being on the frontier is a big theme in western stories. -
@lotherio said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
@firepuff said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
Some of my best RP has been "enroute" somewhere. It's okay to RP being bored and throwing a ball at the wall.
The key here is freedom of choice. You should be able to roleplay being en route, but when it's enforced by any outside force then there is no way for it to fit any narrative of absolutely essential gameplay elements such as timezone compatibility, story narrative.
If I, as staff, force you to stay out of general scenes for 3 RL days 'so you can RP going from Waterdeep to wherever' then I better be on the ball about providing you with stuff to do during those days.
If I don't then I'm bad and I should feel bad.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
If I don't then I'm bad and I should feel bad.
Or be up-front about it. "Look, this mission will take you guys off-grid for a week and you'll only have each other to RP with. You in?" The problems I've seen are not so much about occasional one-off plots, but occur when getting from A to B is a regular and routine part of the game (like on a Star Wars MU with multiple planet settings).
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@faraday said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
Or be up-front about it. "Look, this mission will take you guys off-grid for a week and you'll only have each other to RP with. You in?" The problems I've seen are not so much about occasional one-off plots, but occur when getting from A to B is a regular and routine part of the game (like on a Star Wars MU with multiple planet settings).
As far as I'm concerned, the travel time is the time for social RP. So, if I can't RP while I'm in transition, that's a strike against the game.
Last time I played on a game where travel time was remotely enforced was BSG:U, and, like you barely even noticed it.
“It is better to live doing the things that you like. It is foolish to live within this dream of a world seeing unpleasantness and doing only things that you do not like.” -- Yamamoto Tsunetomo.
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@ganymede said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
As far as I'm concerned, the travel time is the time for social RP. So, if I can't RP while I'm in transition, that's a strike against the game.
If it's done right it could also be a good hook for side-quests or extra thematic stuff PCs don't need to be proactive about.
I do like that option since it's a little less on the nose (sometimes my NPCs feel like they well have a yellow exclamation mark over their heads) and there's a small chance the players won't see it coming.
But even then I guess I wouldn't even call it an 'enforced travel time'. There's basically zero difference between "hey, I'm gonna run a PrP for you guys tomorrow at 8pm" and "hey, since you guys will be on the road let's have a scene about the trip tomorrow at 8pm".
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
But even then I guess I wouldn't even call it an 'enforced travel time'. There's basically zero difference between "hey, I'm gonna run a PrP for you guys tomorrow at 8pm" and "hey, since you guys will be on the road let's have a scene about the trip tomorrow at 8pm".
Not to be a nitpicking twit, but the difference, of course, is whether everyone is scene-locked between today and tomorrow (or whenever they get back) because they're on the road, unable to RP with anybody but other road-trippers.
That's what I think @Ganymede was alluding to with "you barely even noticed it" on BSGU. There were enforced travel times, but I took care to set up most of the missions so the travel time didn't inconvenience anybody. Most games don't care about +time beyond the 'day' level, so as long as you can get there and back in the span of an IC day, you can easily avoid continuity issues or scenelocks.
"Hey I'm gonna run a PrP for you guys tomorrow at 8pm... it's going to ICly require you to spend the prior 8 hours getting there, so don't RP anything that happens during the IC hours of 12-8pm."
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I'll just pipe in with a tiny short tidbit that I've learned, and tried to keep in mind when designing MUSHes.
The amount of barrier between two people being able to RP together is in an inverse relationship to how much RP will occur.
Aka, 'RP should have as few barriers to entry as feasible'.
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@faraday said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
"Hey I'm gonna run a PrP for you guys tomorrow at 8pm... it's going to ICly require you to spend the prior 8 hours getting there, so don't RP anything that happens during the IC hours of 12-8pm."
I guess the alternative to that is what I've been doing my whole MU* career.
Basically timewarp the downtime into its own pocket instead of letting it bottleneck anything else.If IC my PC is supposed to be on the road for a day and there'll be a PrP about it tomorrow at 8 then I just continue to RP on the grid until then if an opportunity comes, and simply place all those scenes in the timeline before the trip takes place.
I dunno, maybe I've never ran into someone who tried to enforce it on me? Or if someone did I mentally chuckled and just didn't pay attention to them.
- He who takes offense when not intended is a fool. He who takes offense when intended is a greater fool.
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@arkandel said in Travel Times - Enforced?:
If IC my PC is supposed to be on the road for a day and there'll be a PrP about it tomorrow at 8 then I just continue to RP on the grid until then if an opportunity comes, and simply place all those scenes in the timeline before the trip takes place.
That works as long as everyone else in the scene is on board with that plan, which is totally fine. But it takes coordination. If you're mentally slotting that scene into Tuesday and I'm mentally slotting it into Thursday (because that's what +time says it is) then you run into continuity issues. Maybe your games have been less concerned with continuity. I've been on games like that. There was one Victorian game where +time was just a month. It drove me crazy. But on the games I've played, continuity was more important. You could do backscenes or even forward scenes, but you just had to be careful.
