Telling Time

[3drinks]

This is a concept I have noticed as a DM I cannot really control effectively. I do not know how to accurately portray time passing in any consistent manner, and I know this has an effect on how I run my games. So how do you, the gitp members specifically, take care of such a "seemingly" simple yet "utterly" complex matter?

[Uncle Pine]

Could you be a little more specific? Do you need help to keep track of time without having to write everything the PCs do on a paper or to describe the time as it pass to the players without boring them?
In the former case, you could craft a paper clock that you can adjust whenever you want (here (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vko2aksr4E) there's an easy tutorial I just found on youtube). In the latter, just throw a random encounter or side-plot every now and then to keep the players busy.

[supermonkeyjoe]

I normally just say "that took you X hours it's now early morning/mid morning/midday/mid afternoon/early evening/ late evening/ night time" or if they are in a dungeon away from any way of telling time I'll say something like "you're getting hungry, it's sometime around midday" or "you're getting tired, it's probably getting pretty late" I find the exact time of day rarely matters in game.

[3drinks]

I normally just say "that took you X hours it's now early morning/mid morning/midday/mid afternoon/early evening/ late evening/ night time" or if they are in a dungeon away from any way of telling time I'll say something like "you're getting hungry, it's sometime around midday" or "you're getting tired, it's probably getting pretty late" I find the exact time of day rarely matters in game.

Yeah, the exact time doesn't matter as much, but I have a hard time actually defining just how long it took to perform a task. And it's because of this that my players are able to, how can I say, "take advantage" of that. Like, how long should it take to travel across town in a mid to large city, or just how long did the players stay in that dungeon?

[Pink]

Yeah, the exact time doesn't matter as much, but I have a hard time actually defining just how long it took to perform a task. And it's because of this that my players are able to, how can I say, "take advantage" of that. Like, how long should it take to travel across town in a mid to large city, or just how long did the players stay in that dungeon?

Well, the dungeon is something that you should use a sort've gut feeling and common sense approach to. A small room that is searched probably takes 5-10 minutes, double that for a large room as you feel appropriate. Add another 5 minutes every time they search and loot the bodies. From those numbers you can get a rough estimate, and then adjust that time higher and lower as you feel fits. I find that the seems fairly reasonable to most players.

As for in town, so you have a map or an idea how large the city is? There are movement rates (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/movement.htm) for how far a person can walk within a minute or an hour, a good basis for estimate. Then keep track of how long in real time they talk to the people or take to buy stuff and use that as how long it probably takes in character. Don't be afraid to ere on the side of longer, because things can happen a bit quicker in tabletop description than it would take to do in real life.

[yougi]

Regarding the original question, I personally go straight to "It's about 11 AM", whether they're in a dungeon or not, because I don't see how it can give an unfair advantage: it's just translating the information the PCs have into words the players understand. If the players don't think that's fair, they sometimes say something like "we got into this dungeon after waking up, you said it was 8ish, and we've only had two fights, both less than 5 rounds, and went through like 2 corridors. How can it be 11?", to which I respond either "If you know what time it is, why do you ask me?" or "Well I think <PC's name who asked the original question> should get his watch fixed." Or even the classic "just checking if you were following. It's between 8 and 9".

If it matters and the PCs don't have the info (they've been underground for a few days, ready to come into a city to invade, but they want to do it at night), then I tell them "it's somewhere between midnight and the next midnight.", and let them try to figure it out.


Yeah, the exact time doesn't matter as much, but I have a hard time actually defining just how long it took to perform a task. And it's because of this that my players are able to, how can I say, "take advantage" of that. Like, how long should it take to travel across town in a mid to large city, or just how long did the players stay in that dungeon?

Well, for travel, two ways of doing it: first, calculation: the DMG says you travel 1 mile per hour for every 10ft in your base speed. A party with a heavy armored medium-sized PC or with small PCs (or both) would walk 2 miles per hour (base speed 20ft), while a party with all medium-sized, light armored character (base speed 30ft) would walk 3 miles per hour, and a party riding (base speed 40ft) would cover 4 miles per hour. Then, you have to evaluate distance: Montreal (closest city from here) is a bit over 160sq. mi. Let's say it's 8 miles per 20 miles: that means that walking literally around it is 56 miles, and actually walking everywhere in it would probably be much closer to 400 miles. On horseback, that's a hundred hours, and by foot, double that amount. Then again, Montreal is not a medieval city.

The second way of doing it is just calculating how big a city is by saying how long it takes to walk around it: just yesterday, a player asked me how large the city they are in was (the capital of the world's most powerful empire), and my answer was that it would take a day just for walking around, not considering time to stop and do anything nor explore in any details: a day just to go around once and "get a feel" of the town, and half a day to explore in detail any of the 5 neighborhoods in the city. In reality, the players don't care about the mileage, just about the time (and then again, probably not that much).

If you're talking about how long they stay in dungeon, then it could be more important: I'd evaluate the length of their travel, and calculate how long it is (following the 1 mph for every 10 in base speed, you end up at about 90 ft/minute for every 10 in your base speed, so 180ft = 1 minute for regular party; I however divide that by two in an unsafe place, to say they're on their guards and stuff, so about 90ft/minute), and I then add about 5 minutes for every combat (length of combat + short break after). And, most importantly, I'd make a player calculate that, cause DMs have enough to worry about.

[ButtSoup]

Lots of good ideas already posted; any of it helping? If not, maybe you could explain how they have specifically taken advantage of time.

Not sure if it helps, but you could flip the burden onto the players.
DM: "how much time do you want to spend doing X?"(where X is something that benefits from the amount of time put in)
DM: "what do you plan on doing for the next 2 hours?" (Maybe have a default fluff time increment)

[3drinks]

Alright, thanks guys I appreciate it. Really helps me to put things in closer perspective for my players now.