How does time work in the SARP?

[Doshii Jun]

This may be a mood killer, but on the notable career award -- are we assuming that six OOC months always translate into 1 IC year? I guess that's what we did with YE 29, but I wasn't sure.

I only ask because it seems hard to tell ... two weeks could pass on a plotship, yet a new IC year could start in that time. I don't want to ruin the mechanics of a plotship with some hard and fast rule ... but it'd be better than zero.

 

[Wes]

IC Time is based on what is actually described during JPs. Not all plots are always perfectly aligned, of course. New years occur, basically, when I feel like it's been a long time since the last one, and an IC year's worth of plots have been covered. There is no "hard" conversion rate of IC to OOC time. Usually, RP itself moves slower than life (because we can't be here all the time) but the RP universe can move faster, since periods between missions can be skipped ( "After three days of travel/One week later" effect. ) I try to keep plots fairly aligned, but plot GMs get a lot of flexibility within each IC year.

If we really needed to (and players wanted it), we could create a rule that each post should carry an in-character timestamp.

 

[Jadg Wolf]

Well, if it was up to me?

Um... my concern lies more in the actual travel speed than the combat applications. I'll leave that part to Vesper ~_^

Uh, dude, it seemed like he was talking to Vesper.

I always sort of assumed one OOC year to be about one IC year (that's what I assumed when I looked at the career awards) with Wes officially changing it around whenever it needed to be. I think it'd be pretty difficult to try and implement a timetable for every IC post, since there's several plots running at once. It's not like your characters aren't doing anything when you're not at the computer, unless you're in a special situation--the middle of a JP or SP.

 

[Edto Xar'Sivaree]

The idea of making people have IC timestamps for their posts would be a bad one. I've been on enough sites to know that things don't exactly run smoothly when everyone is freaking out about continuity.

So far I like the aside system that I think is fairly common place. Each mission is your basic timeline. The time they start correlates with the time that it is in the real world because poeple dont get missions back to back to back spanning over a few day. Especially with space travel and space navies.

The aside are essentially things that happen in between certain time stamps. This is empty space to be filled by misc social interactions between characters that don't realy need to be GM'd because they are personal stories. You mark what came first or last by what order the asides are listed in. This system works best with JP's so that you can post the whole thread up at once and don't have to worry too much about SPing the whole thing.