Staffing Timeline

[featherstone 69]

As my board starts getting, hm, more than two scenes, I'm wondering what's the best way to handle the timeline.

 

To elaborate: RP moves slower than real life. A scene that lasts a few hours IC may take weeks or months to be concluded. And that's fine! But when a scene is supposed to have an impact on the setting and/or a development in other scenes, and meanwhile new plots are being started, you need to know what comes first.

 

Now, the site has a Timeline. Things happen in an order and that's not random. What I'm not sure is how slow or fast it should be.

 

The options are:

- timeline as fast as RL. New scenes, unless otherwise specified, are happening at the time when they are started. Meanwhile, old plots are still being played, and you write new stories without knowing how previous ones ended. 

 

- slower timeline: all current plots must be wrapped up (or at least, if something has more impact than a random chat, we must establish how it will end and how it will affect others), before we can start playing in the following month/season/whatever. This is the most accurate option consequences-wise, but not everyone likes having a widening gap between IC and OOC time.

 

I'm currently looking for inputs, from my players but also from people on sites such as this, since I'd like to know both what people likes, and what are possible solutions I might not have considered.

 

NB - Please don't suggest timey-wimey / fully fluid time solutions. I know they are popular but I cannot stand them. A bit of vagueness is okay, a mess of paradoxes and having no idea what happens first on the other hand is not something I want to deal with.

[Elena 546]

I suggest a stamped date with the story time at the beginning of the thread, so that everyone knows when the thread happens, and a board calendar listing all the thread in the chronological story order (not in the order they have been written). This is how each thread is written in their own time, but everyone knows which comes first and what to keep into account when writing the one happening afterwards into the story.

 

This is how inconsistencies are avoided. In nine years of writing this way, I had no problems, while the sites which said they didn't need a calendar, got into inconsistency problems.

Edited July 8, 2018 by Elena

[featherstone 69]

44 minutes ago, Elena said:

I suggest a stamped date with the story time at the beginning of the thread, so that everyone knows when the thread happens, and a board calendar listing all the thread in the chronological story order (not in the order they have been written). This is how each thread is written in their own time, but everyone knows which comes first and what to keep into account when writing the one happening afterwards into the story.

 

This is how inconsistencies are avoided. In nine years of writing this way, I had no problems, while the sites which said they didn't need a calendar, got into inconsistency problems.

 

We do have a timeline. My issue is whether I should move on the current time before old plots are concluded. I know you write on historical sites. My site is set nowadays, so one assumes their scenes would be happening right now.

 

On another board, we had new threads happening in IC present, but there were still scenes that were "located" two years earlier. If later any of those older scenes had got any dramatic impact on the setting, it would have been ignored by those newer scenes.

Edited July 8, 2018 by featherstone

[clipsed 231]

1 hour ago, Elena said:

I suggest a stamped date with the story time at the beginning of the thread, so that everyone knows when the thread happens, and a board calendar listing all the thread in the chronological story order (not in the order they have been written). This is how each thread is written in their own time, but everyone knows which comes first and what to keep into account when writing the one happening afterwards into the story.

 

This is what we do as well. I need an established chronology in order to function as a writer, and I've found this is enough for me. That said, though, we don't list every thread in our timeline because while we do have arcs, we are a bit more sandboxy outside of those, but even so it allows individual players to keep track of their own chronologies while still responding to the board's!

 

 

We do have a timeline. My issue is whether I should move on the current time before old plots are concluded. I know you write on historical sites. My site is set nowadays, so one assumes their scenes would be happening right now.

 

On another board, we had new threads happening in IC present, but there were still scenes that were "located" two years earlier. If later any of those older scenes had got any dramatic impact on the setting, it would have been ignored by those newer scenes.

 

I think Elena meant "right now" in the chronology of the board, rather than "right now" today in the modern era! For example, "right now" on my board would be July 8th, 1888.

 

That is a question that absolutely needs to be answered by your member base. It doesn't matter a whole lot if I think that  scene should be wrapped (or not!) before moving on, but rather what the people actually writing it think. That said, I've seen many boards have success by running in IC months or seasons -- players are given warning when the time period in question is about to end, and need to get their independent writing done before then.

Edited July 8, 2018 by clipsed

[CovertSphinx 710]

The issue I've always had with "Okay people, wrap up your threads before March 3rd because the next segment of plot is being started" is that is FORCES a certain level of activity/speed in posting, no different than an Activity Check. 

 

The only thing you really need to "beholden" to a timeline is anything that is going to directly impact the board as a whole/world setting/Major OverArch plot, and cause "setting changes" in the unrelated threads of members who aren't directly participating in the Big Plot. 

 

Everything else can be thrown into "seasons" around those points as happening before or after certain events. More like, "Hey everyone, New Segment is starting March 3rd. Anything currently ongoing will be set prior to XYZ event. We don't want to rush your threads, just please keep in mind that they will canonly become "recent past" on March 3rd". 

[StormWolfe 557]

1 hour ago, clipsed said:

That is a question that absolutely needs to be answered by your member base. It doesn't matter a whole lot if I think that  scene should be wrapped (or not!) before moving on, but rather what the people actually writing it think. That said, I've seen many boards have success by running in IC months or seasons -- players are given warning when the time period in question is about to end, and need to get their independent writing done before then.

 

Managing IC time is the bane of my RP existence! I think and write in a linear, chronological fashion and really am not comfortable with sites that have a "free-for-all" lack of time management sites. Being forced to write too fast in order to keep up with a set time stamp is also an issue.

 

My sites follow - roughly - a format akin to a television series. We have seasons, episodes within that season, and then the written plots / posts for each episode. Our episodes usually cover a one-month timespan regardless of what is happening in the real world. Each episode has a primary plot and then everyone gets together and writes for the main plot and their various character plots. However, we also do our IC writing all in one forum with timestamps that show in the topic listing. We mark topics that impact the main plot with an [EP] before the title (Episode Plot) so people know to read that topic for the episode plot events.

 

This works well for us. As the plot points are met and the plot winds down, notices go out that people need to finish their threads so we can close it and start the next episode. When I write the episode summary, I ask everyone to let me know if anything that happened in their character stories should be added to our timeline. Only events that everyone should know about gets added to the timeline.

 

Anyway - summary, we allow open writing a some fluid time, but only in like one-month segments (IC time). We are small though and have the expectation that our members will read the episode plot threads.

[featherstone 69]

@CovertSphinx I wouldn't tell people to wrap up threads, especially because what do you do if they don't?

 

What I think I could do is keeping an eye on ongoing scenes and move on the current date accordingly.

 

Say, we're currently playing in July 2018. If this month nothing happens, except casual chats and the like, next month I can update it to August. However, if tomorrow someone starts plotting something big, that would have an impact on several characters, and that is supposed to display its effects soon enough, I wouldn't move on the current date until the outcome is somehow established. People can still play side scenes, personal plots, etc. They'll be happening a bit earlier or something like that. But they won't start their new plans, whatever they are, only to discover later that their casual chat is supposed to happen in a war zone, that their ship mate should be in jail and nobody noticed, that their new ally has been exposed as a traitor a month earlier etc. These examples might be a bit extreme (I'm not literally planning a war), but you get what I mean.

[Elena 546]

2 hours ago, featherstone said:

 

We do have a timeline. My issue is whether I should move on the current time before old plots are concluded. I know you write on historical sites. My site is set nowadays, so one assumes their scenes would be happening right now.

 

On another board, we had new threads happening in IC present, but there were still scenes that were "located" two years earlier. If later any of those older scenes had got any dramatic impact on the setting, it would have been ignored by those newer scenes.

 

I think one should advance to the next month/ season only when the current one is closer to completion.

 

In the case of the threads happening two years earlier, given that there were threads happening later, the ones happening earlier shouldn't contradict the existing ones. This is why they know  what happened first and what happened later, so they should navigate among the known facts to write the unknown yet without negating the existing ones 🙂 

[Arceus 1,082]

Basically, the way I've always handled it, is kind of a combination of set chronology, and looseygoosey. I know, no time-y wime-y stuff, but, hear me out.

 

How fast should it go? This depends on how fast your member base posts. And even that is in a constant state of flux. Some people can post a lot in a short time frame, others can't, and still even others can for a short period and then get busy. You can't really put strict caps and guidelines on how fast to move the time-line. So, how I've always done it is, here's where we are. How fast does it go? As fast as the members make it go, no quicker, no slower. The 'current date' is really just the month we're in; we change it when the players push the time-line into the next month, i.e. someone dates for the next one, or gets very close to it. Even if your Big Plot runs on a strict timeline, you can still fit in there around the member base's posting tempo, and just let them decide when things move.

 

Don't fuss with it too hard; you're not in a good position to decide that it needs to move faster or slower, only they are, and its needing to move faster or slower is really per player, to further complicate things. The players that are ready to move forward, will. The ones that aren't will move forward when they are. If a member wants a thread wrapped up before starting another one because they feel they need to know what happens in the one thread first, they'll wrap that one thread up first. It's a per-player thing. Yes, you'll have older threads having things happen that impact new threads that ignore it until a point, or entirely ignore it. You will also often end up with a huge gap between the earliest dated thread on the time-line, and the most recently dated one. It happens. Currently, one of my boards has a full month gap between the first thread on the time-line and the last. But it works fine. No one feels rushed. The players that don't want to be in six threads with the same character at once aren't. Some people are okay with later threads bringing new things to the table in newer ones. Some aren't. Without the micromanagement of the time-line, both can play fine.

 

Let it manage itself. I've been doing it this way for a long time now, and I've never had issues with the members not moving it, or plots not getting anywhere. If they do stop, post a more recent thread. It'll go. And if it doesn't, well, you've probably got bigger problems than your time-line.

[CovertSphinx 710]

@Arceus said it MUCH better than I could. 

Edited July 9, 2018 by CovertSphinx