Treatments of Time

Time 

Time references in the game refer to the game world, and are independent of the way time passes for those playing the game. This is similar to the way a movie jumps to “Six Months Later” in an instant, and then has a sequence that consumes 15 minutes showing you what was actually 5 minutes in the movie world.

Human Time vs. War Time

When humans are the primary focus, time will pass relative their their speed of processing. The Host will describe bits of narrative and the players are free to interject whenever they would like their characters to act. When elohim are actively trying to influence human situations, the Host will proceed in chunks of time called Scenes. Scenes last however long the Host determines they do. The purpose of Scenes is to help the Host keep the flow of the story moving along while still allowing the elohim to interact with situations to a reasonable degree. During each Scene, the Host will usually each character to do some action or attempt a Social Interaction with one other character. Some characters may have the ability to perform multiple Interactions. During each Scene, each human will only be able to receive one Interaction from a holy elohim and one from an unholy elohim. Any more attempts become mental static, being too much for the human to process.

When War begins, the focus will shift primarily to the elohim and the perspective of time shifts to their pace. During War, elohim act much faster than humans.

Days

In Allies of Majesty, a Day is treated as the period of time from one nightfall until the next. In Genesis the world started in darkness before there was light. This echoed each day when it is stated "and there was evening and there was morning". Day considers concept more than clockwork. As such, if characters leave the earth over North America during the daylight and re-enter the earth over Asia during the darkness, in game terms it will be considered a different Day for any effects related to Days.

Cycles, Segments, & Turns

Once War commences, time must be accounted for more precisely. This allows for the contributions of each character to be accounted for.

• A Cycle is approximately 3-7 seconds in human time. This is generality and will flex relative to the situation. 
• Each Cycle takes place across 7 Segments, which helps to spread character activity throughout the Cycle.
• Each time a character has an opportunity to act during a Segment, it is also called that character’s Turn.

The use of multiple Segments within a Cycle allows the actions of each character to feel more intertwined. This intertwining better simulates simultaneous action than if each character used all of their Action Points for the Cycle at once. The need for such distribution is less obvious at lower Ranks, but as characters begin to increase in Speed the necessity becomes much more apparent.