Fairly new DM here - I’m running LMOP and DOIP as a combined adventure. Going really well so far, but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around how much time is passing in game - not details like combat rounds, or even more specific things like “it takes two days to travel to Conybury”, or whatever. But overall time - how much time passes between the beginning and the end of the entire adventure? Months? A year or more? Maybe a better question would be - how much do characters age as they progress from 1st to 5th level? I understand out of game when to level them up - but I’m not sure how to correlate that with story time IN GAME. Any thoughts or tips appreciated.
I don't know about those adventures, but you can keep track of total travel time. Most adventures don't take much longer than 3 months in-game time, and as a result the characters almost never age unless there is a time-skip.
Honestly... there's no rules for this. If your party hurries from event to event the whole thing can be finished in a few weeks of in-game time. If they're taking down time, or taking on a lot of little jobs between main story missions it could take as long as you want. I don't think there's enough content in LMoP to have a story that realistically takes a year to complete. Leveling up, though, doesn't require any specific amount of time... it just depends on experience. A party that takes on high-stakes, high-experience battles every day can reach level 5 within a week.
Travel time is tricky, I suspended time between quests as if it was an open world video game. Once the quest started, time was critical for that quest, but the story was not progressing for others (unless there was a reason for me to do so).
This post also is very helpful for keeping track of quests (LINK).
Thanks, Ortan. Most of our sessions end with cliffhangers, so there really isn’t much downtime going on. If I really want to know I guess I could just add up travel time + time in each quest.
Transmorpher - I wasn’t really thinking of it that way - that if you’re taking risks, etc you’re going to level up more quickly. I mean, I get that as a game mechanic (XP), but I wasn’t really translating that to time in game - I was thinking more that it would take a long time to get this good (5th level characters are nothing to sneeze at!) - like months of study and practice. But if you think about it, after you fight your first goblin, you already have gained a ton of knowledge about fighting goblins, and can translate that to different foes. And they’re not starting from the level of a a normal towns person - they are adventurers after all! Thanks.
Hi everyone,
Fairly new DM here - I’m running LMOP and DOIP as a combined adventure. Going really well so far, but I’m having trouble wrapping my head around how much time is passing in game - not details like combat rounds, or even more specific things like “it takes two days to travel to Conybury”, or whatever. But overall time - how much time passes between the beginning and the end of the entire adventure? Months? A year or more? Maybe a better question would be - how much do characters age as they progress from 1st to 5th level? I understand out of game when to level them up - but I’m not sure how to correlate that with story time IN GAME. Any thoughts or tips appreciated.
I don't know about those adventures, but you can keep track of total travel time. Most adventures don't take much longer than 3 months in-game time, and as a result the characters almost never age unless there is a time-skip.
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Honestly... there's no rules for this. If your party hurries from event to event the whole thing can be finished in a few weeks of in-game time. If they're taking down time, or taking on a lot of little jobs between main story missions it could take as long as you want. I don't think there's enough content in LMoP to have a story that realistically takes a year to complete. Leveling up, though, doesn't require any specific amount of time... it just depends on experience. A party that takes on high-stakes, high-experience battles every day can reach level 5 within a week.
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Travel time is tricky, I suspended time between quests as if it was an open world video game. Once the quest started, time was critical for that quest, but the story was not progressing for others (unless there was a reason for me to do so).
This post also is very helpful for keeping track of quests (LINK).
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Thanks, Ortan. Most of our sessions end with cliffhangers, so there really isn’t much downtime going on. If I really want to know I guess I could just add up travel time + time in each quest.
Transmorpher - I wasn’t really thinking of it that way - that if you’re taking risks, etc you’re going to level up more quickly. I mean, I get that as a game mechanic (XP), but I wasn’t really translating that to time in game - I was thinking more that it would take a long time to get this good (5th level characters are nothing to sneeze at!) - like months of study and practice. But if you think about it, after you fight your first goblin, you already have gained a ton of knowledge about fighting goblins, and can translate that to different foes. And they’re not starting from the level of a a normal towns person - they are adventurers after all! Thanks.
Account - thanks for the link. Very helpful!