Hello, my son is 8 and really wants to get into D&D. I am trying to read it all and explain it to him. The biggest part I don't get is the travel, speed, distance portion of the game. For example, a spell takes one hour to conjour. A player walks 60feet. Long rest of 8 hours. How are these played out? Is there a set time somewhere I am not seeing? Like 1 hour is equal to 5 actions or something like that. Please and thank you for any advice you can give.
You can just say "so then, an hour later..." The only time time becomes a significant detail is in combat, where characters can only do so much in one turn. Beyond that, it's up to the DM to decide how much to handwave the passage of time versus playing it out, depending on what effect they want to have. If you're doing wilderness survival, it might be good to narrate what happens for each hour to make the players feel like the environment wants to kill them. But if they're just walking eight hours along a well-patrolled road to the next town, it's perfectly fine to say "eight hours pass, and now you're in the next town."
You'll find when you play that there's also a strange time-dilation effect IN combat, whereby players will fill a six-second round with five minutes of conversation. But SageTympana is right. Just think in terms of it being a movie. Sometimes, the scene fades out to show the passage of time, sometimes, there's one long conversation that's all one shot. It's whatever serves the narrative. You don't have to say "OK, you take a long rest. I guess we'll pick the game back up tomorrow," or anything.
Where you get wrong footed is when different players have different ideas of the best way to proceed. The wizard wants to cast a ritual that will take ten minutes and the barbarian wants to hurry on ahead. In those cases, leave it to the players to figure out who does what and just be ready for anything.
Hello, my son is 8 and really wants to get into D&D. I am trying to read it all and explain it to him. The biggest part I don't get is the travel, speed, distance portion of the game. For example, a spell takes one hour to conjour. A player walks 60feet. Long rest of 8 hours. How are these played out? Is there a set time somewhere I am not seeing? Like 1 hour is equal to 5 actions or something like that. Please and thank you for any advice you can give.
Two parts to this answer. First, the actual time-tracking:
1) In combat, "one action" is six seconds. So things that take "one action" are fast. Most of the time, fights take no more than a few rounds, so "a fight" is only gonna take a minute or two of in-game time.
2) Some spells or actions have an associated time. Like, spells might take an hour to cast, a "short rest" is usually about an hour (like a lunch break), a "long rest" is eight hours (like sleeping overnight).
Usually you don't need to convert between listed time and number of actions in-combat, but sometimes a spell says it lasts for a minute and you have to divide that by six second-rounds to see that it lasts for 10 rounds in combat.
In-combat, you automatically track time because you're taking turns in order. Out-of-combat, you don't need to track time precisely unless there's a good reason to. A "typical adventuring day" is designed to be 2-3 short rests, so I'd interpret things done first as "morning" then a short rest and then "afternoon", then a short rest and then "evening", then a long rest to take the adventurers into the next day.
If the players are mostly spending the day traveling in a straight line somewhere, you can use the distance/pace rules at https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/adventuring#Movement to figure out how far they can get, or what time it is when they get somewhere, but usually those only come into play if they're traveling long distances and you care to track those sorts of things, which often you don't.
...but the second point I want to make is that I think you're overthinking how to introduce D&D. There's lots of rules for lots of things, but you don't really need to know all of them to start playing or to introduce someone.
The basics of D&D are pretty simple! Player describes what their character does, the DM describes the result, sometimes asking for a roll if success of the action is in doubt, sometimes applying bonuses based on the player's skills. You really don't have to, like, memorize or even understand the travel pace rules to play D&D!
Like 1 hour is equal to 5 actions or something like that. Please and thank you for any advice you can give.
An action (or rather a turn/round, but you get 1 action per turn) is 6 seconds, so an hour is 600 actions.
Anyway, you don't need to role play or describe every second of every day, but there are 24 hours in a day, so it isn't completely inconsequential. Hope that helps.
Above someone mentioned a good way to track passage of time and distance on long treks, and I recommend that. Or you can just kind of hand wave it and just estimate. I play with active duty guys, so we estimate that a party can do about 20 miles on normal terrain (small hills, forests, flats), 15 miles on hilly and rocky terrain, 10 miles on mountains, and 25 on flat open areas per day. You can shave off 5 miles or so depending on the amount of rest your party takes.
As far as movement goes during battle, I HIGHLY recommend making a grid. You could buy a sheet with a grid in it at a place like Joann Fabric's or just make your own with rules, paper, and markers. Remember that every grid is 5 feet and that should help your kid learn how to understand the distances in battles.
Hello, my son is 8 and really wants to get into D&D. I am trying to read it all and explain it to him. The biggest part I don't get is the travel, speed, distance portion of the game. For example, a spell takes one hour to conjour. A player walks 60feet. Long rest of 8 hours. How are these played out? Is there a set time somewhere I am not seeing? Like 1 hour is equal to 5 actions or something like that. Please and thank you for any advice you can give.
You can just say "so then, an hour later..." The only time time becomes a significant detail is in combat, where characters can only do so much in one turn. Beyond that, it's up to the DM to decide how much to handwave the passage of time versus playing it out, depending on what effect they want to have. If you're doing wilderness survival, it might be good to narrate what happens for each hour to make the players feel like the environment wants to kill them. But if they're just walking eight hours along a well-patrolled road to the next town, it's perfectly fine to say "eight hours pass, and now you're in the next town."
You'll find when you play that there's also a strange time-dilation effect IN combat, whereby players will fill a six-second round with five minutes of conversation. But SageTympana is right. Just think in terms of it being a movie. Sometimes, the scene fades out to show the passage of time, sometimes, there's one long conversation that's all one shot. It's whatever serves the narrative. You don't have to say "OK, you take a long rest. I guess we'll pick the game back up tomorrow," or anything.
Where you get wrong footed is when different players have different ideas of the best way to proceed. The wizard wants to cast a ritual that will take ten minutes and the barbarian wants to hurry on ahead. In those cases, leave it to the players to figure out who does what and just be ready for anything.
Two parts to this answer. First, the actual time-tracking:
1) In combat, "one action" is six seconds. So things that take "one action" are fast. Most of the time, fights take no more than a few rounds, so "a fight" is only gonna take a minute or two of in-game time.
2) Some spells or actions have an associated time. Like, spells might take an hour to cast, a "short rest" is usually about an hour (like a lunch break), a "long rest" is eight hours (like sleeping overnight).
Usually you don't need to convert between listed time and number of actions in-combat, but sometimes a spell says it lasts for a minute and you have to divide that by six second-rounds to see that it lasts for 10 rounds in combat.
In-combat, you automatically track time because you're taking turns in order. Out-of-combat, you don't need to track time precisely unless there's a good reason to. A "typical adventuring day" is designed to be 2-3 short rests, so I'd interpret things done first as "morning" then a short rest and then "afternoon", then a short rest and then "evening", then a long rest to take the adventurers into the next day.
If the players are mostly spending the day traveling in a straight line somewhere, you can use the distance/pace rules at https://www.dndbeyond.com/sources/basic-rules/adventuring#Movement to figure out how far they can get, or what time it is when they get somewhere, but usually those only come into play if they're traveling long distances and you care to track those sorts of things, which often you don't.
...but the second point I want to make is that I think you're overthinking how to introduce D&D. There's lots of rules for lots of things, but you don't really need to know all of them to start playing or to introduce someone.
The basics of D&D are pretty simple! Player describes what their character does, the DM describes the result, sometimes asking for a roll if success of the action is in doubt, sometimes applying bonuses based on the player's skills. You really don't have to, like, memorize or even understand the travel pace rules to play D&D!
An action (or rather a turn/round, but you get 1 action per turn) is 6 seconds, so an hour is 600 actions.
Anyway, you don't need to role play or describe every second of every day, but there are 24 hours in a day, so it isn't completely inconsequential. Hope that helps.
Above someone mentioned a good way to track passage of time and distance on long treks, and I recommend that. Or you can just kind of hand wave it and just estimate. I play with active duty guys, so we estimate that a party can do about 20 miles on normal terrain (small hills, forests, flats), 15 miles on hilly and rocky terrain, 10 miles on mountains, and 25 on flat open areas per day. You can shave off 5 miles or so depending on the amount of rest your party takes.
As far as movement goes during battle, I HIGHLY recommend making a grid. You could buy a sheet with a grid in it at a place like Joann Fabric's or just make your own with rules, paper, and markers. Remember that every grid is 5 feet and that should help your kid learn how to understand the distances in battles.
On the topic of grids, often cheep wrapping paper has a 1 inch grid on the back.