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Time Skips; the good, the bad & the ugly.

Queshire

Auror
So I just want to get the scribe's take on the idea of time skips.

When are they done well? When are they done poorly? Have you used them in your story? What's your thoughts?

Let me talk about the situation I'm in.

I'm part of a "collaborative writing project." Actually that's just what I call the RP I'm part of in order to sound fancy.

The characters in there are just absolutely stressed to hell. Over the course of the couple of years we've been doing it the characters have...

>Dealt with magic supremacist terrorists.
>Dealt with a moralistic / theological / philosophical conflict over the proper use of magic.
>Dealt with asshole angels.
>Dealt with one war.
>Dealt with a second war with a different group.
>Dealt with asshole angels again, only this time backed by cultists.
>Dealt with having a faction not doing anything actively malicious to the heroes but being vaguely menacing and untrustworthy in general.

Foreshadowing has indicated in the future they will soon have to deal with;

>Some sort of cooperate asshole making it difficult for the heroes to do their hero-ing thing.
>Some sort of vague, menacing demon realm thing that's allied with one of the defeated antagonist from asshole angels part 2.
>Mysterious invaders from a different dimension (separate from the demon realm guys.)
>A world wide terrorist organization becoming active whose goal seems to be mostly just seeing the world burn.

None of those really seem likely to decrease the stress afflicting them. The characters have, in character, noticeably demonstrated that they're getting burned out over all of it with them talking about taking a vacation and one of them performing potentially supervillainous acts out of a desire to stop bad things from happening no matter what.

To me it seems like the best point to have a time skip that the RP's going to get.

None of the foreshadowed events would be unduly harmed by having a time skip, it gives characters a chance to decompress, it lets the handful of baby characters in the RP have a chance to grow up enough that they can at least talk, and it gives a chance for long term projects to be completed like training, rebuilding and so on.

Well, it's an RP so ultimately whether that time skip actually happens depends on what the community decides. It's either that or a (or multiple) low tension arcs to de-stress the characters.
 
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