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It's a world away now, but the time limit was the reason I never played Fallout 1 until after I did Fallout 2. This was before the time I was smart enough to look up stuff for myself, so really all information was sourced from print magazine reviews, so in the main all I saw was the time limit mechanic as described in the review and thinking to myself "that doesn't sound fun" and more of less ignored the title. A regrettable incident in hindsight of course, and one that I imagine lessened my perception of the game when I finally got around to it years later. But that's a digression that adds nothing to the discussion really. I'm still not particularly in favour of time limits, though it's not a firm position. Hard, binary, "you fail" type limits I don't feel are particularly compelling, especially in longer time scales. Even on the shorter scale, like "run away from the time bomb" or "get in and out quick before the radiation kills you" I can take or leave. It becomes either a case of save-scumming in examples like the former, or a maintenance chore in the case of the latter. It's not an interesting decision point, it's just either a case of doing it and being allowed to move on, or not doing it and having to replay that section. On the other hand, I'm very much in favour of time as a variable in terms of choice and consequence - a third axis if you will - in which time elapsed contributes to the outcome, not in terms of success or failure, but in terms of story divergence. The most basic implementation of such a system would be some linear scaling, where your task would get incrementally more difficult if past certain thresholds; the next would be as outlined by chamr, where certain options would be closed without completely denying you success. But the concept could be taken even further, with things like a completely different narrative branch possibly resulting - neither positive nor negative - leading to potentially different ending scenarios. This leads to the tangential issue of, in the case of "failure" to meet a time limit (I don't like the use of the term "limit" in this context), the handling of failure in general. In a perfect RPG world, there would be no concept of failure in the metagame sense, just the in-universe consequences of the player character failing. Or before I muddle myself up even more in the phrasing, "being allowed to fail." This was discussed here in the forums earlier this year I think - my favoured example is as always, Wing Commander's losing path. Wing Commander 3 in particular had a very long, detailed, and fleshed out (and mostly unrecoverable) losing path where the tide of the war would sweep you up into a final, doomed, last defence of Earth. In the context of the game, this path was just as significant and compelling as the winning path.

That's not an elegant solution. It's kind of lame. And doesn't even pertain directly to quests. Fortunately, I've got your solution for you. It's something I puzzled out a while ago as I too am interested in time limits on quests and other ways to make my beloved video games more sophisticated, challenging and consequential. The solution is that you alter the quest itself. You allow a certain amount of time for the simple solution to be taken. If the player dilly dallies that time away, the simple path is closed, and only the difficult path is left. Example: say you're playing a spy type RPG. You've received intelligence that a certain contact has valuable information you need to advance the quest. However, you're also warned that you should hurry to find him, because the Big Evil Semi-Secret Society of Bad Guys (BESSSBG, "Big Bess" for short) is out to get him. If you find him within a game day, say, then you can talk to him and get the info through a simple dialogue puzzle. But if it takes you more than a day to find him, you find him dead. Then you're on your own, chump. You've got to search his house. You know the info's in there somewhere, but the tricksie developers don't give you any clue that they've hidden it in a floor safe in a closet in the dead dude's bedroom. Hell, you can even add a timer to that path too. If you search for more than a game hour, the assassin from Big Bess comes back to the house because he left his cell phone on the kitchen counter when he hit the head to relieve himself after killing the dude and before taking the long drive back to bad guy headquarters. Now you have to deal with him too. There you have it. Problem solved. Quest is still complete-able, just harder to complete because your spy apparently doesn't take his job seriously enough to prioritize his time appropriately.