Handling Time in Multiplayer RPGs

I had awoke this morning thinking about the same thing you are talking about. For some odd reason. This idea came to me from thinking about the classic movie Time Machine. There is another movie similar to this idea called Demolition man. Where the protagonist sleeps in his normal state and awakes in another time and his body has aged and so does everything else. Hyper sleep. With everything that has happened in the past or present of the game it alters the outcome in the future present or the distant future.

Seeing the main character attributes change due to the environment and knowledge he or she had acquired before hand to do new missions or obtain new skills, talent, research new information and maybe bring it back to relay the old information to the new person in the future in charge or even this hopw about going back into the past and telling the news to change the future or the present?

I guess it could work for a game like this. Instead altering time to slow down or speed up time to run faster or swim faster or change time to slow or fast or what ever the game is asking for.

Confused? Yeah me to. lol

Any suggestions or ideas?.

I wasn't really considering skipping ahead in time on a Rip Van Winkle scale, more like a few hours of game time so the player wouldn't have to wait when their character slept or stood about waiting for a store to open.

I have seen a few single player adventure games that feature time travel or suspended animation though, such as Day of the Tentacle, Lost in Time and Snowball. One of the Infocom text adventures also had you meet a past/future version of yourself.

An idea is to speed up the time it takes for events to take place (like tasks a player would have to wait for). As to stores and such, have some day time stores and some night time stores. Then throw in some "24 hour" stores. Not sure how many hours per day your game has, or if it even has hours. You may get a few ideas play The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask. They had that 72 hour time frame and all the NPCs were on a certain schedule depending on events and certain stores were only open during the day or during the night. Just have shorter day/night cycles so players can enjoy both even if their real life day/night cycle does not work with the world.

I was planning to have game time pass more quickly than real time, but only at something like a 6:1 ratio.

Opening hours for stores are something the player could plan around. The biggest problem is that it would take over an hour of real time for a character to sleep.

To speed up that time would really require the consent of all the players in the game world, and they may not all be working/playing together.

Having the stores open 24 hours and/or removing the need for sleep reduces believability and some gameplay elements.

I was planning to have game time pass more quickly than real time, but only at something like a 6:1 ratio.

Opening hours for stores are something the player could plan around. The biggest problem is that it would take over an hour of real time for a character to sleep.

To speed up that time would really require the consent of all the players in the game world, and they may not all be working/playing together.

Having the stores open 24 hours and/or removing the need for sleep reduces believability and some gameplay elements.

Why does the character have to sleep? If it interrupts the flow and fun of the game, toss it out. If there are gameplay elements that sleep times would support, maybe you need to rethink them. If on the other hand you feel like games need to be realistic and leaving out sleep is breaking that, maybe you need to reconsider the role of realism in games. Either way, you are right, you can't temporally desync the game and you can't rely on players agreeing on anything, so you can't have sleep cycles that take significant time.

I do feel that day/night cycles can add interesting gameplay and that they can also add significant atmosphere to the environment. Don't confuse the two roles though. Day and night in Oblivion served virtually no gameplay purpose and only really added annoyance in that realm, it did however add to the atmosphere of the game.


You may want to remember something though, in MMOs, players do sleep, and a player may assume that his avatar/character also sleeps during these times. To reinforce this idea, all you need to do is move the character to the nearest friendly city at log off and have the character crawling out of a hotel bed at log on. Viola, he slept while you were logged off.

Whether a particular feature interrupts the flow and fun of the game is subjective. For example, a player only interested in combat may not appreciate going into town to buy and sell or talk to NPCs.

I don't want to include sleep just for realism purposes. I feel it also adds depth, believability and a way to include additional gameplay and story elements. Consider what any group of heroes in an action/adventure movie do when it is time to rest. They don't just drop all their gear on the ground and go straight to sleep. They check their equipment, eat, plan their next move, post a guard and/or just sit and chat first.

Once they are asleep, they may be attacked, have something stolen from them or have a prophetic dream.

In Oblivion, the day and night cycle did have a gameplay purpose, as did sleeping. Night was the ideal time for stealthy thieves and assassins to practice their skills, or for more law-abiding characters to attack a bandit camp. The character's level only increased after resting.

I think you should flat out ignore the folks who find no value in realism. They don't get it, they don't like it, and they're not your target audience. Personally, I really like the concept of survival in RPGs. Carrying enough supplies, finding a safe shelter from monsters and planning around the needs of my character *IS* gameplay for me.

You'll have to assume that anyone who gets together to play a game with these elements finds them valuable. That said, if time can't jump forward players need something worthwhile to do in real time. One option would be to actually let them do things while sleeping, maybe in an astral form. If 10 characters need to sleep and 6 are trying to raid a tomb, could the six corporeal characters get aid from the rest in a way they couldn't if the rest were awake?

Another option might actually be to allow the game to get out of synch provided you could break the world up into zones. All players within the same zone share the same rate of time passage for agreed upon or majority vote activities. When players meet back up there's some transitioning that handles the difference in time much like a game master would. Perhaps in order to synch players are allowed to warp or automatically complete certain actions, with the transitioning capturing what each did.

For example, in area A 10 players set up a camp. Half decide to train or study, the other half sleep or stand watch. Maybe they even set up shifts. Time in this zone is going to be one big abstracted lump that lets them get through the night.

In area B six players decide to raid a tomb. This plays out in real time, still occurring "last night" from the perspective of those in area A. If those in area B want to interact with those in area A (say to get help) then the raid is aborted and the virtual GM / transition manager says something about them arriving back in the morning. Alternately if those in area A want to jump into area B to help, any benefits are rolled back and they can enter the tomb.

You could get into issues where players become too out of synch but I think it would help if there were some factor which only occasionally made it beneficial to separate. If there were some sort of virtual GM akin to the "Director" in Left For Dead you could apply greater risk / punishment for parties that continually separated which intensified as they got more and more out of synch.

I have thought about giving each player something worthwhile to do whilst their character is asleep, but haven't yet come up with a suitable activity. I wouldn't want it to be so trivial that it became "busy work", nor so important that being interrupted when the character woke up (possibly unexpectedly) was a big deal.

I like the astral form idea, but am concerned it might become frustrating to be non-corporeal for lengthy periods.

Allowing player characters to get out of sync seems to be an even more problematic option though, as it could so easily introduce time paradoxes. Dealing with issues like one character doing/taking something unique in real world time, and another doing it after, but still before them in game time, would not be easy.

Forcing a player character to jump forward in time would cause issues if they were in combat, trying to break into a closed store or in some other time critical situation.

I have been thinking in circles with this one for quite some time, yet I still can't help feeling there is a simple solution that I'm missing.

I have thought about giving each player something worthwhile to do whilst their character is asleep, but haven't yet come up with a suitable activity. I wouldn't want it to be so trivial that it became "busy work", nor so important that being interrupted when the character woke up (possibly unexpectedly) was a big deal.

I like the astral form idea, but am concerned it might become frustrating to be non-corporeal for lengthy periods.

Yes, idle time is no small issue, no matter what the player is doing. If you create a non-corporeal form of gameplay it can't just be tacked on, it's GOT to be critical to the fabric of your design. If it's not then during the creative process you won't invest the same amount of work as you do corporeal activities and players will feel the imbalance. Put another way, you've got to be committed to it.

Allowing player characters to get out of sync seems to be an even more problematic option though, as it could so easily introduce time paradoxes. Dealing with issues like one character doing/taking something unique in real world time, and another doing it after, but still before them in game time, would not be easy.
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This is why I propose zones. If I'm in zone A stealing from a vault in real-time and you're in zone B sleeping you can't interact with my zone until I'm done. Better yet, a "virtual GM" would give you something to occupy yourself with until I'm done.

Forcing a player character to jump forward in time would cause issues if they were in combat, trying to break into a closed store or in some other time critical situation.
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If you have to jump players forward one idea might be to use two levels of rule resolution, one real-time and one abstract and linked to a library of dramatically interesting outcomes. If, for instance, players have to jump forward in combat then you could auto-resolve the battle depending on how important it was. Some battles would be too critical, but then you could easily avoid these by requiring the entire party to be present (boss chamber requirements, for instance).

I don't see this working if players are a bunch of whiney "me first!" gamers out for their own glory. This sort of player will only get annoyed that he's not the center of attention. Skipping time would mean some players sacrificing a stretch of gameplay and rewards, which is something that probably only team oriented players would do if they felt it was for a worthy goal.

This is why I propose zones. If I'm in zone A stealing from a vault in real-time and you're in zone B sleeping you can't interact with my zone until I'm done. Better yet, a "virtual GM" would give you something to occupy yourself with until I'm done.

I can still see problems with that.

Imagine a group of characters going into a large dungeon and then deciding to split up to cover more ground and/or not get in each others' way in the narrow corridors. If one group decides to sleep, but the other stays awake as they encounter more enemies, it wouldn't be very practical to force the first group to stay put until the other sleeps too.

It seems to me that this system would encourage players to delay sleeping and discourage any form of friendly competition (as in one group saying, "I bet we get there before you guys").

I see what you mean. I think that including sleep is going to require a fairly flexible system that can summarize and abstract the day's events in order to keep a good sense of pacing. Whatever you do I don't think you have the option of playing out events second by second at all times and letting players sleep informally. Without abstraction you're going to have to resort to other (maybe more familiar) devices like having players "sleep" for an unrealistically short time or cast a spell or something unless sleep / training / etc. is anything but idle time.

Is it possible to synch the players so that, no matter what, they need rest at approximately the same time?

with up to about 16 players in the same world

How many of them will be online when you login? If they live in different timezones and each play for 2 hours a day then statisticly you can meet only 1 fellow player... I don't see it working for an RPG. For turn based strategy, no problem, but realtime RPG with its social interaction...

Is it possible to synch the players so that, no matter what, they need rest at approximately the same time?

I think most players would accept their level of fatigue being affected by a lack of sleep/rest and there being a point where that would incapacitate their character. However, they would also expect that to vary depending on their character's stats, and how active they had been.

I suppose each character could be defined as more/less alert at night during the creation process and/or by their actions, with appropriate bonuses and penalties when doing tasks.

How many of them will be online when you login? If they live in different timezones and each play for 2 hours a day then statisticly you can meet only 1 fellow player... I don't see it working for an RPG. For turn based strategy, no problem, but realtime RPG with its social interaction...

The idea is to allow people who want to, to play with a few others without hundreds of strangers being there too (as there are in MMORPGs). Most of them will probably already know each other to some extent.

It shouldn't be too difficult to provide a method of finding other players who are online at similar times so they can meet in the same game.

It worked for Diablo and Neverwinter Nights.