Some Thoughts on Time

This is a bit that, in a final draft, will go after the Basic Rules but before Combat Rules. I think it's important to build the system and define your terms as you go along.

In fact, I have a general outline for how the final document looks.

I. Basic Systems
A. Roll & Keep
B. Time
C. Combat
D. Warfare
II. Character Creation
A. Basics
B. Meibutsu, Discipline, Skill, and Qualities Short List
C. Rings & Traits
D. Skills
E. Honor & Glory
F. Equipment
G. Qualities
H. The Wa
I. Season Actions
III. Hachigoku
A. Culture, History, etc.
B. - I. The various regions of Hachigoku & their Uji
IV. Bushi Disciplines, Paths, & Advanced Disciplines
V. Teishin Disciplines, Paths, & Advanced Disciplines
VI. Shugenja Disciplines, Paths, & Advanced Disciplines
VII. Gakusho Disciplines, Paths, & Advanced Disciplines
VIII. Ronin Otokodate & Okuden
IX. NPC's -- Brutes & Stock NPCS
X. Creatures
XI. The Shadowlands
XII. The Spirit Realms

And that's just Phase I. But for now, some thoughts on...

Time

An important consideration for the mechanics of a game is the concept of time. How much time does it take to do a specific task, or even independent of a given task how is time measured? It is one thing to measure time in years, then months, then days (all of which Hachigoku does), and another thing to measure it in rounds and phases.

So, for mechanics purposes, the largest unit of time is a Year, which in turn is composed of four Seasons. A Season is pretty much what it sounds like: a roughly three month length of time. What's important about the Season is that it's a specific time unit in which certain actions requiring a great deal of time and concentration, such as training or crafting complicated items, take place. Which Season (Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter) is currently active can influence certain other mechanics, and the end of the Year (concurrent with the end of Winter) is a time for accounting when all the koku is taxed and the Winter Courts recount the glories of the past year. Most games are assumed to begin in Spring, but there's no strict rule against beginning in another Season instead.

Also, each Season corresponds to one of the Five Rings; Void can be theorized as symbolizing the entire Year. This is important when it comes to performing Season Actions, described much later. The correspondences are:

• Spring: Water
• Summer: Fire
• Autumn: Earth
• Winter: Air

Why take such an extend view of your character's activities? Well, he has responsibilities to his daimyo and shinden. Even a ronin must scrape and scrounge for work to survive. None of this is particularly exciting to roleplay, yet your character lacks roots in the world, and a stake in the society, without such obligations. What matters to you, as a player, is the conflict your character encounters, the victories and defeats that make up his life. Your daimyo, your shinden, and Hachigoku in general of course do not care. What matters to them is your service, duty, and ability to stay out of trouble most of the time.

When you do get into trouble, that's when Stories happen. The Story is the conflict the player characters encounter that's, well, fun. Even when it hurts. For samurai, especially when it hurts. If Story sounds like a pretentious term, feel free to think of it as an Adventure or Mission or Module. There are no hard and fast divisions. It's useful to think of a Story in Hachigoku as proceeding in three parts similar to the ritualized iaijutsu duel: Challenge, Focus, and Strike.

In the Challenge (in other games, you might call this the Hook or the Call), the characters are presented with a dilemma that requires their attention and tests their abilities (even if this is not obvious). Examples include:

• Your daimyo orders you to investigate bandit attacks on some of his villages. He wants to know who's responsible, and wants them stopped.
• The shinden is scheduled to receive a high ranking visitor, who is known to be hostile to their philosophy. The abbot wants you to escort them and make a good impression.
• A murder has been committed in the city, and your lover was discovered standing over the body with a bloody tanto.

In the Focus, the Challenge takes on a new dimension as a wrinkle or unexpected complication occurs and puts the characters into conflict with what should be a simple matter. It's recommended that this complication spring from some intrinsic properties of the player (Disadvantages that make resolution difficult or traditional uji and Discipline conflicts) or characters already present in the Story or foreshadowed. Completely external events could also provide the Focus, but should be appropriate. Thus, if you're investigating bandit attacks, the sudden appearance of oni would be jarring unless it was controlled by the bandits, or some force in conflict with the bandits. Examples include:

• Once you arrive at the villages, you are attacked by the bandits. You quickly discover the “bandits” are ronin the peasants hired to protect themselves from the ruinous taxes of your daimyo.
• You arrive at a rendezvous point to meet the visitor, who has been kidnapped by samurai from an uji he offended. It's clear their actions are in violation of law and honor, yet these samurai hand over documents indicating the victim already had the official papers to close down the shinden in his traveling pack.
• After intense investigation, it becomes clear that your lover truly is the murderer, but she was blackmailed into the killing by your daimyo's enemy to disgrace the uji. Publicly shaming the enemy would require you to publicly shame and condemn your lover, too.

The Strike is the resolution of the conflict, a resolution that could end in various outcomes depending on the characters' values and views on Bushido. It is not necessarily a definitive end, as one Strike can easily lead to a new Challenge. What the Strike does essentially is represent the characters' answer to a question being posed by the Focus. Examples include:

• Which is stronger, your loyalty to your daimyo (punishing the ronin and villages) or your compassion (figuring out a way to alleviate the taxes on the villages and letting the ronin go)?
• Which is stronger, your need to punish dishonor (freeing the captive), or protecting the shinden at the cost of your honor (failing in your task by making the documents and witness “disappear”)?
• Which is stronger, the personal loyalty to your lover (releasing her from punishment), or your desire for justice (holding her accountable to your daimyo's law and pursuing the enemy daimyo)?

Having each of these three elements (Challenge, Focus, and Strike) take up about one gaming session each tends to be effective; you can spend more or less time, certainly, or even adopt a completely different structure. It should begin and end within a single Season, although interconnected Stories can beneficially extend throughout the Seasons, eventually composing a large-scale Challenge-Focus-Strike epic. A Season should contain one or two Stories. There's no rule against doing more, but eventually people begin wondering why no harvest reports are being turned in, why you're never at your assigned guardpost, why the routine crimes under your authority are never being adjudicated, why you're chronically absent during scheduled prayers and meditation... And your players wonder if they are ever going to improve their character's attributes and abilities, since the benefits of training and Holdings usually occur at the end of the Season.

Past the large-scale time segments are the segments that occur in a single session. The most basic is the Scene. The Scene is the focus on what your characters are doing now, with a coherent set of circumstances, reasonably limited time-frame, and defined location. That sounds complicated and a bit fuzzy (what defines “reasonably”?), but I trust you to adjudicate what makes sense for everybody to stay engaged in the game. In other games, we might call this an Encounter. So, a single Scene could be the characters investigating the murder scene, fighting a skirmish outside a village, reporting to the daimyo, or arranging an ambush. A change of location then could signal the end of the Scene and beginning of another (your investigation of the murder scene concluded, you move to the home of the suspect for apprehension), or even a considerable passing of “inconsequential” time (you spend a Scene planning and arranging an ambush, then spend hours waiting until the target arrives triggering a brand new Scene). A Scene becomes a useful measure of time to regulate effects and abilities that do not (or rather do not need to) function in set increments like minutes or hours. Actions can be taken in Scenes, but if another Action is taken in response (anything that might be construed as a Complex Action under the Combat rules) the game has moved from the Scene into an even more precise segment: Rounds & Phases.

A Round is a unit of time measuring activities requiring swiftness and certainty, usually combat-related. A single Round is dived up into 10 Phases each, with a Phase being only an arbitrary tracking of Action order. Exactly how much real time a Round takes up is fluid; it may only take the traditional 6-second period most games take for granted, or it may take significantly longer, depending on what's happening. Generally speaking a Round should never be considered longer than a minute, and fierce combat is considerably shorter. The most honest answer is that Rounds, like Scenes, move at the speed of the plot, nor exclude extraneous action. While during a Round you might roll only a single attack roll, there are assumed to be other lunges, feints, dodges, footwork, etc. The Actions are the ones that matter, the ones that might succeed. Actions are, in short, opportunities. Your character does not simply stand there stock-still waiting for the right moment to wiggle a finger.

Warfare, it should be noted, can change the scale of Scenes and Rounds.