I disagree with the premise that location-dependent time flow is necessary to support map design.
Well i disagree with premise that you need time flow in the first place.
Since i played Dragon Age: Origins, im perfectly fine with static time ingame, my adventures taking unspecified amount of time, that between two long rests give together 24h.
Its not hard concept to grasp, and it suits me.
BUT!
If there should be some flow ... then yes, it needs to reflect the world.
There is also another problem and that is we are in control of time by resting ...
I dunno how about you, but if my group rests 4 times during travel from Grove to the Waukeen's Rest ... im totally willing to pretend it took them 4 days to get back, rather than they sprinted so fast so they managed to squeeze 4 days long trip into 1.
But I digress ...
First of all, I don't think that such time scales need to be so highly different. IF the time scales do *need* to be different, then a factor of 2 or 3 is perfectly fine.
Second, I don't think times scales need to be different at all. It's not needed. Use a simpler system that is mostly immersive, rather than an incredibly complex system that might be more immersive on its own, but not necessarily when taken into account map size.
Just take two distances next to each other ... one realy small, and one realy big.
A wall of some house ... and a distance between Grove and Waukeen's Rest.
If you keep those two scales too simmilar to each other ...
You either end up with really small world, or with realy big house (as i stated before).
Now to take it little deeper:
(I was disturbed a lot when i wrote this ... so i cant guarantee that i didnt mess up somewhere)
Runing from Grove to Waukeen's Rest take you 5minutes (for example) ... that implies small world, (ignoring that acording to World Map it should take you 3 days to get there) in order to create feeling of biger world, you make it so that during that time a day ingame will pass (again, just example, i know that day every 5 minutes is crazy fast).
Now keeping the same scale ... running next to the house wall took you 5 seconds ... meaning 1/60
If that wall is 5m long (still just examples) ...
That would mean Waukeen's Rest is 300m away from the grove ... and you have small world again.
Same correlation between distances and time.
BUT!
The bigger the difference, the better are results.
If inside the town that time passes slowly 1s=1s ... you can spend hour runing around the house and the time will hardly move.
And you create time outside to pass a lot faster ... 1s=30s ... then if you spend an hour running from place to place, 30h will pass ingame and that is conciderable difference.
Again tho ...
Please dont imagine it as some "zones" or "bubbles" where time go slowly and once you step outside, within single second an hour will pass ...
As i said abowe to GM4Him such thing would work best as coridor where time would either get counted by the end ... so:
- you would start in the Grove by morning ... you would walk through first coridor (from grove towards the bridge) > the time would jump 6h later ...
- then you would walk through the Blighted Willage (inside slow zone) > time would pass normaly
- you would enter another coridor (broken bridge) and reach its end by the Waukeen's Rest gate > time would jump another 6h ...
Voila! Traveling from Grove to Waukeen's Rest now takes half day!
OR (but that sounds like a lot more work) it would get faster and faster, until it would reach its edge, and then it would again get slower and slower.
You'd be inside a building - a dedicated area with no access to the outside roads - so clearly the game time should be passing much more slowly. 5 minutes in the Windmill should be like 30 minutes in-game, max. Similarly, the Blacksmith's basement, Zevlor's Cave, and talking to Nettie and Kagha are all self-contained zones and shouldn't have significantly sped-up time progression.
Exactly my point ...
That is why i said "
if you apply consistent time flow" ... consistent time flow = time runs in exactly the same speed no matter where you are.
That is why you would need at least two time flows ... one for outside (and by outside i dont mean Out of Building, but everything that is in between zones like Grove, Willage, Temple, Goblin camp, Swamp, etc.) and one for inside (again those zones, not just houses).
