A few months back, I made a post about how poorly my tabletop role-playing campaign (a superhero scenario in OVA: The Anime Role-Playing Game) went when I attempted 1:1 timekeeping, which means 1 real day equals 1 in-game day. I declared that there was no point to tabletop role-playing, and I extolled the virtues of the video game.
But not long after declaring the failure of my campaign, my players encouraged me to keep it going. I did, and we ended up with a far more enjoyable campaign.
But what made my campaign go from near-collapse to heights undreamed of was how I implemented 1:1 time. It really is the key, the essential ingredient, to any tabletop role-playing campaign.
Earlier, when I did 1:1 time for the first time, I made the mistake of trying to game things out day-by-day. While it created some amazing events, it was exhausting to do, and I almost soured on the campaign because of it.
Then, I realized something: I didn’t need to game things out day-by-day. I could just define a stretch of time and explain what happened in all that time, using dice rolls where needed. This not only sped up the process, it produced the same great narrative effects that going day-by-day did.
With that, my campaign was revived, and it’s going strong to this day.
Let me be clear: 1:1 time WORKS. It solves a lot of problems that can occur at the table. Most players use “stop time” where the campaign world freezes in place at the end of a session, but that style is useless and inadequate with any serious campaign.
What problems does 1:1 time solve?
A lack of time. This is the most obvious benefit of 1:1. A single gaming session cannot encompass everything your player characters wish to do, but with 1:1, the players can have their characters perform tasks and even missions in the downtime between play sessions. This takes the pressure off of the active sessions, allowing in-person playtime to focus on truly important things.
The Game Master’s Pet NPC. Some GMs have a character or characters of their own and want them to interact on the level of the players. In a standard stop-time game, the GM may be tempted to have such an NPC hog all the attention, leaving little for the players to do. 1:1 fixes this by allowing the players to have their fun during the in-person sessions and letting the GM run a parallel campaign during the downtime between sessions. This allows the pet NPC to make changes to the game world that will indirectly affect the players; as a result, both the GM and the players get to have fun.
Railroading. While no system can stop a bad GM from forcing the players along a predetermined path, 1:1 allows an honest GM to avoid unintentional forcing by letting many different things happen during downtime. Working out the logical consequences of multiple NPCs taking action keeps the game from feeling static, as if there’s only one possible way for things to go.
Lack of strategy. Because there’s such little time in a stop-time game, players have to squeeze every bit of enjoyment out of the session, meaning that strategic thinking falls by the wayside. The wide variety of events that can happen during downtime makes players think carefully about what their characters will do before they do it.
Overfocus on the party. A stop-time campaign is too time-constrained to allow multiple characters per player. There’s also the problem of every major development tying back to the players in some way. 1:1, by contrast, allows players to send one character off to do a task while a different character has the spotlight. Because other characters can do other things, not everything needs to revolve around the party, and thus the world feels more full.
Of course, all the thanks goes to Jeffro Johnson (via Twitter user @Bdubs1776) for rediscovering this crucial tabletop rule, which was first implemented in the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons. Even in a non-D&D superhero scenario set in modern times, the 1:1 timekeeping approach has proven to be quite powerful.
This way, tabletop offers a level of player agency that video games cannot hope to offer. I was wrong — there’s nothing quite like a good tabletop campaign.
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