Achaean Time and Real Time

Iocun

Currently, the relationship of Achaean and real time is defined like this:

Achaea                      That Other Context

------                      ------------------

1 Year                      ~ 300 hours (about 12 and a half days)

1 Month                     ~ 25 hours

1 Day                       ~ 1 hour

1 Hour                      ~ 2 and a half minutes

1 Minute                    ~ 2 and a half seconds

1 Second                    ~ 1/24 of a second

This works perfectly fine for Achaean years, months, and days, but simply doesn't quite work for the shorter ones in practice. Years, months, and days are soon understood by Achaean players to refer to Achaean terms and are used as such all the time, but I can't remember any character ever talking about hours, minutes and seconds and actually referring to the times listed above. There are probably two reasons for this:

1. The conversations are much less practical for those terms. It's easy to translate "one day" to "one month", but much too tedious to figure out how to speak of a RL minute in-game. (Many people thus use something like "a sixtieth of a day", but that too gets clumsy rather quickly.)

2. Time actually does flow faster in Achaea when we're talking about longer stretches of time, but not for the very short ones. Some mechanics that work on cycles of RL days or weeks will take "months" to "years" in Achaean time and actually feel like the kind of things that would take months if they happened in real life too. But when we get to fast things (like combat), Achaean time seems to flow rather similar to real time. The time it takes to swing a sword in Achaea is rather similar to the time it takes to swing a sword in real life, and not 24 times faster.

That's why I suggest changing the bottom end of this table and modifying the time conversion like this:

Achaea                      That Other Context

------                      ------------------

1 Year                      ~ 300 hours (about 12 and a half days)

1 Month                     ~ 25 hours

1 Day                       ~ 1 hour

1 Minute                    1 Minute

1 Second                    1 Second

Equate RL minutes and seconds with Achaean minutes and seconds, and get rid of Achaena hours completely. Now, an Achaean day would simply consist of 60 Achaean minutes.

I think this would feel much more natural to many of us and give us ways to easily talk of shorter timeframes IC without feeling we're using OOC terms.

Sena

My only objection is that I just made a nice IC time display (showing the IC time as hour:minutes) a few days ago, and this would make it meaningless.

This would make things a lot simpler, and it's basically what everyone seems to do anyways. I don't think I've seen anyone other than Clementius reference Achaean hours/minutes/seconds, and people commonly refer to OOC minutes/seconds IC.

Eilona

In Caer Witrin there's a quest where you are asked to come back in ten minutes by the denizen. It's ten RL minutes, not IC ones. Even the denizens don't use IC time at that level.

I'm all for making minutes and seconds the same IC as IRL.

Delphinus

Or just don't canonise it. You don't have to paint the curtain for us to ignore the man behind it.

On smaller scales, I really, really think vagueness is the best of both worlds.

Silas

I use Achaean times unless I'm rushing something (in raids/defence). I do often feel like people get confused by what I mean when I arrange meetings to be held in x hours, though, so I can see the argument for keeping it consistent with RL time. Personally, though, I'd be sad to see Achaean time go.

Delphinus

Honestly, I just divide it up for those situations. If I say "in a fourth of a day," people know what I mean. Granularity beyond that is rare enough that I don't think we'd need to overhaul and canonise the whole shebang for it.

Sena

Delphinus said:

Honestly, I just divide it up for those situations. If I say "in a fourth of a day," people know what I mean. Granularity beyond that is rare enough that I don't think we'd need to overhaul and canonise the whole shebang for it.

The problem is that Achaean minutes and seconds already are officially defined, but OOC minutes and seconds are still commonly used IC (and not just by players). Just changing the help file (even simply deleting the minute/second conversions) doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Delphinus

Sena said:

Just changing the help file (even simply deleting the minute/second conversions) doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Sure, I'd be fine with that.

Penwize

Just deleting the minute/second conversion is the ideal solution to this I think, because everyone really uses OOC time at that granularity at this point anyway and it'd be nice to stop having to worry about that particular bit of immersion breakage.  The smallest fraction I can really go to in common conversation is using a "quarter day" to refer to 15 minutes, which is pretty decent but I can't really seem to accept anything smaller than that as being reasonable to use, and using IC hours/minutes/seconds would just confuse everyone.

Sena

It would still essentially mean 60 Achaean minutes in an Achaean day, even if it isn't officially defined that way.

Iocun

I'd be fine with that too. They certainly don't need to make a big deal out of it, as long as a slight change is made to no longer make saying "You have one minute to explain yourself!" or "If I had fled two seconds later, I would have died." feel as if you were talking in OOC terms.

Saying "a fourth of a day" is reasonable, but saying "a thirtieth of a day" is just so much clumsier than "two minutes".

Penwize

Iocun said:

Saying "a fourth of a day" is reasonable, but saying "a thirtieth of a day" is just so much clumsier than "two minutes".

Well, I argue that saying "a fourth of a day" is silly and not natural conversation at all.  People just don't talk like that!  If you're going to say that, say "quarter day" or "half day" instead.  Agreed on the other half though, quarter's about as low as you can go without sounding weird.

Aerek

I use minutes and seconds like Iocun's proposing, because it's simple and reasonable. Changing the HELP containing the Achaean minutes/seconds/hours would be easy and wouldn't have any real repercussions except that I could finally roll my eyes at people saying "In about a sixth/twelfth/twenty-fourth of a day".

If we're making sweeping changes to the Achaean continuum, though, can we re-write every month to have 24 days? I'd love to be able to say, "Yes, I'm usually available in the realm between the 1st and 7th of each month."

Rispok

Sometimes I have used a sixth of a day to describe the duration of fury. Frenzy isn't worth explaining beyond "A little while", since I believe it's 12.5 seconds, or a 288th of a day.

Maya

I've removed the hour/minute/second references from HELP 18.1 - leaving the communication of smaller amounts of time to your personal preference. "One-quarter of a day" vs. "fifteen minutes" is up to you!

@Aerek - there are quite a few reasons we have 25 days in an Achaean month instead of 24 (mostly on the back end of things), so it's unlikely that would change and sync up to real hours. If using the DATE command is impractical (as, in your example, it would be), the best way to reference real life time is probably to tie it in to the Orphean Serenade. E.g. "I'm usually available two to eight hours after the Orphean Serenade."