Let’s suppose that a GM wants to run multiple parties in the same world. They have two parties A and B which play on different days weekly. Let’s say Tuesday and Thursday for the sake of example. Everything goes well until the following scenario happens:
Party A goes to dungeon X and ends the session mid-dungeon. Before their next session, party B goes to the same dungeon and captures the largest treasure hoard.
There are several ways to prevent or resolve this issue, depending on the priority one wants to put on the real world timeline versus the game world timeline.
If the real and game timelines are tied together, such that each day which passes in the real world causes a day to pass in game, then party A will either have to leave the dungeon by the end of the session or else be forced to spend a week of game time in the dungeon, which is likely quite undesirable. I’m going to call this the “freeing” method, as party A is forced to let others use the resource of dungeon X when they aren’t actively using it. This prevents the problem from occurring in the first place, at the cost of imposing time limitations on the party. There are other problems with this method which will be discussed later.
If the real timeline is held to be more important than the game timeline, then we reject that this is actually an issue. Events happen solely based on their real timelines, so party B can absolutely swoop in and steal the treasure out from beneath party A. I’m going to call this the “ignoring” method. This is a fine solution for many styles of running games, but causes issues for my own style of sandbox games where the game timeline is important. If the GM’s job is to simulate the world fairly and the game timeline is totally subsumed by the real timeline, then when is it fair for the GM to change the world on its own accord? You lose any real ability to answer what day it is in game. My criticism of this approach mostly stems from my own principles and desire to simulate the game world. I feel as though there is more to say here but I’m not in a position to dig into it at the moment.
If the game timeline is preferred over the real timeline, then one must prevent the real timeline from causing issues with the game timeline. In the example, this would mean explicitly preventing party B from going into the dungeon due to party A already being there. I will call this the “blocking” method. This has the advantage of preventing the issue, but also fails my principles for games. Trying to prevent the players from reaching the dungeon without explicitly telling them they can’t go there will likely be immensely frustrating for the players and I would consider this to be classically terrible GMing, but explicitly telling them breaks immersion. Either way this option undermines the reality of the game world. This option could be saved or at least the blow lessened by some diegetic reasoning in this specific example, such as a board the adventurers post their claimed dungeons on, but it’s unlikely that a given diegetic solution will make sense broadly across multiple possible collision scenarios.
Another option might be to split the game timeline. Party A ends their session in the dungeon. Party B steals the loot. When party A comes back the loot is still there. I consider this “splitting” solution to be a hack. I see two possible ways to implement this, either having the timelines be totally separate or merging them after collisions. If the timelines are totally separate, I would argue you aren’t running two parties in the same game world to start with. You wouldn’t have any of the gameplay benefits of multiple parties for the players, and as the timelines diverged the prep benefits of having only one world are also lost. This is why I call it a hack solution. The other implementation of merging the timelines would be something like both parties A and B coming back with two identical copies of the same treasure. Frankly, trying to merge the timelines after every conflicting event sounds like a pain in the ass. It could be justified in-game with multiple timelines being a canonical feature of the world, and I think would be more satisfying to me than doing so for the blocking method, but this is a high level cosmological choice which greatly changes the flavor of the game world and perhaps makes the player characters more cosmically important than I think they ought to be.
My own previous attempts at multiple parties have drawn on the previous work of the BrOSR and their patron-style play, which I consider to be the canonical example of the freeing method (though not one that Gygax et. al. used, and certainly the not only way to play D&D). As such I have put more thought into problems with this method. Using the patron-style method of fixing the real and game timelines, we can still run into conflict situations. Consider this second scenario which can only exist with linked timelines.
Party A walks to city Y, which takes them two weeks. They buy a unique magic item, Z. All of this happens in one session. The next Thursday, Party B teleports to the city and plans to spend two weeks there, all in the same session. This means they are in a position to buy Z before party A does. Should they be allowed to do so?
(Following patron-style play, the session happens just as a normal D&D session would (i.e. during the session the players play out traveling to the city and taking any actions there), but the characters are unplayable for two weeks afterwards as the events of the game session play out in real time. The “camera” of the game timeline follows them for the session, but afterwards real time has to catch up to the camera.)
As far as I can tell, in these situations the BrOSR actually follows a real-timeline first method here, simply resolving actions on a first-come first serve basis. So party B would simply be unable to purchase the item, either for meta or diegetic reasons. This has the advantage of being easy for the GM to resolve as well as being a general solution, but does restrict the possible actions players can take.
A more “pure” linked-timeline method might be to consider all actions which occur in the future to be orders and not set in stone until that real-world date has passed. So party B would be able to purchase the item, party A would be out of luck and have to re-submit orders from the point where things changed. This creates a lot of extra work for the players and the GM, having to retcon and then effectively re-play decisions. It would also be extremely frustrating to say, get a really good roll when fighting a powerful monster only to have that version of reality not happen. I could also see it causing a considerable amount of meta grief with players jockeying for position due to their ability to effectively know the future. I haven’t tried to come up with an example scenario, but I also fear that under this paradigm it might be possible to get stuck in an infinite loop of retcons. So though this is a pure solution it is also a much messier one.
This scenario initially involved party A burning down the city, but this was revised as multi-party PvP and indeed PvP in general is a can of worms I’m not opening in this post. But I do want to consider it, and there are some interesting questions such as whether you can fairly interact with a character whose player is not present even outside of a PvP context.
I’m sure there are some solutions to this scenario I haven’t thought of, and that there are implementations of each of them which reduce the impact of their downsides. I’m probably going to stick with the one-to-one method for now as it avoids most of the problems which conflict with my own personal gaming principles, but for people largely unconcerned with a consistent canon or fixed timelines the ignoring method is probably the easiest and simplest. I may consider adopting a modified version of it myself once I can properly analyze and resolve my own issues with it, as it provides a more casual experience for players than one-to-one time and my own players have complained about being forced to leave the dungeon at the end of a session. If I was designing a new multi-party campaign from ground up the splitting method with merging timelines might work well alongside anti-canon tools, but it would need to be tightly integrated with the setting and my current project is not compatible with that.
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