More a thread to find out how others track the time and days of a campaign. Do you tally it up in a box, do you use a real calendar to mark it off, or do you handwave and guess at it?
Personally in game time I track to the nearest half an hour. So I work out how long has been spent exploring a room, or walking round a dungeon and add in any rest periods.
For days, I track a rough guide of how long was spent doing a thing and I try not to let anything happen on sundays :) no religious reasons, it’s one of my fav dr who quotes. Never go anywhere on a Sunday, nothing ever happens on a Sunday, universally the most boring day of the week :).
I have tried using a real life calendar, or making up a special one when I decided to have a funky calendar system for one campaign. But that involved yet more book keeping, now I just put into my DM journal a section of how much game time passed during the session and what the current day is, because a player will always ask at the most random time.
So how do you all track time and keep a note of how much has passed?
I stole the Realms Calendar for names from a Wiki. I just used Word and created a 3 row by 10 column chart in which I mark the days. I generally used my dusty 1E time in the dungeon for exploring. Back in 1E I ripped out the 20 year calendar from the yellow pages and used that as my calendar. So far in my Candlekeep AL campaign they are 121 days in. With 13 sessions.
I use the Simple Calendar mod in Foundry, which allows you to track things to the second if you want. It will just "run time" or you can advance in segments. So if the party is just RPing and talking, I will let time run in real time. If they are exploring then I will advance time in increments based on distance moved, time searching a room, time taken to ritual cast Detect Magic, etc. I love it, and find it super easy to use.
There was another calendar called Calendar/Weather that included weather as well as the time and day, but that mod seems to have broken recently.
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WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I tally in game days in my notes, but as far as hours and minutes, I tend to track mentally during non-resting hours of the adventuring day. I mostly use an estimate of how hard a task is versus how bad the roll was, especially tasks that characters are skilled at. Someone skilled at setting a trap shouldn't fail to set it, it just takes longer this time because (insert reason). Travel time I run a skill challenge system that sets a DC for environment and travel speed vs party "Jobs" during travel - navigator, etc. Low rolls = longer time to reach destination and other things.
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“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
I have a custom calendar. It's a 7 day week, 28 day month. I made up the day and month names but it's similar to our real world names and seasons so as not to feel too tricky to remember (ie "Moonday" is Monday, Dawnfrost is early spring, etc). I also made up the method of day and year tracking. (In my game, for example, it might be "12df19a3" which is shorthand for "12 Dawnfrost, 19th Age, year 3 of the 19th age.") I'm really bad at remembering to track the exact date, but I've gotten better about it by creating a timeline and trying to remember to write down the shorthand date every day that goes by. Mind, I run 3 campaigns all set in wildly different times, so remembering when each game is (especially considering time travel features heavily in most of my games) is important!
Unless there are timed events going on (ie, the party has a dinner meeting with some noble or whatever), I just generalize it. "It's around noon. It's early afternoon. It's late evening."
When there are timed events going on, I keep the party informed of the hour, or they'll ask. This is the only case where I take closer note. Occasionally the party might want a specific time when I've been broad about it most of that ingame day, and I might have to do some quick rounded math, but that's not often the case.
I created an excel spread sheet. That way I can add in a note section key events on days I want to track (levelling up, payments from their business, travel days, duration of training times etc)
It seems to work nicely so far
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More a thread to find out how others track the time and days of a campaign. Do you tally it up in a box, do you use a real calendar to mark it off, or do you handwave and guess at it?
Personally in game time I track to the nearest half an hour. So I work out how long has been spent exploring a room, or walking round a dungeon and add in any rest periods.
For days, I track a rough guide of how long was spent doing a thing and I try not to let anything happen on sundays :) no religious reasons, it’s one of my fav dr who quotes. Never go anywhere on a Sunday, nothing ever happens on a Sunday, universally the most boring day of the week :).
I have tried using a real life calendar, or making up a special one when I decided to have a funky calendar system for one campaign. But that involved yet more book keeping, now I just put into my DM journal a section of how much game time passed during the session and what the current day is, because a player will always ask at the most random time.
So how do you all track time and keep a note of how much has passed?
I stole the Realms Calendar for names from a Wiki. I just used Word and created a 3 row by 10 column chart in which I mark the days. I generally used my dusty 1E time in the dungeon for exploring. Back in 1E I ripped out the 20 year calendar from the yellow pages and used that as my calendar. So far in my Candlekeep AL campaign they are 121 days in. With 13 sessions.
No Gaming is Better than Bad Gaming.
I use the Simple Calendar mod in Foundry, which allows you to track things to the second if you want. It will just "run time" or you can advance in segments. So if the party is just RPing and talking, I will let time run in real time. If they are exploring then I will advance time in increments based on distance moved, time searching a room, time taken to ritual cast Detect Magic, etc. I love it, and find it super easy to use.
There was another calendar called Calendar/Weather that included weather as well as the time and day, but that mod seems to have broken recently.
WOTC lies. We know that WOTC lies. WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. We know that WOTC knows that we know that WOTC lies. And still they lie.
Because of the above (a paraphrase from Orwell) I no longer post to the forums -- PM me if you need help or anything.
I tally in game days in my notes, but as far as hours and minutes, I tend to track mentally during non-resting hours of the adventuring day. I mostly use an estimate of how hard a task is versus how bad the roll was, especially tasks that characters are skilled at. Someone skilled at setting a trap shouldn't fail to set it, it just takes longer this time because (insert reason). Travel time I run a skill challenge system that sets a DC for environment and travel speed vs party "Jobs" during travel - navigator, etc. Low rolls = longer time to reach destination and other things.
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.” - Mark Twain - Innocents Abroad
I do three things:
I created an excel spread sheet. That way I can add in a note section key events on days I want to track (levelling up, payments from their business, travel days, duration of training times etc)
It seems to work nicely so far