Cºntinuity

Last night was Erica's Cºntinuum game, a highly detailed time travel RPG. Lots of fun, especially if you have a hard-on for rigorous timekeeping.

Ahem.

One of the primary elements of Cºntinuum is the players' ability to keep meticulous records of their whereabouts at all times in order to avoid creating paradoxes in the space-time continuum. Hence the name.

There's no part of this game I don't like.

I don't have a problem keeping track of when I go, but every time you jump from one place to another, called "spanning", you use up some finite quantity of travelability you possess. Consider this to be a kind of time travel juice. When the juice is used up, your character needs to rest in order to replenish it. You have to keep tabs on this kind of thing because spanning after you've used up all your "time juice" is dangerous.

So let's say you jump forward nine hours, watch a two-hour movie, and then span back. You record that you've spanned forward nine hours, for a duration of two hours, and then you span back ten hours, fifty-nine minutes, and fifty-nine seconds.

Why not eleven hours? To avoid bumping into yourself. Cºntinuum only has per-second granularity, which is plenty. What this means is that if you span off to your movie at 10 AM, you don't want to start creating paradoxes left and right, so you span back at 10:00:01.

Your head exploding yet?

If thinking about these things isn't your cuppa lapsang souchong, maybe you should give Cºntinuum a pass. Me? I'm just worried about keeping tabs on all my spanning. For a one-shot, you're going to be a Span One, meaning you have 1 year's worth of "time juice". In a typical four-hour gaming session you aren't likely to consume it all since nearly all of your actions generally won't go beyond a series of events that last several days. e.g., you span forward to Tuesday, do something, span back to Monday, span forward to Tuesday again, span back to Sunday, span forward to Thursday, and finally back to Monday again. With all this back and forth over and over again, you may go through, what? A month of time juice? No worries. You have eleven more to go.

On the other hand, any serious, medium- to long-term Cºntinuum campaign is going to need to-the-second precision of your actions and whereabouts for a host of reasons. Enter computers.

I've toyed with a few different systems of timekeeping, and for an application like Cºntinuum (which generously forgives things like leap seconds), there are three I'm willing to consider:

1. Python's datetime module. This gets my lowest recommendation because of the sloppy, generalistic way in which time is handled, but Python is installed on my iBook and its command interpreter allows for some of the fastest "back of the envelope" math possible. It is "good enough".
2. The caltime library. Pros: expert handling of leap seconds. Fast. Cons: Requires a C program. Have to compile something. Probably fastest to printf() something and just re-write your mytime.c application over and over again. I suppose this would be best for day after calculations of the stuff you did the night before.
3. Monad/MSH and the .NET Framework. .NET supports its own DateTime and TimeSpan structs, which provide probably the best Cºntinuum interface. The problem? Try getting Monad to run on your iBook. Windows users will probably prefer Monad's easy support for .NET for doing the same kind of stuff that I'll be doing in Python on the other end of the table.

In all, Cºntinuum is a tremendously fun game — if you don't mind writing everything down all the time. Last night saw us raiding a warehouse, stealing a car, crashing it into the guard fence, and grabbing the surveillance tapes that recorded us doing all of this. Simultaneously. If we'd had more information about our target we could probably have done something even zanier. No matter. A lot of Cºntinuum is doing research.

Constantly going to the Library?

Meticulous timekeeping records?

Writing interpreted time-based arithmetic scripts just to keep up?

Screwing around with people's minds?

Where do I sign up?