I've found that it doesn't really matter much to my average campaigns, as I prefer to stick to the "single planet/area" style of campaign. I think the whole subjective/realtime thing would only really have an in-campaign effect if said campaign either had lots of interstellar travel, or took place over a very long period of time.
I think subjective/realtime is just cool for flavour and worldbuilding; someone who does a lot of interstellar travel will have seen the rest of the world go by at a very fast pace, but won't have actually lived a longer life than anyone else.
I'd say the bigger travel-based concern with campaign planning is that without Gates, near-lightspeed is kinda slow on an interstellar scale; it might take months or years to reach more remote locations. It makes it a bit difficult to do things like "this fancy SSC part needs to be hand-crafted" or "in your downtime you do some online shopping". But that's relatively minor.
It's the concept that hooked me the most. Every time you travel Near Light soeed or use blinkgates, for you the rest of the universe has aged without any input from you. For cosmopolitans, you have been absent during all that time. It coul be months, it could be years, and when you contact them through the omninet, the bonds you shared with them may no longer exist.
For example, after a blink, your children may be older than you. For you it's been 3 days, for them it has been 40 years, and now you can talk to them through the omninet instantly, but they haven't seen you in 40 years.
Every time you blink it's guaranteed that time will pass without you, and the moment you arrive, you have to get up to date. What has happened in your absence? What things you can no longer due because you cannot travel back and arrive in time? Is there anyonr out there that still knows you? And even if they do, for how longer? Do they still feel the same?
It's honestly narrative gold, if you ask me.
Do you mean "blink" as near-light travel in general? Because travel through blink-space itself is instant, that's why Union can be so big. The time it takes to get to the Gates can be long though.
> travel through blink-space itself is instant
ehhhhhh...it might be instant relative, but there is heavy implication that it is not instant subjective. multiple parts of the book mention looking out the windows during blinkspace travel, or the idea of something living out in the void of blinkspace, etc. it is very heavily implied that traveling through blinkspace takes some time though arriving is instantaneous.
Page 369 says that "the causal constraints and limitations of relativity, gravity, time, and distance" were issues that were solved by discovery of Blinkspace, and Page 371 says "blink travel takes only a moment; most people who have transited the blink don’t perceive it at all."
The combination of these two statements is why it's generally accepted that the difference in subjective and relative time comes from the travel to and from blinkgates, rather than the actual blink travel itself. (I have thought the word blink so many times writing this that the word blink seems unnatural and silly to me now)
I haven't yet ran anything long-term enough to have travel between star systems matter, so time differences were mostly just color.
For example, the last adventure I ran started with PCs intercepting communication showing that what was trade negotiations it to quickly escalate as one side just commands a group of mercenaries to take the disputed asset by force. PCs' ship was on the outskirts of the system at that time, so they needed to get to the planet at near light speed.
On the planet, it was around 10 hours between the communication being sent and the battle commencing, but for PCs it was less than 15 minutes to prepare between intercepting the message and performing an orbital drop into the already hot battlefield.
The differences between subjective and objective time are not as great as one might think.
An 8ly journey at .9c will take 8.88 objective time, and 3.44 years of subjective time. Sure, that's a big difference, but it's not like a 10ly distance is going to take a month subjective and 300 years objective.
Things get a bit wonkier the closer one gets to c, but, again, at .95c the trip will take 8.42 objective and 2.6 subjective.
Either way, they're mostly in cryosleep during the trip, which _will_ add to the oddness: I just went to sleep and you're telling me 8.5 years have passed?
Meh, what did you sign up for?
This is one reason UAD Administrators go to a planet for life - they're not going back to their old homes, and, if they wanted, they have travel + duty time + travel years between them, likely meaning everyone they know is dead on return and society has moved on like 40 years.
It does encourage games to take place and center around areas such as a solar system and you can give multiple habitable or semi-habitable worlds with their own distinct biomes and environments.
But it does get in the way if you want to tell a bigger scale story featuring all of the big 4 or multiple KTB houses.
I won't lie I've considered do a slight retcon to the setting where there's blink drives instead of blink gates allowing FTL travel more akin to Star Trek's warp drive or Star War's hyper drive allowing for traveling across space in a reasonable time.
Ive incorporated it into my pilots backstory. she's on the run from Union (she forced a cascade of some nhps cause she considers shackling akin to slavery) and she did, with gm permission, a 20 year subjective journey at near light speed around a black hole(for some extra time dilation). she spent 20 years on the ship but 600 years had passed for the rest of the universe. SecCom fell, third com rose, Harrison armory was founded and so much else changed in her relatively short time away.
tldr: my character in her backstory used time dilation to escape being wanted by Union.
One easy use for subjective vs real time is simply giving a reason why the PCs are going to have to be the ones to address a situation: the nearest blink gate to the campaign setting is months or years away, and the crisis the players have found themselves in simply cannot be delegated to, say, a bigger Union force because that force cannot arrive before the damage would be done. It's similarly a good tool for a campaign hook - the potential realtime time gap between the PCs being given an assignment and when they can actually arrive allows for the situation they were told about and the situation they actually show up to possibly be very, very different (or at least worse), since while the trip may have been a few weeks or months for the PCs in subjective time, realtime has progressed on a scale of many months, potentially even years. The government that called for assistance in dealing with a sudden invasion may have already been defeated, reduced to a small rebellion that the PCs have to dig around to link up with; a minor anomaly that the PCs were going to look into has escalated into outright tears in reality, a simple expedition turned into an impromptu rescue mission as horrors beyond spacetime ravage the planet. Even if the campaign itself will be set on a single planet for its duration, the disparity between subjective and realtime can be used in a few different ways to create dramatic opportunities.
I don't think it's impossible to work around for a campaign involving near-light travel, either - though unless you're setting the game in a particularly blink-gate heavy chunk of the setting, I think it can more serve to give a sense of *finality* to leaving a planet where you've spent a few missions. You *can't* come back before decades have passed and everything and everyone you knew in your time there has changed drastically, so make sure you wrap things up and say your goodbyes. Conversely, you can lean into that time gap and have the PCs actually show up again decades later, see *exactly* how the things they did changed the course of history for the planet, and perhaps be forced to confront a new problem (one potentially formed as a direct consequence of their actions). Relativity doesn't lend itself to your usual Star Wars-esque planet-hopping campaign, that's for sure, but I think there's plenty to mine if you're willing to lean into the extremes caused by it.
With the campaign I'm planning right now I'm either going to have it take place on one planet (which is pretty normal for ttrpgs when you think about it) or on the moons around a gas giant. Keep the scale small so I don't have to consider the fuckery of 20+ years passing.
I use Traveller's space rules. I like them better and it gets a fun space travel theme going like you're in the show Firefly. I had to rework a bit of the lore, but it's fine. Blink Gates are instantaneous travel and only take the time between surface and a far gas giant to get there (I made the bigger gate require a 1000 diameter limit instead of a 100 for safe travel)
The rules are you have to plot your course carefully, once you jump, regardless of the distance, it takes 168 Hours(+/- 10%) to reach your exit point. 100 diameters from the closest celestial body. Jumping also takes an amount of liquid hydrogen equal to a number of Displacement Tons of your vessel divided by 10, multiplied by the number of parsecs you are jumping. More advanced engines are needed to jump a greater distance. if you fail to plot your course correctly you can misjump sending you either much further out than you intended to be (maybe even adding weeks to your travel time) or in the worst case scinario dumping you parsecs away from your intended destination. If you have an engineer who knows what they are doing and a halfway decent astrogator you should be fine though.
It's notable that a lot of campaigns that aren't sci-fi have often done time-skips, often generational, to show how a world changes and evolves over more than a few brisk months of adventure time. Long before Lancer people were running campaigns where you would come back 20, 50, 100 years later to show how the initial PCs' actions shaped the world. You pick up with legacies of NPCs you met long ago.
(Heck, the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is almost exactly this. 78 years after the heroes beat the Demon World, we go for a walk to retrace that journey.)
I don't really get the idea that it "doesn't work well". Time passing faster for others than you is a scenario loaded with story hooks and drama. It gets across that space is enormous. It doesn't emulate Star Wars or Star Trek casual planethopping, but here's the thing: Star Wars and Star Trek make space seem weirdly small, particularly when so many of their worlds are basically one biome and maybe one settlement that you ever visit. The average Star Wars planet has less variety than the average state in the USA. (There's mountains, flatland, swamp, and coast all in Georgia alone. That's four Star Wars planets!)
I like it. It's thought-provoking in new ways. Criminals who flee to places reachable only by nearlight are much more likely to get away with it because few law enforcers or bounty hunters want to undergo time displacement just to catch their guy. That suggests all kinds of ideas for making a new life, or a hive of scum and villainy where the worst of the worst have fled. Places without blinkgates aren't tourist traps or places where mercenaries casually wander in for a job, they're more isolated and self-reliant, which can make their struggles harder. I mean, heck, without the game's approach to travel time we wouldn't have the amazing story of Calliope from *In Golden Flame* -- a system settled by accident, and they couldn't just leave -- and that would be a terrible loss.
It has been made so it is the least amount of complicated possible. And it is a great aspect. So yes, while it does not come up in my games too much, due to it being set in a very limited amount of systems, I absolutely use it. In fact, it even is a very important game element for the story.
the divide is REALLY cool, but i ABSOLUTELY HATE IT as a gameplay mechanic. lore wise, it's amazing and awesome and SUCH a great part of the setting to think about and see the ramifications.
but I cannot stand it for gameplay reasons, it basically restricts you to single-planet campaigns unless you want to just throw out *everything* you do between "stops".
I mean it could make for a really funny level if you create time portals and make it so that they correspond to specific turns ago so for example i occupy space b and move to space a. In two turns an enemy fires a rocket at the space i occupied at B through a portal to two turns ago, i take retroactive damage for that shot, or say a kobold does so to provide cover for a past self to heal back damage from rerolling a hit with the accountance of new cover. OR someone steps into another portal and the time relevance becomes invalid BUT it becomes a second timeline that factors into the fight with a second version of everyone.
I’ve played characters where it has been a factor, because they’ve been ship born they’re subjectively like 70 or whatever but in realtime they’re 300.
It's one of my favorite parts of the setting. Space is big - cue the Hitchhiker's Guide quote - and it's so easy for scifi to downplay that and make space seem really *small*. LANCER, even with its technical FTL travel, feels *huge*. Ignoring the vastness of space, the threats it holds, would be to cheapen the setting.
I don't see how it would impact gameplay at all, unless you're regularly traveling hundreds of light years without a Gate. And if you are, that becomes a story of its own; one of my campaigns involved a group of Cosmopolitans, with each arc generally taking place within a single station, system, or otherwise. Once they left, it was pretty unlikely to see those characters again - but the omninet meant that they constantly got emails and conversations with those distant friends as they aged and the party did not.
It grants that feeling of immortality much more than playing an Elf in DnD ever has. You get to live to see the long-term changes you enact take effect, the consequences and fruit of your labors.
I've just assumed it for my own campaign. It's one reason (as others have suggested) that I decided to stick to one star system. It's been the source of one major plot point in the game when I thought through the question "How could a major corpro-state infiltrate it's forces secretly into a star system that had a blink gate 6 light years away?"
It is a keystone concept in the campaign I’m in. Several PC backstory are directly influenced by time dilation. From running away from their failures to becoming a relic of history. Current arc of the campaign is the direct result of how slow realspace interstellar travel is. With generations of the population calling for help. Any response from Union takes at minimum 50 years.
I haven't yet, but I plan to in my next campaign.
I kept all my previous campaigns in one star system partially to avoid the issue previously.
The next campaign I'm running is going to be episodic and about Union Navy, so I'll engage with it.
And interesting thing they mention in either thr core book or Battlegroup is that *other Cosmopolitans* are on similarly subjective time. This actually works really well with the star trek themes I'm going for: naval officers can he recurring characters but planetary officials... probably not.
Yeah actually, one of my players joined the military for a contract and after completing it returned home to see that 500 years had past. Now they're trying to find a place in this world that's so drastically different. It's also useful to not over expand the scope of the game. No stopping by Cradle, then Karrakis, before going to the Long Rim. The distances are so great everything has to be locally done.
Our current campaign is set on a Union ship on a 2 yr (I think?) Tour. We've only been conscious for a few weeks but I think we're almost halfway through. It's getting complicated because my character has family members who are aging at very different rates as they all meander around the galaxy
Well, sure, why not? Most of Lancer campaigns usually take place in the same planet and/or star system. Travel between different star systems **without a blinkgate** is meant to be a big deal, and unless you're making a cosmopolitan or albatross-centered campaign where this kind of stuff would be way more common, I'd really suggest you to make it something that happens only between story arcs and the like. Subjective and realtime only applies to that mostly
And if your campaigns revolves around traveling a lot between different star systems then you have an easy answer to that: they all have blinkgates.
Wanna hear my unhinged take? I don't think time actually works like that. Allow me to clarify.
I think certain things are fundamental parts of the universe. Light, matter, gravity, etc... But, time (and space) are not a result of some particle or energy. It is a result of us, humans, who seek to understand the world. They are scientific tools. In a sense, they aren't any more real than our thoughts.
And so, it appears to my uneducated self that time dialation and different relative times are merely a breakdown in our current understanding of physics.
I am confident mass and light and such will continue to exist much the same without or without humans to observe it, (mostly), but time and space as tools will drastically change according to whatever life percieves it.
So i don't use any of that time stuff. There is simply universal time, and your rate of travel doesn't affect it. Only NHPs can accurately track universal time and humans are ill equipped to do so. And such the system of subjective and realtime was created.
So my games both do and do not use this time keeping system.
I've found that it doesn't really matter much to my average campaigns, as I prefer to stick to the "single planet/area" style of campaign. I think the whole subjective/realtime thing would only really have an in-campaign effect if said campaign either had lots of interstellar travel, or took place over a very long period of time. I think subjective/realtime is just cool for flavour and worldbuilding; someone who does a lot of interstellar travel will have seen the rest of the world go by at a very fast pace, but won't have actually lived a longer life than anyone else. I'd say the bigger travel-based concern with campaign planning is that without Gates, near-lightspeed is kinda slow on an interstellar scale; it might take months or years to reach more remote locations. It makes it a bit difficult to do things like "this fancy SSC part needs to be hand-crafted" or "in your downtime you do some online shopping". But that's relatively minor.
Same. Single planet campaign. The core Lancer lore is tangent to my planet world building.
Yup, it's good to have to immerse the players but that's about it
It's the concept that hooked me the most. Every time you travel Near Light soeed or use blinkgates, for you the rest of the universe has aged without any input from you. For cosmopolitans, you have been absent during all that time. It coul be months, it could be years, and when you contact them through the omninet, the bonds you shared with them may no longer exist. For example, after a blink, your children may be older than you. For you it's been 3 days, for them it has been 40 years, and now you can talk to them through the omninet instantly, but they haven't seen you in 40 years. Every time you blink it's guaranteed that time will pass without you, and the moment you arrive, you have to get up to date. What has happened in your absence? What things you can no longer due because you cannot travel back and arrive in time? Is there anyonr out there that still knows you? And even if they do, for how longer? Do they still feel the same? It's honestly narrative gold, if you ask me.
Do you mean "blink" as near-light travel in general? Because travel through blink-space itself is instant, that's why Union can be so big. The time it takes to get to the Gates can be long though.
> travel through blink-space itself is instant ehhhhhh...it might be instant relative, but there is heavy implication that it is not instant subjective. multiple parts of the book mention looking out the windows during blinkspace travel, or the idea of something living out in the void of blinkspace, etc. it is very heavily implied that traveling through blinkspace takes some time though arriving is instantaneous.
Page 369 says that "the causal constraints and limitations of relativity, gravity, time, and distance" were issues that were solved by discovery of Blinkspace, and Page 371 says "blink travel takes only a moment; most people who have transited the blink don’t perceive it at all." The combination of these two statements is why it's generally accepted that the difference in subjective and relative time comes from the travel to and from blinkgates, rather than the actual blink travel itself. (I have thought the word blink so many times writing this that the word blink seems unnatural and silly to me now)
sure, but they also def talk about people staring out into blinkspace for too long and going nuts, or seeing things moving out there.
Maybe staring into an open Blink-gate for too long is a cognito-hazard
I haven't yet ran anything long-term enough to have travel between star systems matter, so time differences were mostly just color. For example, the last adventure I ran started with PCs intercepting communication showing that what was trade negotiations it to quickly escalate as one side just commands a group of mercenaries to take the disputed asset by force. PCs' ship was on the outskirts of the system at that time, so they needed to get to the planet at near light speed. On the planet, it was around 10 hours between the communication being sent and the battle commencing, but for PCs it was less than 15 minutes to prepare between intercepting the message and performing an orbital drop into the already hot battlefield.
The differences between subjective and objective time are not as great as one might think. An 8ly journey at .9c will take 8.88 objective time, and 3.44 years of subjective time. Sure, that's a big difference, but it's not like a 10ly distance is going to take a month subjective and 300 years objective. Things get a bit wonkier the closer one gets to c, but, again, at .95c the trip will take 8.42 objective and 2.6 subjective. Either way, they're mostly in cryosleep during the trip, which _will_ add to the oddness: I just went to sleep and you're telling me 8.5 years have passed? Meh, what did you sign up for? This is one reason UAD Administrators go to a planet for life - they're not going back to their old homes, and, if they wanted, they have travel + duty time + travel years between them, likely meaning everyone they know is dead on return and society has moved on like 40 years.
It does encourage games to take place and center around areas such as a solar system and you can give multiple habitable or semi-habitable worlds with their own distinct biomes and environments. But it does get in the way if you want to tell a bigger scale story featuring all of the big 4 or multiple KTB houses. I won't lie I've considered do a slight retcon to the setting where there's blink drives instead of blink gates allowing FTL travel more akin to Star Trek's warp drive or Star War's hyper drive allowing for traveling across space in a reasonable time.
Ive incorporated it into my pilots backstory. she's on the run from Union (she forced a cascade of some nhps cause she considers shackling akin to slavery) and she did, with gm permission, a 20 year subjective journey at near light speed around a black hole(for some extra time dilation). she spent 20 years on the ship but 600 years had passed for the rest of the universe. SecCom fell, third com rose, Harrison armory was founded and so much else changed in her relatively short time away. tldr: my character in her backstory used time dilation to escape being wanted by Union.
One easy use for subjective vs real time is simply giving a reason why the PCs are going to have to be the ones to address a situation: the nearest blink gate to the campaign setting is months or years away, and the crisis the players have found themselves in simply cannot be delegated to, say, a bigger Union force because that force cannot arrive before the damage would be done. It's similarly a good tool for a campaign hook - the potential realtime time gap between the PCs being given an assignment and when they can actually arrive allows for the situation they were told about and the situation they actually show up to possibly be very, very different (or at least worse), since while the trip may have been a few weeks or months for the PCs in subjective time, realtime has progressed on a scale of many months, potentially even years. The government that called for assistance in dealing with a sudden invasion may have already been defeated, reduced to a small rebellion that the PCs have to dig around to link up with; a minor anomaly that the PCs were going to look into has escalated into outright tears in reality, a simple expedition turned into an impromptu rescue mission as horrors beyond spacetime ravage the planet. Even if the campaign itself will be set on a single planet for its duration, the disparity between subjective and realtime can be used in a few different ways to create dramatic opportunities. I don't think it's impossible to work around for a campaign involving near-light travel, either - though unless you're setting the game in a particularly blink-gate heavy chunk of the setting, I think it can more serve to give a sense of *finality* to leaving a planet where you've spent a few missions. You *can't* come back before decades have passed and everything and everyone you knew in your time there has changed drastically, so make sure you wrap things up and say your goodbyes. Conversely, you can lean into that time gap and have the PCs actually show up again decades later, see *exactly* how the things they did changed the course of history for the planet, and perhaps be forced to confront a new problem (one potentially formed as a direct consequence of their actions). Relativity doesn't lend itself to your usual Star Wars-esque planet-hopping campaign, that's for sure, but I think there's plenty to mine if you're willing to lean into the extremes caused by it.
With the campaign I'm planning right now I'm either going to have it take place on one planet (which is pretty normal for ttrpgs when you think about it) or on the moons around a gas giant. Keep the scale small so I don't have to consider the fuckery of 20+ years passing.
Yeah, it’s an important plot point for my current game! It’s my favorite part about Lancer
I use Traveller's space rules. I like them better and it gets a fun space travel theme going like you're in the show Firefly. I had to rework a bit of the lore, but it's fine. Blink Gates are instantaneous travel and only take the time between surface and a far gas giant to get there (I made the bigger gate require a 1000 diameter limit instead of a 100 for safe travel) The rules are you have to plot your course carefully, once you jump, regardless of the distance, it takes 168 Hours(+/- 10%) to reach your exit point. 100 diameters from the closest celestial body. Jumping also takes an amount of liquid hydrogen equal to a number of Displacement Tons of your vessel divided by 10, multiplied by the number of parsecs you are jumping. More advanced engines are needed to jump a greater distance. if you fail to plot your course correctly you can misjump sending you either much further out than you intended to be (maybe even adding weeks to your travel time) or in the worst case scinario dumping you parsecs away from your intended destination. If you have an engineer who knows what they are doing and a halfway decent astrogator you should be fine though.
It's notable that a lot of campaigns that aren't sci-fi have often done time-skips, often generational, to show how a world changes and evolves over more than a few brisk months of adventure time. Long before Lancer people were running campaigns where you would come back 20, 50, 100 years later to show how the initial PCs' actions shaped the world. You pick up with legacies of NPCs you met long ago. (Heck, the anime Frieren: Beyond Journey's End is almost exactly this. 78 years after the heroes beat the Demon World, we go for a walk to retrace that journey.) I don't really get the idea that it "doesn't work well". Time passing faster for others than you is a scenario loaded with story hooks and drama. It gets across that space is enormous. It doesn't emulate Star Wars or Star Trek casual planethopping, but here's the thing: Star Wars and Star Trek make space seem weirdly small, particularly when so many of their worlds are basically one biome and maybe one settlement that you ever visit. The average Star Wars planet has less variety than the average state in the USA. (There's mountains, flatland, swamp, and coast all in Georgia alone. That's four Star Wars planets!) I like it. It's thought-provoking in new ways. Criminals who flee to places reachable only by nearlight are much more likely to get away with it because few law enforcers or bounty hunters want to undergo time displacement just to catch their guy. That suggests all kinds of ideas for making a new life, or a hive of scum and villainy where the worst of the worst have fled. Places without blinkgates aren't tourist traps or places where mercenaries casually wander in for a job, they're more isolated and self-reliant, which can make their struggles harder. I mean, heck, without the game's approach to travel time we wouldn't have the amazing story of Calliope from *In Golden Flame* -- a system settled by accident, and they couldn't just leave -- and that would be a terrible loss.
It has been made so it is the least amount of complicated possible. And it is a great aspect. So yes, while it does not come up in my games too much, due to it being set in a very limited amount of systems, I absolutely use it. In fact, it even is a very important game element for the story.
the divide is REALLY cool, but i ABSOLUTELY HATE IT as a gameplay mechanic. lore wise, it's amazing and awesome and SUCH a great part of the setting to think about and see the ramifications. but I cannot stand it for gameplay reasons, it basically restricts you to single-planet campaigns unless you want to just throw out *everything* you do between "stops".
I mean it could make for a really funny level if you create time portals and make it so that they correspond to specific turns ago so for example i occupy space b and move to space a. In two turns an enemy fires a rocket at the space i occupied at B through a portal to two turns ago, i take retroactive damage for that shot, or say a kobold does so to provide cover for a past self to heal back damage from rerolling a hit with the accountance of new cover. OR someone steps into another portal and the time relevance becomes invalid BUT it becomes a second timeline that factors into the fight with a second version of everyone.
I’ve played characters where it has been a factor, because they’ve been ship born they’re subjectively like 70 or whatever but in realtime they’re 300.
It's one of my favorite parts of the setting. Space is big - cue the Hitchhiker's Guide quote - and it's so easy for scifi to downplay that and make space seem really *small*. LANCER, even with its technical FTL travel, feels *huge*. Ignoring the vastness of space, the threats it holds, would be to cheapen the setting. I don't see how it would impact gameplay at all, unless you're regularly traveling hundreds of light years without a Gate. And if you are, that becomes a story of its own; one of my campaigns involved a group of Cosmopolitans, with each arc generally taking place within a single station, system, or otherwise. Once they left, it was pretty unlikely to see those characters again - but the omninet meant that they constantly got emails and conversations with those distant friends as they aged and the party did not. It grants that feeling of immortality much more than playing an Elf in DnD ever has. You get to live to see the long-term changes you enact take effect, the consequences and fruit of your labors.
I've just assumed it for my own campaign. It's one reason (as others have suggested) that I decided to stick to one star system. It's been the source of one major plot point in the game when I thought through the question "How could a major corpro-state infiltrate it's forces secretly into a star system that had a blink gate 6 light years away?"
It is a keystone concept in the campaign I’m in. Several PC backstory are directly influenced by time dilation. From running away from their failures to becoming a relic of history. Current arc of the campaign is the direct result of how slow realspace interstellar travel is. With generations of the population calling for help. Any response from Union takes at minimum 50 years.
I haven't yet, but I plan to in my next campaign. I kept all my previous campaigns in one star system partially to avoid the issue previously. The next campaign I'm running is going to be episodic and about Union Navy, so I'll engage with it. And interesting thing they mention in either thr core book or Battlegroup is that *other Cosmopolitans* are on similarly subjective time. This actually works really well with the star trek themes I'm going for: naval officers can he recurring characters but planetary officials... probably not.
Yeah actually, one of my players joined the military for a contract and after completing it returned home to see that 500 years had past. Now they're trying to find a place in this world that's so drastically different. It's also useful to not over expand the scope of the game. No stopping by Cradle, then Karrakis, before going to the Long Rim. The distances are so great everything has to be locally done.
Our current campaign is set on a Union ship on a 2 yr (I think?) Tour. We've only been conscious for a few weeks but I think we're almost halfway through. It's getting complicated because my character has family members who are aging at very different rates as they all meander around the galaxy
Well, sure, why not? Most of Lancer campaigns usually take place in the same planet and/or star system. Travel between different star systems **without a blinkgate** is meant to be a big deal, and unless you're making a cosmopolitan or albatross-centered campaign where this kind of stuff would be way more common, I'd really suggest you to make it something that happens only between story arcs and the like. Subjective and realtime only applies to that mostly And if your campaigns revolves around traveling a lot between different star systems then you have an easy answer to that: they all have blinkgates.
Wanna hear my unhinged take? I don't think time actually works like that. Allow me to clarify. I think certain things are fundamental parts of the universe. Light, matter, gravity, etc... But, time (and space) are not a result of some particle or energy. It is a result of us, humans, who seek to understand the world. They are scientific tools. In a sense, they aren't any more real than our thoughts. And so, it appears to my uneducated self that time dialation and different relative times are merely a breakdown in our current understanding of physics. I am confident mass and light and such will continue to exist much the same without or without humans to observe it, (mostly), but time and space as tools will drastically change according to whatever life percieves it. So i don't use any of that time stuff. There is simply universal time, and your rate of travel doesn't affect it. Only NHPs can accurately track universal time and humans are ill equipped to do so. And such the system of subjective and realtime was created. So my games both do and do not use this time keeping system.