Question on RolePlaying the Recall spell

[John Knighthawke]

Hey everyone. Playing Skyrim, as the part of an attempt to start catching up on single-player games, made me think of the following.

How does everyone RP the recall spell? This is what I mean: For most of my in-game experience I've tried very hard to RP everything more-or-less as it was. In this case the Recall spell and related mechanisms actually exist, the characters use it, etc. I've written posts referring to Recalling to places. Then I played Skyrim and noted that that game's closest equivalent, "quick travel," marks the passage of in-game time, and really just allows you to bypass the journey.

This made me wonder....Would it make more sense if I thought of Recall in a similar way? I've actually ridden to where-ever it was that I'm going, and the Recall is just an OOC mechanism because my RL time is not unlimited? In-game time in UO is tenuous anyway. For some purposes it makes sense if RL time = in-game time, and for some purposes it makes sense if the in-game time mechanism is actually used, and for some purposes neither. (It all depends, let's face it, on how time can serve the storyline.)

Obviously some places only can be accessed via magic so RPing it this method wouldn't work for everyplace.

Anyway: What are everyone's thoughts?

-John's player

 

[WarderDragon]

I've leaned both ways at different times, though the ease at which recall is accessible to all players is something I tended to downplay in the fiction I've written. It is more entertaining to imagine that journey between Yew and Trinsic than to picture myself immediately zapping there. Sometimes I would even intentionally walk or ride from one destination to another just to maintain that immersion.

Siege Perilous didn't have this problem, and for the brief time I played there, the difficulty made things more immersive. (I might've stuck around, but the roleplaying community there was smaller than I had preferred. This was, of course, 2005-2007, so it was larger than anything we have now.) I forget how Europa addressed this, but I was also under the impression that recall was discouraged in some way to go with their "low magic," "magical realism" theme, which I found novel but never experienced myself.