Does Daylight Savings Time exist in Shadowrun?, A really random thought Options

[bibliophile20]

I was resetting a clock that I had overlooked and thinking about the oh-so-famous Darwin Award Living On Zionist Time when it suddenly hit me that using some incarnation of Daylight Savings Time would be a wonderful (and potentially very sneaky) way of screwing with my players--perhaps in regards to spirit summoning, i.e. the whole sunrise/sunset thing...

But I still need to know if that particular social institution has enough social inertia to survive another 65 years into an era when the time of day in relation to the sun can have little to no effect on people's lives.

Thoughts?

[Crakkerjakk]

Daylight savings saves billions, if not trillions, year round in electricity bills because people don't need to use as much light. It'd stick around, as a cost saving measure. That being said, the spirits don't care what hour it is, only when the sun rises and sets, and that changes (unless you live on the equator) no matter what we humans have to say about it.

[Zolhex]

Heres another question about time as far as spirits go if you were to do a run in say alaska and the sun in up and going to up for the next say 4 months can you summon a spirit and it stays till sunset?????

[Ravor]

I'd rule no and limit the spirit to ~12 hours at most, maybe 24 if I was feeling very generous the first time it was brought up.

[ShadowDragon8685]

I would have to rule yes. The rules specify sunup and sundown, and make no exceptions for extremely northerly/southerly climes. They could've just specified a time limit in hours, but no. They had to get poetical.

Use the crap out of it. :)

[MITJA3000+]

Actually, IIRC, Target: Wastelands for example states that spirits summoned in the arctic or somewhere else where the next sunrise/sunset is months away will stay until that moment. I don't remember if it said something about spirits getting grumpy, but ruleswise you really can summon a spirit for many months if the sun doesn't come up or go down.

[nezumi]

I rather imagine daylight savings is still in use by the UCAS, not the CAS, some corporations (Ares, for instance), but not others. In other words, you'd effectively have different time zones in the same city. If people are staying within megacorp turf, they use megacorp time. If they're leaving it for any reason, they use UCAS time.

This allows each megacorp to set their own clocks to either save electricity or ease business processes as appropriate.

Of course, that would get everyone really, really confused, so we just don't mention it.

[Backgammon]

[HullBreach]

Ive been pulling 12-16 hour shifts since monday (Im an IT guy) due to the DST, so I REALLY hope its not around in 2070, as my 91 year old self won't want to deal with it.

[Moon-Hawk]

Even if it did, would it matter? I mean, by that time with all the different corp times and everything else that people mentioned, all timestamps will be in terms of GMT offset, without weird adjustments like daylight savings, and you can choose to have those times displayed to you in any timezone and with any adjustments that you like. You say in an e-mail "meet me at 4:00" which your commlink knows is your time, which it tags with appropriate GMT offset when your mail is sent. The other person receives it, and their commlink reads the GMT offset tag and displays it as "meet me at 5:30*", with maybe a tiny little note indicating that that is not exactly what the person said, verbatim, but it is the information then intended to communicate when expressed in your personal time-reference. They can click on the asterisk to see what you really said, and how it was converted if they care do, which they don't.

Just one possible interpretation.

[bibliophile20]

[Ravor]

Hmm, that would make life interesting in a theorectical magic capable Space Station/Shuttle/Base depending on its orbit, ect...

[Moon-Hawk]

[Kagetenshi]

You're assuming they exist. I could definitely see not being able to summon spirits, even hearth spirits, in conditions like that.

Elementals, on the other hand, are just dandy.

~J

[Moon-Hawk]

Maybe the manaspace of the station would just make up some kind of reference. Like if the stations primary fusion generator did a major self-check every 80 hours that would have some sort of subtle effect on the mana that would cause spirits to reset that often.
Obviously that example was full of a lot of made-up crap, but the idea is that whatever determines the lifespan of spirits is a system that will always find a semi-stable periodic solution, in any environment, and it simply happens to pick any major cycle that it can find.

[Demonseed Elite]

Keep in mind there are a lot of places that don't use Daylight Savings Time today, including Arizona and Canada. So whether or not it exists in Shadowrun is probably up to the GM; there's no real saying whether the various balkanized former-US governments would want to continue it or not.

[Crossfire]

[tisoz]

[hyzmarca]

Daylight saving time can only possibly save electricity if a facility if left to waste for half of the day. This doesn't work out too well at all. A properly productive facility will operate at full capacity 24/7 without break. Workers may be rotated if necessary.

I say that the Corporate Court mandates GMT as a single world-wide timezone for the sake of efficiency.

[tisoz]

But there are many places that don't run around the clock. Schools, government, many offices, etc..

What is odd is that some places charge a premium for power during peak usage times, which are during the daytime. Power plants don't really have variable capacity, so during off peak times, night time, they actually have excess capacity.

Daylight savings time hardly helps the situation.

[hyzmarca]

[Kyoto Kid]

...haven't really given the topic much thought. Rhapsody is taking place in Europe and in my SR4 scenario it is now Boxing Day.

[Fix-it]

[Rajaat99]

In my game, poeple in the 2030's got smart and stopped using daylight savings. I can't see why any corp would think it would be a good idea.

[Herald of Verjig...]