Discussion How Do You Handle the Timeline of Chaos?

[Kei Amadis]

I use the events in roleplay as reference points at times, especially if the event was big, like I would a big faction or board event, the splitting of Corellia, for example, or the destruction of a planet. (Kei treats Corellian whiskey as a rare treat).

But I ignore fixed dates.

It used to be I aged up characters at significant points in their stories. Rank Promotion - Marriage - Kids etc.
Even that's loose now; I age up when I want a change for them.

 

[Rik Perris]

For me, it entirely depends on the individual character. Some of my older characters, I stick to site timeline (Ilias is a good example of this, he's a halfbreed of two long-lived species and I adjust his age every timeline update), but there's others where I age them one year per OOC calendar year, more or less, depending on other characters written by other people, that might be their family, friendships, ongoing romantic relationships, etc.

There's some cases where I haven't written a character for a few years, for one reason or another, and I choose to not follow site timeline and do somewhat of a light retcon of what age they would be if I did follow site timeline.

That was the case when I picked Rik back up a couple years ago, partly because I'd stopped writing him when he was about 19 years old, IC, and I didn't want to skip everything else that could happen, but I still wanted to age him a little, so when I truly started writing him again in 2023, I made him about 29 years old (also in part so all his siblings would be old enough to be written). Since then, I've stuck to aging him once per OOC calendar year, more or less.