Fwurg

[Veolian Commonwealth]

I have a question for everyone: How do we handle IC/OOC time discrepancies?

Up till the Emergency Senate Meeting I assumed that time in the game was real-time. This works as long as their is no intertwining of interests, which happens invariably. Recently this has led to some weirdness in one of the longer-running negotiations.

I would suggest using real-time and assuming that much more is said and done, but that only the relevant parts are played out. This prevents problems that would require back-dated reactions. For example, characters in a thread that spans 3 weeks (from week #1), but is on a single day IC should not use information learned from a thread that is opened in week #2. That would mean that information travels backward in time.

Assuming much more gets said and done is fine for things like negotiations, summits and discussions in senate. It doesn't work well with things like Emergency meetings or other urgent situations such as direct armed conflict and other role play related to time-critical mission and other such Jedi-like things.

I see two solutions to this:

1) We just take everything as being real-time and accept the fact that a forum as medium adds a certain amount of delay into the mix.

2) We take everything as being real-time, unless it has been clearly marked as time-critical with a ((OOC: This thread is time-critical)) marker. If we do this, I feel we should use it sparingly, since it will mean that players have to track what information is and isn't yet available in that time frame.

I'm interested in your opinions on this subject, so feel free to post!

[Mercury]

This complicated question deserves a proper answer. I'll need to think about it for a bit.

[The Lifebringer Clans]

I think Brend's points are pretty much spot on.

Note, all of the following should be prefaced with 'I think that: '

The default option should probably be real-time, with more done in the background than is said and described in the forum posts, if needed. This is the only realistic way to keep the forum synchronized. Other methods would require complicated information tracking/management.

There will inevitably be time-critical or very detailed events, that take much longer to post about than they take in game time. We should try to either handle these as fast as possible, or try to minimize the amount of information that leaks in and out of threads like that. For example, a Jedi mission will probably be self-contained and not have too much political impact. This means they can probably be run in their own time frame.

[Veolian Commonwealth]

For example, a Jedi mission will probably be self-contained and not have too much political impact. This means they can probably be run in their own time frame.

Well... Have you ever seen jedi being sent to a negotiation mission?

[Mercury]

I have given this matter some very careful consideration.

In principle I believe we have to accept that there will, at various times in game, be events that do not properly synchronize in the time-line. Events will take place that influence one another, long negotiations may mess up quick storylines started weeks after the negotiations started, etc.

I cannot see any way to prevent temporal distortions nor to stop timing errors from occurring. There is simply no one-stop solution for this except forcing people to roleplay in one thread only, which is silly.

After careful consideration, I have decided it would be best to go with the assumption that events occur in real time. The real world clock dictates when turns end, so it should be the guiding principle for interaction between players as well.

That does not mean that the time-stamp of a post is a time-stamp of the actual statement. If it were, people would talk excessively slow. Instead, just assume time is running normally within the thread. Thus, in the emergency meeting thread, you haven't been stuck inside the building for weeks.

However, you can use any information from posts in that thread - for example, even though the emergency meeting was still in progress, learning that the ship being shot down was shot down by the Hutt might affect your trade negotiations with the Hutt in another thread. As a guideline however, please do not go "back in time" to edit a previous post based on new information. That causes all-round confusion.

In the past, I have been relatively lenient with people regarding the turn limits. If someone is a day late with the turn report, no issue, if someone made a mistake last week, I'd fix it. I will continue with this policy.

Based on this, I hope that players too will give one another the room to shuffle a bit with the time should problems occur. When there is doubt about the timing of an event, don't hesitate to ask for some guidance, help or even an official ruling.