A Stitch in Time

Question: Please consider changing all of your static times (once per week, once per month, etc.) to narrative time (once per game, once per story, etc.)!

No dice, my friend. While we sympathize with your yearning for the simplified bookkeeping that not keeping track of time within the game would bring, removing all static times from the game would result in a disappointing watering-down and oversimplification of many of the ideas that various powers are trying to represent and a general reduction in the number of ways powers could be differentiated meaningfully from one another. Also, it would be inconsistent as hell.

This varies from power to power, but many of the knacks and boons in Scion that are bound by time instead of story events are that way because they need to be to make mythic sense. Scions using the Sun purview need to be bound by day measurements sometimes because daytime's boundaries are specifically what sun is all about, while Scions using Fertility need to be bound by the growing life cycles of plants and those using the Moon purview need to be tied to a monthly cycle because that's what the moon itself does and what most of the mythology surrounding it is based on. Some powers, like Last Act, measure time in specific increments because they're illustrating similar events from myth and legend. Others, like the Dinsenchas geas or many Justice boons, need to use real time because they have to illustrate a significant time commitment on the part of the Scion, and using narrative time would actually make it far too easy to handwave that away.

Besides, how would you want that equivalency to work? There are more useful divisions of time being used in Scion - minutes, hours, days, months and even years, all of them providing different degrees of precision and symbolism - than there are useful story measurements, which really only offer scene, game session and story. How would you go about deciding which go where?

The most major problem with trying to reduce regular time to narrative time is that narrative time isn't, well, time. It's a narration, and that means it's wildly inconsistent depending upon what's happening in the story. We've had scenes that lasted ten minutes and scenes that lasted four hours; game sessions that lasted half an hour and game sessions that lasted two years; and stories that lasted only a few months or that lasted half a decade. If powers depended on narrative time instead of static, people would be crippled by being unable to use their powers for far too long, or able to bust out the same power over and over and over again if they were going through several rapid-fire scenes. Can you imagine if we replaced the once per day clause on Health with once per game session? That'd be fine for those games that take place over short periods of time, but how ridiculous would it have been if Sophia hadn't been able to heal Geoff for literally months when they were lost in the Mirkwood? Why would her powers have suddenly randomly shut off during that time? It doesn't make sense within the world of the game itself; the very act of trying to hang the mechanic on the game's narration causes the power to become awkward, useless or inconsistent within that same narration.

This is not to say that powers that use narrative time in their mechanics are bad or that they can never work; on the contrary, they're very useful mechanics for some things, and we use them ourselves all over the place (Control Aging, Bona Fortuna, several PSPs and Mystery, among others, all lean heavily on once-per-story or once-per-game mechanics). But they're mechanics that are not universally applicable to everything that Scion needs to do and represent, and we wouldn't want to try to use them for everything any more than we would want to throw Willpower away and only use Legend for everything. It would simplify things, yes, but we would lose more than we gained.

We also don't like overusing those mechanics simply because every gaming group's narrative time is going to be different. Some games always play strictly in realtime, meaning that game sessions lasting more than four hours are a rarity; some games incorporate large amounts of offscreen "downtime" that can take up whatever amount of time in the gameworld the Storyteller decrees; some play tightly-focused combat-heavy games that have extremely short periods of time involved, and others play more broad-strokes and descriptional styles that can stretch on for large periods of time within the space of a single session. Some Storytellers run very short stories with hard caps - three game sessions and we move on! - while others run massive epics that span months of realtime. And all of this is subject to change within the same games themselves, because PCs do unexpected things that prolong plots to the breaking point or abruptly end them with sudden flashes of insight, or Storytellers keep a story going longer in order to make sure their plots points occur or cut them short if they feel the game has gotten off-topic.

And we'd rather provide useful, concrete timelines that make sense and are mythically resonant than fiddly per-narrative-event ones that, depending on the game, may unfairly restrict or unnecessarily overpower characters in the name of avoiding paying a little attention to what day it is. So, while we're totally willing to consider changing a power's mechanics on a case-by-case basis if it makes sense for a particular boon or knack to move to narrative time, we're probably never going to move wholesale to a system without normal time. It's just not workable.

By the way, if anyone out there is struggling with keeping up with times and dates for Scion powers, we've found that just keeping a simple shared calendar works great for that kind of thing. If you're playing an online game, Google Calendar is just a click away and can have anything added to it that you need to keep track of, and we keep one calendar on a smartphone for face-to-face games so it can be whipped out whenever necessary. Some Storytellers like to be in charge of the calendar to make sure no shenanigans are going on; we don't mind having a player take care of it during game, since they can take a second to add things to it while their fellow players are taking actions, and that way someone's always on deck when the Storyteller says "Okay, two days later," to add, "Hey, Geoff, your Resilience from Sangria just ran out," or "Just a reminder, Woody, your geas will kick in if you're not in Mag Mell in the next four days."

Having a calendar for any kind of ongoing game is actually usually a pretty great idea, even if you don't use it much during the game proper. It allows you to add narrative events as well - here's this PC's birthday, here's when we have a meeting scheduled with Dionysus, here's the deadline Marduk gave us to have that treasure reclaimed for him - so that it can function as a helpful source to keep anyone from forgetting what's going on.

Of course, if you play short chronicles, seldom have more than one plot at a time or otherwise have no need for that much bookkeeping, nobody's going to force you to set up an administrative schedule. It's just one of the many tools you can look into if you want to make sure all your powers and events are happening when they're supposed to be.