the game of time

[marycatelli]

Recently read a book in which a girl was told to do something to the count of 500.

I winced.

Not that culture, not at all.  Even nowadays, you get things telling children that they should wash their hands for the length of time it take to sing "Happy Birthday", and a culture less number obsessed -- and without clocks -- would do likewise.  Medieval recipes prescribe lengths of time equal to a Pater Noster, or a Miserere, or more than one at need.

Then, time is a funny thing to deal with.  You shouldn't have your characters use minutes in a pseudo-ancient world.  Most characters in a pseudo-medieval wouldn't, either.  Minutes as a measure of time spring from medieval clocks that could mark them.  And the tech did not spread quickly.  Most characters would still go by the hours peeled out by church bells.

Seconds, of course, are right out.  Then I generally have the characters says "Just a moment" instead of "Just a second" to convey that.

Comments

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

I remember this happening in one of the Dragonlance books. In this case the problem was compounded by the fact that two different groups of people had to synchronize their actions on the count of 500 (or some other number). And it was a manual count, too, not aided by magical devices or other clock-like technology. Even my teenaged self had serious reservations with that plot point.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Yet the medieval Japanese ninja could do that. There's a lot of fog to push through in finding the truth about such matters, but they learned to keep a synchronous rhythm count in their heads in much the way you could imagine silently singing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat,” so there was no need to “synchronize their watches” for coordinated actions - at the count of x one squad would act, knowing that the other squads elsewhere were acting simultaneously with no need for trumpet signals or other giveaways. It was impressive as heck. (Clearly it was extremely difficult, too, and not an everyday expectation.)

[marycatelli]

Yeah, it's amazing what can be done with training.

on the other hand, it's amazing how many people assume characters can automatically act as clocks

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

In William Manchester's A World Lit Only by Fire, he puts that very well - he points out that while we today are seriously connected to measured time, knowing the time to the minute, a thousand years ago few people knew what century they were in. Nor did they need to! “Between 1793 and 1993,” he says, “the world changed greatly. Between 793 and 993, on the other hand, nothing changed at all.”

[marycatelli]

There were a lot of changes in the Dark Ages. Hard to pin down because of the lack of records. But large portions of Europe became arable for the first time because they had improved the plow. They invented crop rotation. They took the water mill that the Romans regarded as a curiosity and systemically substituted it for human labor, putting it to uses the Romans never dreamed of.

[ljlee.livejournal.com]

Something like that did cross my mind. In one of the teams the guy keeping count was Sturm Brightblade, so I briefly wondered if keeping accurate time was part of his training as a knight of Solamnia. It never came up before or after, though--if he did receive such training it's a heck of a skill and should have been utilized more.

[marycatelli]

Well, it could only be used to its full potential with other people who can do the same trick.

[marycatelli]

so easy to forget that the modern world does not cover all of space and time except where specifically excluded

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Excellent point. And we still do this as young children, only in a back-formation: to know how long a second is, we say "one-Mississippi."

[marycatelli]

And all you have to do for world-building is a cultural equivalent!

[rai-ryu.livejournal.com]

I had never actually thought of this before! Measured time just seems to be ubiquitous. I'll definitely keep this in mind.

[marycatelli]

It's the hardest thing to remember, that simplest things may have been different in other times and places. . . .

An old problem. What inspired Poul Anderson to write A Midsummer Tempest was Julius Caesar in which Shakespeare had a clock chime. Chiming clocks are a medieval invention.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

James Burke talked about that in his series, The Day the Universe Changed. There was a twelfth-century monastery that needed to know when it was 3 am, so they could say their prayers at the proper time - so they built an alarm clock. The plans survived, so a reproduction was built today, and it works! Weights pull down and the mechanism uses a ratchet to catch and release, catch and release, and as he says, “As the mechanism works back and forth, we hear for the first time the sound that would soon dominate the Western world:” Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick, tock…

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

I loved that series, it generated so many great potential story prompts like that.
Also, you get some cool world-building when you sort out the tech in a fictional world and decide what the people would have used in different economic and status classes, too. Priests or courtiers used to water clocks (as in the Chinese Imperial court) would speak differently from peasant's kids doing counting rhymes to synchronize practical jokes.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

At one point here marycatelli and I were discussing the possible consequences if Imperial Rome had developed the semaphore telegraph, with relay stations built along the famed Roman (military) roads. Compared to even the fastest post riders the system is fantastic, able to transmit messages across the country in less than an hour. (News of an event reached Paris twenty-six minutes after it happened.)

Even if it hadn't in itself prevented the collapse of Rome, it would probably have made the division of Empire into east and west unnecessary (g' bye, Constantinople!) and it would have had a massive impact on the affairs of the Church in Europe.

So I generally include it where practicable; my players in the Empire of the Petal Throne knew they were approaching one of the massive Sakhbe roads that spanned the Empire when they heard the whoom-BOOM, bumm…whoom-BOOM, bumm… of Cyclopean semaphore arms slamming (and bouncing) into new positions from first light to clean dark…

[nagasvoice.livejournal.com]

Very cool--and I agree, it would have completely changed the history of Eastern Europe. It'd be interesting to see what happened with the nomads off the Asian steppes, back when they (in our world) were invading Poland etc.

[marycatelli]

Hmmm. Hard to tell. After all, the invaders would have learned to chop down towers -- the wars of the time were a major obstacle to the semaphore telegraph.

[marycatelli]

The telegraph would have changed so many things as to make one wonder how far you could trace it.

[marycatelli]

O yes, the ripple effect is great.

[marycatelli]

yeah, the monasteries' midnight office was a big part of the progress of clocks in the medieval age.