Adventurers Are Scary

First post so if I'm in the wrong place or if this repeats, sorry. I thought it was neat.

I just paid attention to Eorzea time. I know the IG clock is used for some DoL, and you wouldn't pay much attention to it, but I did for no other reason than I was curious.

Assuming Eorzea time is similar to ours:
For every 4sec that pass, 1min has passed IG. Every 4min, 1hr. 16hrs, 10 days. 2 days, a month. 24 days, almost a year.

On the one hand I'm hoping I'm wrong. If not, time gets really skewed for the IG events. On the other hand it points out how terrifying players are in comparison to NPCs. Adventurers are in dungeons for hours or days at a time - not minutes. You go to fight Primals for hours w/o rest. PCs don't eat or drink unless they want to (mind you this is purely from a mechanical PoV and leaves out any RP aspects that some might attribute to PCs off-screen) and they don't tire like NPCs either. They're immortal, ageless, and individually terrifying.

Thoughts?

Adventurers are manic-depressive. When we're connected to them, they stay up for days on end, becoming a killing machine that scythes through any opposition and laughs about it. Then we disconnect from them, and they can't be arsed to get out of bed for days on end.

From an RP perspective I just ignore the game clock's effect on 'days'. Hell, according to the plot writ large, regardless of how long you've been playing it's been less than a year, so the nature of MMOs and time is one that's just a headache to deal with from a narrative perspective.

Personally, I have dates roughly matching real-world dates and the year I list as 7UE 6 (Sixth Year of the Seventh Umbral Era) given that ARR launched last year and it was canonically 7UE 5. As for day/night cycles in Eorzea, I fudge them as necessary.

Game mechanics and lore can never be 100% in sync, otherwise the game would literally be another universe. So every mechanic doesn't need a lore explanation and every piece of lore doesn't need a mechanic to back it up.

This is one of those situations where Eorzea and the video game that takes place there just can't be reconciled with each other.

All of 1.0's Yoshi-P/Dalamud storyline was only a couple of months, canonically.

In-game time =/= time passed for story. This applies in almost every game with in-game day/night cycles (unless you only have a certain amount of time to do things).

That big villain isn't going to postpone his quest for world domination/destruction/whatever-his-plan-is because you're doing side-quests/waiting out the clock for certain events to take place.

There's cannon passage of time, and then there's the time that passes for the sake of gameplay

inb4 someone mentions Log Horizon ;)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Apeiron

They're immortal, ageless, and individually terrifying.

Thoughts?

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They're Warriors of Light :) i think they can afford that :D

I tend to treat our in-game characters the same way Pod Pilots get treated in Eve Online.

There are regular people, then there are pod pilots. We're almost indestructable, essentially immortal (keep your clone up to date!), have access to the best, latest tech (universal translators for everyone! An Aura for every pod!), and we move more money in a single minute than most "regular" citizens will see in their entire lives.

I think having been a pod pilot for some time has skewed my view of things. At least in this game, we're more-or-less normal :P.

D'aw...

Well, at least that was cleared up. I'm not on top of all the lore so I didn't realize the canon timeline was a month or so. I guess I need to spend more time in this part of the forum, eh?

Still... the idea of adventurers going hours on end in battle is kind of a cool idea -- at least to me.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Apeiron

Assuming Eorzea time is similar to ours:
For every 4sec that pass, 1min has passed IG. Every 4min, 1hr. 16hrs, 10 days. 2 days, a month. 24 days, almost a year.

On the one hand I'm hoping I'm wrong. If not, time gets really skewed for the IG events. On the other hand it points out how terrifying players are in comparison to NPCs. Adventurers are in dungeons for hours or days at a time - not minutes. You go to fight Primals for hours w/o rest. PCs don't eat or drink unless they want to (mind you this is purely from a mechanical PoV and leaves out any RP aspects that some might attribute to PCs off-screen) and they don't tire like NPCs either. They're immortal, ageless, and individually terrifying.

Thoughts?

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I'm assuming you're perceiving that time is progressing selectively scaled-up, which means time is actually moving faster there, but the motions they make are selectively slowed down so we perceive it slowed down in our own speed.
E.G. If you fast forward time in Maxis' The Sims, the characters movements also speed up. But imagine if they didn't and just played out their actions normally no matter how fast time went by.
It wouldn't make any sense, but that's how most people think of games with progressive time.

I like to perceive it as just another world with a shorter day cycle. Like how Jupiter's day cycle is roughly 10 Earth hours, but doesn't necessary mean time is moving more than twice as fast there than it is on Earth.
It just fits more nicely if it's projecting a time scale similar to our own, rather than factoring it up or down.

Though its easiest to just overlook the entire thing, as most games don't bother to define these details as it doesn't really pertain to their vision of the game.
Simply, enjoy what it is.