Tracking Time

So how do you track time in your game? Do you do it at all? Do you just convert distance traveled to some average time spent? Do you use calendar? Do you have a custom one?

I generally just arbitrarily declare "It's this time of day now."

Okay, but when a journey takes hundreds of miles? Or when dungeon delving without generally much information on how time passes? Or if there is a monthly income, for example?

In that instance, break the traveling up with towns, random encounters on the road. Use an entire session to get you to the location, AND build up suspense and tension

But how to track time for all of this?
I think there might be some kind of misunderstanding between us. My bad - not a native English speaker.
What I mean is - how do you track in game time for your characters?

Keep notes on the progression of the quest from hour one, where it begins, to the hour it ends. Start a new hourly counter for each new part of major progression

Say you start a quest at a town, that begins the first hour. Traveling to the cave or castle on the outskirts of the town's farmland takes an hour, so you make note of that. Clearing the dungeon takes an assumed few hours of careful navigation, and when you exit it's late, you decide to set up camp for the night. Take note of how long the rest is, head back to town, collect reward, start new counter if you go to another town or quest

Unless it strictly matters (The cultists will sacrifice the noble on the next full moon in 6 days. Or here's a letter that needs delivered as soon as possible with consequences if you delay), I don't.

Unless it actually matters for some reason the passing of vague but large stretches of time are the only that matter. It would be rather silly to track individual hours to make note on the passage of seasons.

Adventurers have 'other income' that is a monthly wage of some sort. Hence the question.

Or just keep counting hours until they become days, to weeks, to months. Don't forget to track the minutes too. Seconds you could just round up or ignore

I figure that a GM could use the hourly tracker to go back, find say, the wife of a man who died because of the party's actions, and using her to hire thugs or assassins

Then track things by the week, or by the month is not terribly much happens during a particular stretch of time. Downtime can quickly fill gaps and allow you to control the income of the party, having things take place quickly to limit it, and spreading things out to increase it.

I honestly don't see how an hourly tracker would help there. Care to explain the rational? Like if you're searching for a person in a limited time frame, either a limited time to go looking for a bonus, or a hard roll limit before other options must be explored.

We play in Pellucidar.

I use made up or real calendars.

All my NPCs major players have goals. If the pcs don't interfere, their actions play out, on a timeline.

My campaigns are typically designed in such a way that there is more going on than the pcs are likely to even discover (though i include lots of hooks), let alone interfere with.

They have to prioritize what to do.

This is what makes the story.

Idk, I'm just anal about keeping track of things like that. It can only be me that does it too, so I could go back and look at individual events to see what can be taken from them for another plot, or possibly see a connection between quests, etc

It'd also help weed out already finished secondary missions, so you could recycle ones the party missed earlier, so long as they match the setting

But you don't really need exact times to keep track of things. Just remember the more time you spend keeping track of and figuring out exact times, the less time you're actually playing and making use of your own time.

Not to say that keeping a mental note of things isn't a good idea, but you shouldn't be so strict.

Ahem.

"YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." - 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master's Guide, page 37

I keep track of time in all of my campaigns. I use custom calendars for all of them, but mostly I stick to really simple shit (13 months to a 364 day year).

My main campaign has custom astrology, for which I keep track of planetary positions. The sky is divided into 13 houses, each planet advances from house to house at it's specific rate (one changes every day, another takes 52 years to go through each house).

In one shot games, who cares? But for a campaign, which presumably has a history that the DM has written, keeping track of time just gives more history. It's necessary to keep things straight and in order, it adds a lot to making the campaign world feel like an actual place.

>We play in Pellucidar.

Did any surface-born happen to take a mighty red fire axe down there?

I have a map of the realm divided into squares, each square represents one day's travel by horse, unencumbered. Makes it quite simple to count. I have a calendar and mark down the date between each trip.

But what if I'm already adjacent to the square i want to be in?

Older D&D rulesets are actually very strict on timekeeping for this reason. You can only move X feet in a dungeon (or at a different rate in the wilderness depending on the type of terrain), and taking actions would also eat up turns.

The whole idea behind random encounters is that they were checked at specific time intervals, which meant that if you dallied around in the dungeon you would slowly be sapped of resources (spells, items, HP) from battling encounter after encounter.

In a more narrative game that's focused around a tightly scripted plot, you can divide time into arbitrary segments like "scenes", but the precision of your time tracking gets more vital the more free-form you want your campaign to be.

Timing is the difference between destroying the superweapon before or after it activates, after all - or in the longer term, stopping the bad guy before or after he carries out his villainous plans.

You could of course arbitrarily set in advance that the PCs arrive "just in the nick of time" always, regardless of what else they do - this sort of scripting is prevalent in video games and isn't necessarily a bad choice - but this is definitely a choice that takes away the freedom of players to intervene in a time period beforehand - and for that to happen you need to be strictly tracking times and timetables.

>
Timing is the difference between destroying the superweapon before or after it activates, after all - or in the longer term, stopping the bad guy before or after he carries out his villainous plans.

Yeah but if you're ticking away the hours until the weapon fires from before the baddies complete building it. Or before the players have even heard about the baddies let alone their plot. You're doing it wrong.

Once the players learn about it sure. Give them a timer. The weight of each minute mattering more and more the closer they get to the weapon. At the beginning you count in months, then weeks, then days, then hours, then minutes, then combat rounds.
Of course if the players dilly dally after hearing about the weapon then you can lower the time, if they don't you can raise it. But keeping a precision tracker on it doesn't really add anything except for taking up your time. And theirs if you're counting things moment by moment at the table.

>Once the players learn about it sure.
This is one of those things that gets endlessly debated and depends a lot on the specific situation. Having everything in the world trigger specifically off the PCs will can often strain the illusion of a larger, living world, but whether or not to do so depends I think a lot more on the specifics of the event.

For example, if a kingdom is about to descend into civil war I might start this timer completely independent of PC action. At the outset the PCs might not know about the civil war unless they do some deep digging, but as the timer progresses signs of imminent civil war become more and more obvious until the regime erupts (or the PCs decide to get involved).

I wouldn't necessarily spring a "doomsday device" plot on the PCs out of nowhere, though, but you can easily massage a lot of these into events that happen completely independent of the PCs. For example, you might have the rise of a new doomsday cult. Again, by not keying the timings off PC knowledge this allows PCs to actually "stumble" into knowledge that isn't pre-ordained by you.

Again, it's like the scripted videogame example - sometimes the PCs will always start at the exact point in the breadcrumb trail you determine regardless of what they do, and you might do this for dramatic purposes or to save time. But this eliminates the possibility of truly emergent outcomes, like discovering the secret plan late or discovering it early.

I want to re-iterate that neither is necessarily "wrong", either. Just that keying things off PC observation actually removes some possibilities for emergent story that otherwise won't be there. Different GMs have different priorities, and "emergent" doesn't necessarily mean more dramatic. Games that are highly emergent can also result in fairly lame stories, like the emergent outcome of "Sir Marion stumbled into a gang of cultists in a back alley after they had sacrificed his lady and bled out in a sewer".

For some groups, the possibility of these outcomes is part of the appeal. Other groups may be willing to sacrifice some ability to have emergent outcomes for more consistently dramatic situations - for example, the GM might rule Sir Marion will always arrive in the back alley just before the cultists are about to sacrifice his love interest. It's all about the specific style of game you're trying to invoke.

>being a glorified watch

>being a nihilist who doesn't give a fuck about consistency

Entirely fair and I completely agree with you. My entire argument is that keeping a clockwork finely detailed record of such things is unnecessary extra work.

I mean think about it. Take the alley example. Would anything in that scenario really benefit from the sacrifice taking place at exactly 10:48pm local time? Why not just keep a rough mental tally on major things people have been up to to determine when Sir Marion arrives?

Would boiling time down to on time/late/early not accomplish everything time can really accomplish in terms of storytelling? Our hobby is all about abstraction after all.

I track moon phases in the background, because werewolves

Oh yeah, definitely. How fine-tuned your tracking is - whether it's by turns, seconds, minutes, hours, days - that's all dependent on what you're tracking and often the system provides some good suggestions on how to structure time, like D&D's round/turn/hour/day divisions.

Then you abstract it? If you simply travel across the dividing line and no further then you are zoomed all the way down to action time where you are in adventure mode. I don't count the steps from the party's camp outside the cave as they enter, that's ridiculous.

I am not home ATM but iirc each grid is 40 miles across. If my group is fucking around inside of one then I toss the overworld aside and have a local map in a different scale.