How do you feel about time skips in a campaign?

How do you feel about time skips in a campaign?

Weaboo shonen gimick? Clever narrative tool?
Only appropriate for an epilogue?

I think the only time skips I've seen have been for a few months to cover wintering in a certain place. It's cool, because the DM would take each of us aside between sessions to detail what we get up too during that time.

Though I'd be down to see how a longer time skip could work out.

If your sessions are short and you have a huge distance to cover mini time skips work well, make some distance and have an event, sort out the event and skip ahead.

Very casual way of playing, but if you've only got a few hours to play you've got to do what you can

It's good.

Nobody want to travel from a village to another for 20 days

I did a time skip in my current campaign. It was only 3 months but it was enough to move the plot along and for the players to level up.
Also the characters have been dealing with threats one after the other for a while so they deserved a break.
I asked each of the players what they would do during this break and they came up with some pretty cool stuff which resulted in some pretty good RP.
All in all everyone seemed to be happy about it and that's what is important.

Xanathar's Guide actually has a lot to say about downtime, and has a couple of interesting charts for what the characters can be up to between adventures. Things like how to handle research or how a character can pick up an extra language, along with complications that can result during downtime.

It doesn't really have much to say about downtime beyond a few months at most though, so it's not really a guide to Everything as it claims.

The timeskips OP is talking about are more like jumping forward a few years and finding out everything has changed and characters from before are more powerful. It's used to lampshade the power creep of a series and up the ante, so to speak.
Think the timeskip during Dragon Ball to DBZ.

>time skips
>Weaboo shonen gimick
????????????

Depends on the situation. For example, my friends and I have winter break coming up, and will be going back home. Our DM has an arc ending event for the session before break and when we return it's a few weeks later. The only time where I was annoyed with a time skip was when we did skip a plot point for a fun Halloween session

>Weaboo shonen gimick?
What

A lot of shonen manga used time skips as a way to generate interest when the series was losing steam. Since reader polls are extremely important and a few lapsed weeks might actually threaten the series with cancelation, a time skip is one of the biggest ways to renew interest by dramatically changing the story and characters.

It's sometimes done well, but at other times looks like the author is desperate.

One of the game ideas I've always wanted to run, but just never have gotten the chance or time to do it, is to have the players start the game in a "prologue" without knowing it ahead of time.

Just a first session to break the characters in, and lay some framework for relationships. Then do a time jump to the "real story" later.

I want to try it with a Western at some point. Maybe I will with the Genesys system.

>shonen manga invented time skips
Excuse me?

These are the fucking simps that are posting on this board. Jesus Christ, Gook Moot just end this shit.

>this thread
>this OP

GREAT

BIG

MILKIES

No one said they invented them. It's just that in shonen manga, they can often feel like a desperate gimmick.

If the campaign ever hits a wall, I usually skip ahead a year or so to a point where stuff is actually happening

It feels like it could be a good way to give players a lasting victory, without having to play the victorious parts.

Skip the good times, go to the next real challenge.

>timeskip
>character still at the same XP because he was apparently sitting around doing nothing the whole time

This is not Ok

If the system has different power levels of play that do not flow well from one to the next a timeskip is an appropriate way to handwave the sudden jump in power but changing-up the world entirely is a kinda crappy thing to do. Those changes mean cool stuff was happening and the PCs likely would have cared about that stuff and done something interesting because of it.

I have come across an RPG that makes generational play interesting though in the form of image related. The short version is that in it your parents sold your unborn soul to some dark entity and you inherit the benefits and detriments of that deal sometimes in a diminished way but usually in a bigger one.

Agreed. They should get something even if it is just an item or two.

I plan to do some in my hardcore zombie survival game, between scavenging missions. Role-playing people sitting around for a week or so eating rations reading books and fucking each other is going to get old fast.

Someone mind posting the comic this comes from? I've been trying to find it.

seconded

...

Thanks, user.

We timeskipped six months once, because we were resuming a campaign we'd put on hiatus for a year and needed to justify two characters being gone and two new ones showing up. It worked out extremely well. It gave everyone (the players and the DM) a chance to sort-of start over with a firmer grasp on the setting and what we wanted out of it.

I like it and it improves things. Several reasons being

1. I hate the whole hey we managed to spend several days destroying the enemy goblin encampment, did a tough fight where our party nearly died, destroyed the menacing goblin leader that had been terrorizing the local town for years. Then we slept for a day to recover all of our strength and went on the next huge adventure where we went to kill a rampaging Minotaur that has slaughtered every adventuring party send to kill him so far. Almost died and achieved a hard victory, but then we rest another day and go on the our next huge adventure in stopping a dragon. By the way in game time it has been about a month and we went from level 1 novice adventurers to level 10 heroic level top 0.1% badasses

2. Assuming you are a decent GM that tells players what they can do during the time skip of a month or so, it hastens things like NPC interaction or making gold or building a house or whatever goals the players have. If a player for instance really liked the NPC baker's daughter, I don't want to spend the next fucking session having him roleplay trying to win her heart while the others players have to watch in silence.

3. It allows the world to progress along with the players. As we do time skips, more shops are built, new NPCs arrive, political intrigue happens, the various evil bad guys that players might have ignored start to go forward with their plans, seasons come and now weather has an effect on the next adventure.

>A lot of shonen manga used time skips
You should probably read more than three manga.

DBZ
One Piece
Bleach
Naruto
Claymore
Death Note
Fairy Tail
Gintama
Soul Eater
Toriko
JoJo's Bizzare Adventure
Billy Bat
Magi
Mahou Sensei Negima
Shingeki no Kyojin
20th Century Boys
Vinland Saga
Berserk
Monster

And hundreds of lesser known manga.

But a lot of those were well, WELL, far along. And for dbz, it essentially was the start of a new show in itself.

I mean, yeah it seems pretty common when put like that, but a lot of those seem to be done well imo.

Those are series that are well known and popular, and most of their timeskips were generally well received.

But, for every one of these blockbuster series, there's dozens of cancelled series, or series that were forced to rush their endings, all because of the highly competitive nature and limited slots of manga magazines. It's in that graveyard that you find hundreds of poorly received time skips made by desperate authors trying to avoid cancellation.

>Jojo
That doesn't fucking count and you god damn know it. That's the end of each story arc, and moving on to a different character.

>And for dbz, it essentially was the start of a new show in itself.
You're forgetting the smaller time skips. Like the 3-years between Trunks and the Androids actually showing up. Or the years between Cell and Buu.

>That doesn't fucking count and you god damn know it. That's the end of each story arc, and moving on to a different character.

The end of the story arc, but a continuation of the same story. It's kind of like that time skip in DBZ, where Gohan matures and the story was supposed to switch to having him being the lead (but Goku proved to be too popular so they nixed that idea), or like the Naruto to Boruto time skip, or the Bleach Epilogue time skip.

Time skips like these are also not uncommon in D&D campaigns, where characters end up playing the children of the previous party (along with the elf that hasn't aged in the thirty years).