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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[Reid]

It is 821 now
Last year was 820

With .87 devs decided the smartest thing to do was have Disco time run alongside RL time

So basically, time flows normally. Just come up with stuff your characters would do when you're not playing them

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[Jack_Henderson]

Time flows as fast/slow as you decide it does.
Every good story uses the devices of shortening or lengthening time. So can roleplay do.

As long as you do not force your roleplay on others and as long as the players you are playing with (and who are affected by your rp) agree with your style, you can have chars age faster or slower, have children grow up to a "playable" age faster, jump in time or do whatever you think makes a good story.

For example, I do not have a problem with e.g. returning a char who I sent on maternity leave after 3 months. Her baby is 3 years old now and she returns to active duty. No one cares whether you waited for 3 years or 3 months. The char was gone. Then it comes back, changed, and adds something to the story. I do not expect any problems with personal shifts in time like this one.

Disco times gives you a framework to find some orientation. But you are still the author of your own story.

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[nOmnomnOm]

I have to agree a bit with Jack on this one.

Also its a game and its hard to keep RPing and thinking up stuff he would have done when your not playing.
Unless your being very general like : OH he had a vacation!

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