Time, its Flow, its Importance and your experience within it.

[Hidamari]

Ive been on (and still am on) an extended break from disco. this can be seen most clearly here

Anyway, this isnt a leaving thread, I have a question that I've been pondering for years playing here.

And that is simply, "How fast does time really flow in the mod?"

(The question is posed to indepth role play, ingame role play is for the most part 'passive' role play, passive role play always happens in DRT or 'discovery real time' things like convoys and their banter is an example, a police patrol, bounty hunting, pirating, they are all passive because their is an activity present that is more important than the role play itself)

The only real reason I ask this question at all is because of my character Kiriko Hidamari.

Many if not all people have characters which are grown, they have experienced the universe each through their own set of tinted glasses and have gone beyond the point where time has any real impact on how they behave.

but what if this is not so. what if you are still growing up, still learning or trying to?

your experience of time then changes drastically and its pretty hard to keep up.

Example
So, you have a character that is an adolescent, lets say 9 when you start off, you start role playing immediately and its good, juicy, interesting and it sucks you right off into this new world of infinite posibilities.

From the moment you started role playing, the timeline for that character splits off the "Discovery Real Time", you are now going indepth into a small fraction of the characters life. The problem is that when you do this, you are then (in my experience) cut off from real time occurances whilst you handle that one.

Role playing this small section of time can take weeks months or years to finish, in that time your character will have aged the same amount of time as you spent role playing it for, which produces inconsistences when trying to keep an accurate DRT account of your characters age and other biological occurances they would naturally go through as a part of growing up.

Even if you had several RP's going with the same character, the amount of time you are covering is incredibly small in the long term, meaning you have actually missed (are actually missing) a considerable quantity of your characters life in these character time snapshots. Organising role play takes a lot of time and getting responses takes just as much time if not even longer, even if you each write an emmense quantity of words it might only be a 15 minute activity, or an hour. it might have taken weeks or even a month to get that far.

So what do you do in this situation? its been 5 years in DRT, but you have really only experienced a fraction of this time with the characters development, how old is the character now?

It feels as though im a father that has come back to see my daughter grown up forcibly while ive been away on business and ive not had a chance to experience all their was, or something to that effect, (call me crazy)

tl;dr version

If your character is 20 when you started a role play that lasted 1 year, is your character 21 when you finish that role play, even though only 2 weeks may have passed for them?

(I kinda waffled on a bit, ive never really thought id ask this question but, there you go, what do you think)

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