Ben Milton's recent video on how at least Gygax's version of D&D starts making more sense when you consider the context - a gigantic West Marches with 1:1 time and lots of patron play - has got me curious. With my personal obligations about to be way bigger, I frankly can't do any of this - and I'm cutting way down on polish on these posts to just get out ideas while i still can - i do want to just jot down a bunch of ideas for people to raid as much as possible.
If you do some poking around you'll find there's an existing community around this style, with some interesting ideas worth stealing, but they're abrasive to a degree that 1) offering any condemnation more spirited than that is just offering encouragement, and 2) I'd rather let them continue to be in their corner of social space and they continue to be in theirs.
The best resource collections that I can find on this date back to about 2012, with Nagora on the AD&D game loop and Chris Kutalik of Hill Cantons on domain play. On the comments to Ben's video, though, you find lots of commenters saying they've been playing this way for decades, so it's clearly not so much lost as lost to us!
Telescopic Isotime
Gygaxian fundamentalist play prescribes 1:1 time - one day IRL equals one day in-world. This forces you to be aware of the passage of time, allows coordination of multiple groups, and - although this is a bit of je ne sais quois - is great for the eerie feeling that the diegesis is another world as legitimate as our own, churning along.
This is great for individual-level play, where we experience people, but what about the grinding of continents, rise and fall of civilizations, that kind of thing? This amazing Wikipedia article and this suggests one approach - let each day of IRL time be a certain amount of diegetic time, shifting according to a set schedule:
- starting very slowly, with days equally diegetic microseconds where new fundmental forces come into play
- then ramping up as players describe the kinds of matter these form into
- then going into tens of millions of diegetic years per IRL day as galaxies (or whatever equivalent in the heterophysics you've cooked up) form
- then millions of years as life evolves...
- and so on and so forth, with language evolution described and archived with sound change appliers and whatever...
- up until you're dealing with years, then seasons, then months, then weeks, and finally you've slowed down to 1:1 time
This could be great for worldbuilding! "Organic," aka an absolute mess but in the best possible way.
In particular I suspect a great way to spend the seasons and months would be to great for purposes of building up a stable of NPCs whom you've seen through their childhoods, even generations, and now you're able to zoom in and see them on a human or elf or gretching or whatever level...
Obviously this is insane but maybe you can cobble people together for it via...
use many game systems
Take a cue from Mosaic Strict and cobble together rules systems through diegesis. Use lots of different media entirely. Go to the sufficient velocity quest forums and have them be a god who creates your world, then head over to the grand strategy forum to generate a few centuries of history, deputize regular DMs to run the same shared world using World of Dungeons and Pathfinder 2e and whatever other shit players are into, let anybody who wants to access the maps to play solo play.
use Notion to keep track of canon
If you deputize enough then hopefully the whole thing becomes a distributed system, sort of like a blockchain but (insert your own joke here) and so it doesn't depend as much on a single failure point.
For a single auteur GM or worldbuilder Obsidian is probably the best system, because it's open source, but Notion is way easier to share and use with lots of people and you can even give different people access to different parts, and integration with spreadsheets is good. so i would use that
is god real????
A fun thing you could do especially if you have people playing worldbuilding games from the beginning is to have clerical magic work by influencing players who are gods, like, give clerics no spells but do give them a direct line to the gods. (or both, whatever)
okay so then the next phase of this is that you can do this regardless of whether there are any gods or not! you can tell people this and let them guess. They can send petitions to God or the gods and genuinely wonder whether anyone is listening or cares, having suspicions both ways, just like real life!
scryfall generators for follower recruitment
I mean, this isn't specific to any of this. and you'd have to adjust. But you can specify all sorts of things with the Scryfall API, and it's most coherent with creatures by far (like sorceries are sometimes events and sometimes spells and sometimes actions and sometimes who knows what and the diegetic translation never has much to do with anything you can search for, but the tags for creatures are all much more grounded - creatures with higher CMC are "higher level" and humans are humans and so on.) ANYWAY the follower recruitment tables are always very kitchen sink anyway so make them even wackier by inputting a few constraints into a Scryfall oracle.
Assorted links
- Chris of Hill Cantons on news as campaign glue
