Handling hours-long buffs?

[SangoProduction]

So, around level 3-5, you start considering loading all of your hours/lvl buffs as soon as you get in to a vaguely dangerous situation, so it will be pretty likely you will benefit from them when something happens.

But what if the character has many copies of the spell per day (maybe a sorcerer, idk), and because they are sorta paranoid, or because they think the entire town is a death trap in the waiting, or any other reason, decide to try and keep up the buffs for as long as possible.

How would you handle this type of character, without checking in every scene to ask "has it been 4 hours yet? Do I need to cast my buffs again?" That gets old really fast.

How I personally like to do it (after working with the DM) is to set aside a certain number of spell slots that the spell(s) could use, out of my daily limit. Then I total up the amount of hours/day those spell slots would give. Then do Waking Hours / Buffed Hours for the Chance to be Buffed When it's Needed.
So, if you are awake for 16 hours, and spend 3 of your daily spell slots for a spell that lasts 4 hours. In this case you'd have 12 hours of protection out of 16. So, start of *random encounter*, you have a 75% chance of being buffed.

But I was wondering if the playground has a better idea. Something that's less costly, less annoying, and more reliable?

[ExLibrisMortis]

(1) Set aside X spell slots of Y hours each, giving you protection for the next XY hours.
(2) When rolling for a random encounter, roll 2d6 for Z = "hours passed since last action".
(3) XY = XY - Z.
(4) Repeat.

The Angry DM has a time pool system (https://theangrygm.com/hacking-time-in-dnd/) that handles this sort of thing, and random encounters, in a very interesting way. It's all on the DM's side, though.

[Zaq]

It's a bit of an intense paradigm shift in places if you're not careful, but this is one reason why I like Legend's way of counting time: [Rounds], [Encounters], [Scenes], and [Quests]. They work pretty much like you'd think they do, with one [Scene] often, but not exclusively, equal to one D&D day. You don't have to track minutes or hours between fights or challenges. If something is meant to last all [Scene], it just does, and if it's only meant to last for one [Encounter], it does. But if it says the duration is the whole [Encounter], it'll be the whole [Encounter], regardless of if it drags on a bit. (Stuff measured in [Rounds] works just the way you're used to, so it's not like everything lasts for the full duration of every fight.) Works great once you get used to it. When adapting it for D&D, you basically just decide ahead of time when an hours/level spell is going to last all [Scene] and when it's going to be good for the next [Encounter]. Same with weird stuff like "10 minutes / level" durations and whatnot. You want to be gentle with it so that you're not just turning every spell into an auto-Persist, but hours/level stuff is usually all day anyway, so this is really just making the bookkeeping easier.

Side benefit: travel scenes and other instances where the PCs might spend a large number of calendar days between Plot Point A and Plot Point B get way smoother. You don't have to balance "you're on the open ocean, so you've probably got a full night's rest between actual fights" against "we're still keeping up 4 random encounters per day? This is the most densely populated open ocean ever!": the ocean journey is just one [Scene], so you've got only one dose of your per-[Scene] resources—but anything you have that lasts all [Scene] will last for the duration of the voyage, at least until you reach an island or whatever where you're shifting the focus of the scene. You can technically also have multiple [Scenes] in one in-game day, if that's appropriate; what really matters is that the focus of the fiction has shifted sufficiently that we're calling it, well, another scene.

[Quertus]

Personally, in such a situation, I'd prefer something more like, "I have my buffs up from 9-5. Random encounter happens at <roll> 4:32pm".

Although, truth be told, I'm not a fan of buffs that aren't up 24/7. Too much bookkeeping for my tastes.

[Crichton]

Personally, in such a situation, I'd prefer something more like, "I have my buffs up from 9-5. Random encounter happens at <roll> 4:32pm".





Something kinda like this.


I usually just say something like "I'm casting Mage Armor now. It lasts for 6 hours at my level. I'll assume unless we change locales or you tell me otherwise, it's still within that window"

[Darth Ultron]

Really, just make buff spells have a duration of 24 hours. So you cast them in the morning, and have them all day.


Casting buffs before every combat or keeping track of durations eats up a huge amount of time. And it's just a bit silly to go "oh the goblins attacked at 6:02 PM....just two minutes after your buff spells expired!"

[ericgrau]

I try to get to 24 hours ASAP to eliminate the book-keeping. Failing that, I go for 8-15 hours which basically means whenever we're not sleeping. Pearls of power and rod of lesser extend help. Before I can afford those, I don't use hour/level buffs that much.