How do you handle time in your games? This question covers stuff like how long does a run usually take, what characters do in the time inbetween runs and while waiting for contacts etc.

I'm also wondering how long your games go for in regards to in-game time. How many years in game time have elapsed? What's the longest you've gone for? Is your Ork feeling a bit old?

I'm just passing year 1 in my game, just in time for the year of the comet.

The longest-running (in-game) game I've been in has run for about 2.5 months, with another that might catch up to it if we don't get TPKed in Chicago. The first game ran for just under two years real-time, the second is in its… third year, I think? Borrowed Time is like free build points in the games I GM and play in, though I know if anyone takes it that'll probably change (not deliberately, but because of Mr. Murphy and his law).

Runs usually take between two hours and two days, longer for runs with travel, characters do all sorts of stuff (procure gear, have lunch with their contacts, hit up the local high-end restaurant, whatever), and we try to keep exact track of time. This doesn't always work, of course…

~J

...As a player my longest running character is KK, who started at 15 years old (SR1) and ended (SR3) at 19 going on 20 (still not legal age yet). This encompassed about 5 years of real time.

For single a campaign Arc, my longest running was Rhapsody in Shadow which (game time) began in late October of 2061 (when Leela retired) and ended in September of 2062. Adding the transition from PC to NPC for Leela would back up the start to June of 2060 (which is when I began the initial "What Has Gone Before" storyline). For the players it ran about 8 months (real time).

I think the shortest session ran through about 6 hours of In-game time. Including legwork.

Our longest would have covered about three years, much of which was downtime, training, generic runs, or "legitimate" business activity. Mostly glossed over in favour of metaplot.

Campaign length, our longest spanned from just after the Awakening through to a couple of years after the return of the Comet. Three of the teams' characters were carried through the entire campaign. The elf (a spike baby), my human (with two leonisations), and the sam (who downloaded his father's personality matrix into his head, and was thus "the same character"). It was a bit odd, but fun.

About three years real time, I think. Maybe four.

Well for me it depends. Combat? I use mostly combat turns to help judge the time of say.. a gun fight. Each turn afterall is onlya bout 3 seconds. So if your fighting for 40 turns thats only really 2 hours.

Of course there's additional time going on there for when your not in combat. But again some tasks are easily tracked byt he listed time it takes. Add it all up. Fudge some more numbers and voila.

Your average actual run only lasts a few hours tops usually. The rest of the time when it's not super critical time jumps around alot. A few days or hours here. To several months of downtime due to injuries, training, gear aquisition etc.

Don't you mean 40 turns = 2 minutes?

~J

Yeah Sorry. I'm tired. Long day

For me, if the runners plan and run legwork on a number of topics, a run takes about a week. It takes time to arrange meets with contacts and such. About 3-4 days if they rush it. The actual run can last anywhere from a 10 minutes to several hours.

Usually, rather than give myself headaches, I just call 1 month has passed every third session or so (depending on what gets done).

Yeah for planning to me it really depends on how much planning there is. I've certainly done runs where... planning honestly only took about 20 minutes of discussion. We did like... NO legwork at all. We hit the odd unexpected supprise now and then. But overall with that particular group we almost allways figgured out some way to get the job done just as well if not better than the times we spent all sorts of time gathering legwork on a job. Our plans never worked out the way we wanted them too anyway.

The last game I ran, we tracked time as closely as possible. We had a calendar for 2061 printed out, and I made notes for what went on each day. It was intensive planning and running wise, but it was great for the fact that if a meet was scheduled for two days out, we could actually track that out and play anything that came up between "now" and "then". This was important because runs weren't really the focus of the campaign, and the "downtime" stuff was the good stuff.

All in all, I think my next game will be somewhat of a combination of that method and the old "keep track only when it matters, and then do it loosely" method that I used to use.