This is a Game About Time

For I am old. I was young yesterday.
Time’s hand that I have held away so long
Grips hard now on my shoulder. Time has won. Edwin Arlington Robinson, Merlin

I have seen too many men go down, and I never permit myself to forget that one day, through accident or under the charge of a younger, stronger knight, I too will go down. John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

Past the trees and stones, the world does fly
They see a thousand fates go by
Calls of love and war’s cry
Because man doesn’t know any better
Only ever walking in circles Robin Lerner, Artus: Excalibur

Where has the horse gone? where its rider? where the giver of gold?
Where the seats at the feast? where are the joys of the hall?
O the bright cup! O the brave warrior!
O the glory of princes! How the time passed away
Slipped into nightfall as if it had never been!
The Wanderer

I lose!  They’re loaded dice.  Time always plays
With loaded dice. W.B. Yeats, Time and the Witch Vivien

Many rpgs (in the D&D tradition) have a loose concept of time. Zero-to-hero plots can go from killing rats in a basement to killing gods in a few week’s time.

In this game, time is really important.

The Passing of the Seasons

First, there’s a built in seasonal structure to the game. The idealized Pendragon session is 1 session covering 1 year, with an adventure generally during the summer months, followed by a faster tracking of other events and economic decisions over the winter.

We might not follow that exactly (Pendragon might not, in truth), but we’re still aiming for something similar. Time passes between adventures.

This means constantly going back between two¹ seasons of gameplay, that we want to make feel consequential and necessary.

Part of this is actual seasonality - the textures and different emphases of different parts of the year (also part of grounding it in time period and place - there’s not the climate control and globalization to keep up summers in December and winters in July) - even different parts of day and month².

Progress and Patience

This also means there’s something holding back just leaping from one adventure to the next. Travel time, other obligations³, slow times to recover and repair, etc.

But also that things do happen over time - that things can really change in those large gaps from year to year.

Having different eras also get different kinds of benefits or mechanical balances⁴ is another way to make it feel like things progress over time, and that matters.

Agings and Endings

And of course the biggest way things change is that characters age. Aging is a very important mechanic to get right - both the expansion and sunset of growing old⁵.

Part of that is that characters die - not just from “oh, this game is really lethal and you can die at any time”, but from just getting older and at times weaker - and you get other characters and other stories.

Footnotes

1. Actually a bit more than two depending on how you look at it, but to simplify we can think of it as two clear divisions. ↩

2. Things like weather, travel times, calendars of events. ↩

3. That is to say, emphasizing that the adventures that make the main gameplay are not the only thing going on in character or family lives. Peaking into this with random tables, glimpses into the wider stories during downtime, etc. can help make this feel tactile. ↩

4. Due to changing up rules, adding year-specific effects, slowly switching out old technology and new, etc. ↩

5. Which is tricky, because you don’t want to be making the really young or really old a painful or boring experience to play - but you do want them to feel very young or very old. ↩