Last summer (2024), I completed my third rewatch of the incredible show of Gravity Falls and I found myself struck by something going into the 3-part "Weirdmageddon" finale: the entire show has been taking place under the looming specter of the Pines siblings going home at the end of summer.
Upon this realization, I felt a little odd. That is, after all, the premise of the whole show. It's referenced many times throughout its two-season run, whether it's Mabel wanting a summer romance or Dipper feeling compelled to solve Gravity Falls' mysteries before he has to leave. But it doesn't feel particularly urgent until the end of Episode 37 "Dipper and Mabel vs. the Future" when (spoilers for a 10-year old show) Mabel tries to create an endless summer and inadvertently releases Bill Cipher into our reality.
Why does Mabel do this? Well, for a constellation of reasons, but primarily because the summer is about to end and all her friends (including her twin brother) are seemingly about to abandon her on her birthday of all days. It's been a wonderful summer, but the prospect of it ending so badly almost retrospectively taints it for her to the point of it all being for nothing. Worse than nothing even, because she had something so good and then would have lost it.
So what does this have to do with TTRPGs? I felt like there was something there but wasn't sure at the time, so I wrote the reminder you see at the top of this post to make myself return to the idea at a later date. Then that date came and went. And went. And went. Until I could barely even see it in the rearview as I drove out of Gravity Falls with Dipper and Mabel.
At some point, I decided that I would simply revisit it in a year's time. It'll make for a funny bit, I thought, a blog post about time-limited games that itself is time-limited. Then today came and I actually deleted that reminder because I felt that I had nothing to say. A whole year to think of the perfect blog post and what did I have to show for it? A masterpiece of theory? An incredible bit of advice? Something even halfway funny or thoughtful or interesting? No!!!!!
But then I restored the reminder and chose to write this anyways, because I realized that this post was never about having the perfect thing to say. It was about deadlines, procrastination, and time, both in-game and out.
So what would it mean to have a game on a timer? The Cross Stitch by Ben Mansky is a MÖRK BORG adventure where the players are stuck in a 30-minute timeloop that resets in real time. 60 Minutes to Curtain, a LARP I just wrote for Dice Exploder's 1 Hour or Less Jam, is about a community theater group having just 60 minutes to get their show ready for opening night. OMEN by Spencer Campbell is a one-shot game about a world ticking ever closer to its doom via a dwindling dice pool that gets rolled at the beginning of the session and never refreshes; when it's gone, so is everything else.
Games on timers are nothing new, but they are often short. The games mentioned above take only one session to play (maybe two in the case of The Cross Stitch); what would a whole campaign on a timer look like?
In many ways, grand TTRPG campaigns of the sort imagined by many a Dungeons & Dragons or Call of Cthulhu or Shadowrun player are already on a timer. How long until the players' schedules make it so that the game ends by default, in a whimper and not a bang as weeks since playing become months and months become years? How long until some thoughtless comment or action from the real world causes two or more of the players to cease speaking to each other? How long until a major life event (a child's birth, a new job, a family tragedy) makes it impossible for one or more players to devote 4 hours a week every week to Faerun or Eberron or your DM's homebrew world that's definitely not Middle Earth mashed up with whatever other fantasy series they were reading most recently?
Truly, the longer a campaign goes the more likely something like this will happen - and while the same is true for non-trad games, it is definitely trad games that tend to have the longest running campaigns and therefore fall afoul of these pitfalls most often. And I challenge any players of those campaigns to turn down the promise that was made to Mabel: a chance to keep playing, forever, in a perfect game where your friends will never be sidetracked by other things going on in their lives.
So I want to see games that face this grim reality head on, much like Mabel must do to save her brother and everyone else in Gravity Falls. What would it be like to have a game where one of the rules is that you can only play during the summer? What would it be like to have in-game and out-of-game time pass at the same rate, with telegraphed calendar events in-game barreling toward you at a seemingly breakneck pace? What would it be like to play a game you know will end on a specific day and time (either in-game or out-of-game)?
Ultimately what I'm really asking is, what choices would you make in those games, knowing those things? What choices would your characters make if they knew the same things you knew?
I think it would look a lot like it did in Gravity Falls: it wouldn't feel like it mattered, right up until it did.
