The World of Avlis

For many years, Avlis has been operating on a 15:1 time ratio between ingame time and the time on your clock, meaning that for every 4 minutes that passes in the real world, an hour goes by on Avlis. We've all experienced this, with days passing by in character while you enjoy a conversation with friends (or enemies...). While it offered us some advantages in terms of mechanics, the Team has decided that the RP challenges such a fast clock presents have gotten too immersion-breaking to let them continue.



In an hour or so, Madkat will be rebooting all the modules and when they come back, the in-character / RL time ratio will drop from 15:1 to 3:1. This means time in the game will pass much, much more slowly. Instead of taking 4 RL minutes for an hour to pass ingame, it will now take 20.



The world will get a lot of RP benefit from this. Humans will age more slowly, removing the RP issue of years passing by like the wind. Seasons (now lasting one full RL month each) will become things we can use as RP devices both between players and as a Team. Roleplaying that a plot has lasted for a dozen IC years, or explaining where your character went for years while you took a month off, will no longer be necessary. Night and day will be environmental conditions that don't change while you go get coffee.



I'm sure you're all thinking "what about rest times, spell durations, etc?!?". The changes we've made will not affect the real-life duration of any game mechanic whatsoever. For example, before the change, you could only rest once every 16 RL minutes, or every 4 IC hours. Now, you will still be able to rest every 16 RL minutes, but this will translate to only about 45min in the game. Other RL-to-IC time relationships will similarly change, with the overall goal of not changing the duration in real life, while changing the amount of IC time that passes by during that RL duration.



I want to thank MadKat for implementing these changes for us, the DM staff for talking through all the possible wrinkles before we set out to do it, Hamlet's patience digging through and fixing conversations on every boat captain and barman in the game, and Nob and PsiOmega for their efforts to fix boat scripts, inn room timers, spell durations, and various other little things that all depend on the IC clock. Also, a big thanks to the QA team for their efforts... if you ever want to get an advance look at new development and contribute to the world in an easy convenient way, QA is the place to do it!



Thanks again, and I hope everyone likes the change.



-spool32

Head DM