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Thread: Time Zones In-Game
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2020-07-28, 03:54 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Jan 2011
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- Why am I here?
Time Zones In-Game
How do you handle time zones when running a high level game that features teleportation?
I know some settings take place on planets that probably have their own time zones, so teleporting over Golarion is probably easy enough to figure out. Other times, worlds may not follow the rules of orbits and rotations and there's other wibbly-wobbly considerations. Has this ever been an issue?
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2020-07-28, 04:10 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Oct 2009
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- In my library
Re: Time Zones In-Game
In general? most settings don't have established time zones, so what we're really talking about is the difference between Dawn Noon, and Night. So as a rough working:
France is a square about 600 miles on a side (not accurate, but good enough for our purposes). In 3.5 a 10th level caster can move up to 1 kilomiles with a single casting (okay, fine, 1000 miles). Therefore a caster can easily teleport across France. France is roughly one time zone in width. A time zone is one hour, therefore a character can teleport roughly two time zones per spell until you unlock Greater Teleport. Two hours is roughly how much my wake up times vary between work days and off days. Thus, until about 13th level, if you're not teleport more than once a week or so, you'll probably not have too much trouble.
Otherwise, a day or two to get in sync with the new time zone seems reasonable, until then Will or Fort saves to avoid sleeping too early or too late. (source: I have family living eight hours of time zones away, it takes me roughly two days to change time zones.)
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2020-07-29, 03:48 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2007
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- Imagination Land
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Re: Time Zones In-Game
I've never had to worry about it, tbh. Even at levels where you have teleportation, we don't usually have a reason to teleport to the other side of the world.
You can't really do it at all until you get to greater teleport, since the standard version is limited to 100 miles per caster level. For reference, that's not enough to traverse from one coast of the United States to the other coast, and that's only a few hours difference in time zones.
And even in the few games I've been in that have gotten into the higher teens in level, I've never played one where we did a lot of hopping around the entire world. Most adventures just don't have that kind of scope.
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2020-07-29, 07:19 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jun 2018
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- Belgium
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Re: Time Zones In-Game
It also depends on how long you stay there. If you come back the same day, there shouldn't be any problems except it being earlier or later than where you left.
I know one campaign where we had gates to jump all over the place, but it was sort of handwaved and we didn't really bother with timezones even though we jumped sometimes like half the world.Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett
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2020-07-29, 04:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Feb 2008
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- Italy
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Re: Time Zones In-Game
i had a campaign like that, but i never even considered it. it just wasn't relevant. since most teleportation involved making fast attacks against various objectives, that's the kind of things you can do at any hour. and if you needed to go talk with someone, there was plenty of downtime, so setting up a time that was good for everyone was not a problem.
if i have another similar campaign, though, i will remember to mention time zones just for the sake of adding some immersion.In memory of Evisceratus: he dreamed of a better world, but he lacked the class levels to make the dream come true.
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2020-07-30, 07:04 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2018
Re: Time Zones In-Game
Time zones are stupid. Make your world flat, then you won't need them.
Alternatively, your heroes bring their local time of day with them when they teleport. Thus, no lag for them, but everyone else gets freaked the * out.
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2020-07-30, 08:50 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2008
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- Italy
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Re: Time Zones In-Game
wrong. even a flat world will have time zones. when it's midday in the center, with the sun straight up ahead, then the sun is at an angle in the border. when it's morning in the center, one border is going to have the sun straight up ahead, the other is going to have the sun even closer to the horizon.
in fact, a flat world is going to have much more complicated time zones, also because the sun does not move at equal speed during all of the day.In memory of Evisceratus: he dreamed of a better world, but he lacked the class levels to make the dream come true.
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2020-07-30, 08:59 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Jul 2008
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- Sweden
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Re: Time Zones In-Game
I've occasionally worked with timezones and they are horrendous to deal with, especially when daylight savings is involved. Another issue that often comes up is that changing the timezone can also change the date, literally. Right now it's the 30th for me, someone else on the planet it's already the 31st.
Options:
- Accept that timezones are hard, adjust clocks and the sun whenever you teleport
- Conveniently forget about timezones and hope that your players also forget aka pretend like there's only one timezone everywhere somehow
- forbid such long range fast transportation, teleporting that far just fails, or takes many hours to adjust the time
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2020-07-30, 01:15 PM (ISO 8601)
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- Aug 2011
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- Sharangar's Revenge
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Re: Time Zones In-Game
Depends on how far the sun is from the flat world relative to the diameters of the two. If your sun is really far away, (say, around the Earth-Sun distance) a flat world of about earth's size has two time zones: top and bottom (assuming both sides are inhabited, and the edges are not).
To say it another way, if the sun is far enough away that its rays can be considered parallel across the surface of the flat world, you only have the two time zones: top and bottom.Last edited by Lord Torath; 2020-07-30 at 01:20 PM.
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2020-07-30, 02:10 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Dec 2018
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2020-08-02, 11:19 PM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Mar 2009
Re: Time Zones In-Game
Technically, time zones are an artificial creation. The world will have differing levels of sunlight and darkness at any given moment depending on how it is constructed, but it only has different time zones if the people there have realized the problem and addressed it that way. Case in point, the USA didn't start using time zones until the 1880s. China used to have several, but went to a single time zone in 1949.
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2020-08-03, 12:12 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Aug 2008
Re: Time Zones In-Game
They're pretty unlikely to come up - time zones aren't really a thing without precise time keeping, and that's probably pretty thin on the ground. Also an hour shift on an earth sized planet corresponds to 1038 miles; most teleportation is likely to be equivalent to minutes and not hours, and honestly as a GM I don't track time that precisely for overland travel (or really most things) anyways.
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2020-08-03, 02:34 AM (ISO 8601)
- Join Date
- Feb 2007
Re: Time Zones In-Game
"Differing places identifying midday as different times" will be a thing, long before formal time zones are. And in a world with portals as well as teleportation, it may end up being noticeable.
For a Faerun example, If you step through a portal from Waterdeep to the east coast Kara-tur at midday, you'd notice that there's big jump - two whole continents lie between.Marut-2 Avatar by Serpentine
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2020-08-03, 03:39 AM (ISO 8601)
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- Nov 2010
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Re: Time Zones In-Game
It's worth remembering that the variation in time is actually continuous. We only break it up into discrete time zones because we can travel fast enough for it to matter, so its more convenient to change your clock by an hour when you cross the line, rather than by a few minutes every couple of towns. Before the railways were invented, every town kept its own time based on the local sunrise. This is still preserved by Oxford University which traditionally starts its classes on the hour by Oxford time, which is a few minutes offset from the London time (GMT) which everyone else in the UK's time zone now uses.
Thus you might nit have to teleport far for small differences to crop up. However, if no one has accurate clocks anyway the its only the people ringing tge church bells or the odd wizard who will care. For most people, the suns position in the sky is what matters.Time is but a pattern in the currents of causality,
an ever changing present that determines our reality,
the past we see as history, the future seed with prophecy,
and all the time we think on time our time is passing constantly.
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