How Do You Treat Time?

[Candor]

This may have been discussed before on an older thread, but I can't find it, so I'm going to start a new one (or the first one.)

 

Right, so, time. How do you treat RP time? Do you act as if RP conversations last as many days as the in-game day-night cycle passes? Do you treat the in-game time as corresponding to your own time? Do you never think about time, and exist in stasis?

 

I'm curious how the various RPers of FFXIV treat time, the rate of it passing, and all of that in regard to RP.

[Nhago]

I think it's all based on the situation. For the most part I think it takes place in whatever time you start, and then you use real-life time after that. So if it's morning in the game, say 8:30 AM, and we talk for an hour IRL, even though it'd probably midnight by then in game by the time we finish, I treat it as though they stopped talking at 9:30 AM.

[Naunet]

The biggest thing I do not do is pay any attention to the in-game day/night cycle. I'ts impossible to do a reasonable scene in that short amount of time.

 

Sometimes a scene's time is set by the general time of day it is IRL; other times, we have to "fluid time" it in order to maintain coherency in a story. I've taken weeks IRL to cover events that occurred over days just because it was humanly impossible to do everything in real time. It's also important to take into account the time expansion that occurs with roleplay. Conversations that would IRL take maybe 20 minutes to go through could potentially take hours to roleplay, for a variety of reasons (including speed of typing, time passed between posts, any breaks or OOC discussion, etc).

 

Basically, how we treat time depends on the needs of any given scene and/or future scenes. I've known people who try to follow very strictly to the "every day that passes IRL, another day has passed IC", and while that can work when considering a timeline in a large temporal scale, I've found it almost impossible to keep up day-to-day with those people in RP when something OOC causes a delay in finishing/continuing scenes. It's led to some frustration in the past, when some people just kept moving on with rp, leaving plotholes in the rp of those left behind.

[allgivenover]

I ignore the ingame day/night cycle and consider time passing in Eorzea as 1:1 compared to Earth time unless SE states otherwise.

[DreamedReality]

Ah... time in mmos. So screwy. It's something that usually ends up getting hand-waved here and there. And I try to be flexible with how I perceive time passage in order to include others.

 

As a general rule I follow a day ingame is roughly the same as a day in the real world. Unless whatever storyplot I happen to be in alters that in some way. And the folks I RP with generally seem to follow this as well.

 

If it's technically morning in my corner of the globe and I'm RPing a scene and get asked: "How is your evening going?" I'm -usually- just going to roll with that scene taking place in the evening of that day. The only time I'd maybe send a /t to the other person and dispute that is if there has already been something going on that conflicts with that time in whatever storyline I happen to be in.

 

However I will sometimes use ingame time as a measure of time when, say, traveling a bunch or fulfilling a 'quest'. And sometimes the RP itself dictates the passage of time. Because good researching/spying and the subsequent clearing out a camp of cultists might only be a single 4-hr RP session. But if we RP watching the camp 'all night' to see how guards rotate and such... well that's what happens.

 

When I'm in casual/random RP I personally try and avoid mentions of time and time passage, simply to not create conflicts for the other person(s) or myself. If it's been 2 RL days and to them ICly it's been 2 days. Yet for me and whatever story I'm tied up in its been closer to 7 days... well. That's why I try and avoid things like: "How have you been? I haven't seen you in a week!"

 

So I've rambled a lot. But time can be quite fluid. And if time is a factor or you're worried about it for a particular scene just send a /t to the person you're rping with and try to work it out oocly if you need to.

[TheLastCandle]

I ignore the ingame day/night cycle and consider time passing in Eorzea as 1:1 compared to Earth time unless SE states otherwise.

 

Pretty much this.

[Aysun]

I ignore the ingame day/night cycle and consider time passing in Eorzea as 1:1 compared to Earth time unless SE states otherwise.

 

This. With the addition of using EST as Eorzean standard time, not just Eastern.

[Kage]

Right now, since i haven't had many 'big' RPs, I just treat it fluidly. Time is a trivial matter at the moment.

The times I've had to consider time, I just use RL time. So "the other day" or "last night" type of thing.

[Braise]

I ignore the ingame day/night cycle and consider time passing in Eorzea as 1:1 compared to Earth time unless SE states otherwise.

 

This and I usually keep it loosely relative to the time it is on earth, in my timezone.

[Nebbs]

I have created this space [Nebbs was here!] and will go back in time to fill it in.

 

Time Travel RP! Yes thanks to a crazy wonderful RP partner (Ilwe'ran) have just done this.

 

Oh was that not the question.. dang.

 

Sometimes a day is a day, sometimes we skip forwards to the next happening. Keep a list of events that happen and every so often assign a time to it. I think we are running a 3+ years so for on our story.

[Rythulian]

Depends on the situation.

 

If it's a conversation, like one conversation, I tend to ignore the day/night cycles.

If it's more along the lines of an active, moving plot, i'm more likely to go off of the in-game cycles.

 

Really it just depends on what i'm doing and whether RP sense works with the in-game time sense.

[Maril]

I use the OOC clock, so 24 hrs for a full day->night->day thing. When roleplaying with my own FC, we usually end up mentioning that it's evening because we're europeans, but when roleplaying in bigger hubs and that I try not to comment on what time of day it is at all. Because well, when it's evening for me it's like afternoon for the rest of Balmung >.> If someone else mentions that it is afternoon for example, I just roll with that.

 

Good thing my character is so fond of wine that there isn't a wrong time to consume it in

 

So, all in all it's terribly complicated but yeah. I try not to think of it.

[Steel Wolf]

Unfortunately, I am among those who RP in stasis or a claustrophoic low-ceiling tunnel where the sky isn't even acknowledged.  I say unfortunate, because a genuine day/night cycle would be really really nice.  I'm not a terribly huge fan of handwavium.

 

Though I will acknowledge the sky if the weather is poor.  Hard to have a standard conversation in tincan armor when the rain is pelting the hell outta you.

[Magellan]

I use the time of day and weather conditions at the start of the conversation. It just seems a little odd to start a conversation mid-morning, and then rp 20 minutes later that it is night, when you haven't been talking that long

 

Though if someone does acknowledge 'oh hey its night!' Or ' oh hey its raining!' Then I will just go along with the flow.

 

I also wonder how people rp distance. The ability to insta-travel and be anywhere at the drop of the hat makes Eorzea feel very, very small to me. Personally, I like to rp airships as cost prohibitive, and crystal travel as being bad for your health (aether sickness and ur body breaking down kind of thing) i'd love to see travel between towns actual mean something, and make the world feel like a bigger place.

[Dogberry]

I treat time with suspicion bordering on contempt.

 

Actually, I tend to treat eorzea time like Earth time, much like Rakka'li has stated. Makes it confusing when RPing with Europeans, but then I just pretty much follow their lead for their comfort.

[Kage]

A problem I find with trying to stick to Eorzean time is that I've had long sessions outside where it... goes from night... to day... to night.. to day to rain to X.. it's not easy to fit that time constraint

[Candor]

I also wonder how people rp distance. The ability to insta-travel and be anywhere at the drop of the hat makes Eorzea feel very, very small to me. Personally, I like to rp airships as cost prohibitive, and crystal travel as being bad for your health (aether sickness and ur body breaking down kind of thing) i'd love to see travel between towns actual mean something, and make the world feel like a bigger place.

 

I completely agree with this. I vaguely recall somewhere among the RPC forums it being posted that aethernet travel is considered canon by the community. I could not disagree with this more. Aside from making the world insignificantly small, like Magellan stated, it also means that basically anyone has the ability to teleport across a continent, making everyone pretty damned powerful and able to avoid all sorts of compelling RP scenarios like:

 

-Being unable to rescue a loved one due to distance during a crisis.

-Being captured.

-Forcing RP events in different areas to require travel and time, thus creating scale.

-Giving airships canon purpose again. (What's the point of an airship if you can teleport?)

-Etc.

 

I have always felt that aethernet teleportation should be an OOC system, and that the shards placed around towns and such should be treated as aetheric rely towers for linkshells.

 

As for time and my original post, I've seen some interesting replies. I asked because I completely ignore the day/night cycle in game and treat my own time, EST, as Eorzean standard time. I do however acknowledge weather conditions. But I've seen some others in RP make references to the passage of time, one standing out in particular as follows, "I've never held a conversation that lasted several days before."

 

I might be misinterpreting, but taken within the context I believe the character was referring to the RP they were currently engaged it. This sparked my curiosity as to how adherent other players were to the in-game day/night cycle, which I think we can all agree is ridiculously fast.

[Naunet]

I also wonder how people rp distance. The ability to insta-travel and be anywhere at the drop of the hat makes Eorzea feel very, very small to me. Personally, I like to rp airships as cost prohibitive, and crystal travel as being bad for your health (aether sickness and ur body breaking down kind of thing) i'd love to see travel between towns actual mean something, and make the world feel like a bigger place.

 

I am very careful about how I handle travel in roleplay. My main character doesn't know how to use aetherytes, so when she's traveling somewhere, it's going to take time, and I will actually take that time. Quests in game describe airships as limited to only high-priority individuals and shipments, so those are out of the question for me.

 

I completely agree with this. I vaguely recall somewhere among the RPC forums it being posted that aethernet travel is considered canon by the community. I could not disagree with this more.

 

It's not just the community that considers aethernet travel canon - it's lore within the game itself. However, only people with sufficient control over their aether (and probably sufficient base aether levels) can make use of aetherytes.

[Dogberry]

I think aetheryte travel is granted to those specifically branded as "adventurers", and the average joe isn't able to attune to it, which makes land, sea, and air travel make much more sense. That said, I've always felt like there should be an in-character cost beyond gil price for it. In character, I like to play it as my character hating the sensation of teleportation. It's just so unpleasant. I got the idea from the way J.K. Rowling describes Harry as going through the Floo Network and portkeys in the Harry Potter books. They are horrible and disorienting experiences. To borrow the line from Douglas Adams, "it's rather unpleasantly like being drunk. What's so unpleasant about being drunk? Ask a glass of water."

[Candor]

It's not just the community that considers aethernet travel canon - it's lore within the game itself. However, only people with sufficient control over their aether (and probably sufficient base aether levels) can make use of aetherytes.

 

Is this true? I don't recall any dialogue or scenes supporting that aethernet travel is canon, or at all utilized by any single NPC. But my memory isn't flawless. Does anyone have an example of aethernet travel being supported by anything via the main scenario or a side quest?

[Magellan]

To add onto Gyrs list of why crystal travel is suspect...

 

... in theory, an invading army (such as garleans) could use them to be everywhere all at once, and totally sack Eorzea. The crystal acces points aren't even guarded or anything

 

Hope I didn't derail here, but it is a thread about time,and I feel travel time is important in settimg the world in rp.

[Naunet]

I'll just leave this here for aetherytes, as I think we're getting a bit off-topic.

[Koninbeor]

I treat Eorzean time like an estranged uncle. It's good to know he's there, I guess, but he doesn't have a great deal of influence on what I do or how I RP. Weather is like his girlfriend that he's lived with off and on for the last eight years and you're not sure if they're going to get married, have kids, or just keep breaking up and getting back together until the end of time. She's just so sporadic that you can't actually count on her to make any kind of impact. And if you place too much stock in her then all she'll really do is just mess things up by being consistently inconsistent. Kind of like living in Missouri.

 

In game sun/moon cycles and weather patterns are just there to give the game variety and flavor. Salt and pepper aren't the meal, they're just used to enhance it. All I really worry about is making sure that time makes sense for those I'm RPing with. Making sure that everyone is consistent in the session so that the RP makes sense is the most important thing to me.

 

+1 for Eorzean Standard Time. That's hilarious. Where does that put you now, though? Since you're on Daylight Savings Time, we mere mortals in the Central time zone are on EST. Do you now RP an hour behind? :evil:

[Kage]

But as said, you -need- to attune to the aetheryte/shard to do so. To attempt to use a crystal or shard without having attuning would cause our bodies to essentially be ripped to shreds.

 

I am assuming that Garleans cannot really just easily pay off the guards watching the cities' aetherytes. Or attune to the first unless they're spies.

[Ildur]

Besides what ExKage has pointed out, Garleans can't use aetherites because they are unable to use aether. That's why they abuse magitek so much, to make up for their lack of 'proper' magic. I don't think they could teleport their machinery with them, even if they could: people still use carriages, carts and ships to transport goods. This implies objects you are not currently carrying cannot be teleported via aetherite. And garleans without magitek backup are just regular mooks.

Their only choice for sending troops via aetherites would be to somehow smuggle a crapton of Ala Mhigan conscripts into, say, Ul'dah, make them attune to the aetherite and then leave...so they can teleport back again with their battle gear, I guess.

I don't see much strategical value in that: if you have troops who are already infiltrated in the city, would you make them leave so you can send them back in?

 

Anyway, back to the topic: I don't pay much attention to in-game time too much. I drive myself through convention: we decide if a scene is supposed to happen at a particular hour and then go with it. If it's random RP, I avoid mentioning it until someone else does. I do the same with the weather.