It's Been One Week Since You Looked At Me

So I noticed that it's been a week since I last posted to this blog. I'd been having some writer's block about what subject to discuss next, but with the passage of time it finally hit me: Let's discuss time itself.

In my game on www.rdfrpg.com, the time progression has been very slow. Over the course of about a year of gaming, the time line has only progressed about a year and a half. Many times in a ROBOTECH RPG, the game can stretch over several years in just a few session's time. This is not necessarily the standard, but seems to be a common practice among many GMs. Time progression is dependent on the style of game one is running, as well as the gaming system itself.

If there is a lot of character development interspersed among conflict or other events, often a GM would be well advised to have the time pass slowly; months of gaming may produce only a few short weeks of progression. Conversely, if there are lots of chunks of time between events in one's games, progressing by years at a time could be the key to smoothly transitioning from one section of the campaign to another. Time can be as viscous as corn syrup or loose and fast as a river, and it's entirely up to the GM how to use it.

As another example from the game I currently run, consider this: three of us have been playing the same character for almost a decade. From time to time they are set aside, or reworked as we mature, but the core being of that character is still there. While for a time the game progressed by nearly 15 years, we have returned to our roots, and begun a reworking of our old histories. This very involved process requires lots of character exposition interspersed with intense giant-robot action. So far, we've progressed only about a year, and most of that time was due to some of the characters needing time to recover and rehabilitate after a devastating loss and injury.

Normally in a game such as this, I'd already be into the third or even fourth year of the story line, but that's just how I do it. How will you handle time?