Game Dream 8: I'm Late, Rewind!

And I'm late answering this one! Game Dream 8: I'm Late! Rewind! asks us:

How have the games you've been involved with dealt with the passage of time? Has it been primarily linear, skipped around a lot, or even reversed?

In face to face gaming, I don't think I've seen anything other than strictly linear time, except for one game which was explicitly about time travel. Whenever the players have split up, I've handled the two groups by jumping back and forth between the two, not letting either group get too far ahead of the other. Just about every GM I've played under has done the same.

In asynchronous internet games (PBeM and PBmB), things have to be a bit more flexible to cope with different posting rates. Often players will respond to something another character said or did several posts ago, and as GM I often have entertaining hours of fun editing it all together to make coherent sense. Quite often we'll go into what I call 'timeslip mode' (A term first used by my first online GM, Maughn Matsuoka), where I will start a new thread without closing the previous one. A rule I always enforce here is once I've started a new thread, nothing may happen in the previous thread that has an impact on the later one. A good example of this is when I had an extended conversation thread in the evening, and started a new thread with the party setting out the next morning. The 'no change' rule here would prevent a brawl breaking out which killed or injured anyone already mentioned in the later thread.

With multiple players in different threads, I try to keep them within sight of each other timewise, unless they're widely separated geographically. In the worst case scenario this can lead to a player getting stuck in limbo for extended periods waiting for other threads to catch up; unfortunately this has happened to one PC in my Kalyr game. In contrast, I haven't needed to keep the Calbeyn and Filgeth games in synch with each other; not only are the two games run on totally separate forums so that many of the players are probably not even aware of the other game, but they're set in two cities more than a week's travel apart. This limits the scope for anything in one game to have much impact on the other. At one time the Filgeth game was running about a week ahead of the Calbeyn one, but the Calbeyn-based party did a lot of travelling, and the two timelines are now more or less running in parallel again.

For a more extreme example of parallel timelines and the potential for continuity confusion, I'll have to mention a game I neither GMed nor played in. It's the semi-legendary Highlander: The Gathering run by David Edelstein. In the original game the dozen or so players were scattered throughout history, some as early as Roman times, others in the early twentieth century. Although most of the time each player had their own thread, immortal NPCs cropped up in different threads at different times, which gave mind-boggling continuity headaches. If so-and-so was alive in 1915, it means another PC can't kill them in a duel in 1491! I'm not sure how David managed to keep the timeline consistant, although I remember a complete thread for a player who'd faded away getting removed from the continuity because events in other threads overwrote it. The present game is set in the present, but has "Flashback" scenes set in the past, which I think work in the same way as my timeslip threads: i.e. Nothing may happen in them to contradict the present-day storyline. (No duels in which the PC might die, for starters)

There's no way I could run a game like that. Trying to keep the continuity consistent would make my head explode.