Excellent point.
>Admittedly such situations can be a little more complicated with more
>than two characters, but even then do bear in mind that the flow of
>time passing is based on dramatic pacing rather than a strict
>metronome. My chaacter's active exchange might be resolved in a split
>second of action, while your character's exchange might be narrated
>as represent 10 minutes of time passing in the game world.
The best way to get to appropriate narrations, for me at least, is to simply envisage the action as if scenes in a movie. One moment we're watching this character, the next another. That doesn't mean that time isn't passing. When we come back to the first character, we'll see that positions have changed in unimportant ways, and that they're parrying back and forth or whatever. The reason that the "camera wasn't on them" is that nothing important was happening at the time. When the camera is on them, that's when something important happens to increase the tension.
Using this sort of technique, you never have to worry about problems synching time at all. In Simon's troll example, we flash back to the troll who's been resting behind a rock he got to last round, with a dozen arrows sticking (ineffectively) in him. As the scene starts we narrate him surging forth again.
I'm putting a rampaging troll in my next game just so I can see this scene happen. :-)
Mike
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