What are your best practices for keeping time in game? I am messing about with a physical "clock" mounted on the Screen, and I add clips to it for when the torch runs out, or the spell or whatever. Behind the screen are the other triggers of course. I think it can help for Players to watch the time tick by as they decide what to do. Thoughts?

Quote from: mcobden on December 16, 2024, 05:41:04 PMWhat are your best practices for keeping time in game? I am messing about with a physical "clock" mounted on the Screen, and I add clips to it for when the torch runs out, or the spell or whatever. Behind the screen are the other triggers of course. I think it can help for Players to watch the time tick by as they decide what to do. Thoughts?

You'll need to be more specific because the need for timekeeping varies heavily with both the nature of the campaign and even the particulars of a given adventure.

An encounter has different time management needs than a dungeon crawl and the dungeon crawl different needs from a hex crawl and a hex crawl from a realm management-based game (ex. Birthright, Kingmaker).

Best practices for each will vary.

I guess as a general rule, the biggest difference between the different levels is how much incidental player decision-making can be conducted.

At the realm level, a turn might be a season so even if the players spend an entire game session kibitzing on what actions to take, it has zero influence on how many turns pass at the realm level.

At the dungeon crawl level, spending 10 minutes discussing what to do next while searching the room you just cleared isn't going to impact how time moves. It's incidental.

By contrast, an encounter with turnd measured in seconds puts a fairly tight constrait on what can be communicated between PCs, but at that point too resolution mechanics also take longer than the span of a turn so keeping some sort of real time clock makes little sense.

It's a whole continuum.

The only timer that I started using regularly is the Shadowdark timer for torches. That thing is brilliant!

But a big old physical clock where you add sticky notes for certain things expiring sounds like something that can have a broad range of uses and I'd imagine it could add quite a bit of tension.
You could just use a digital timer like this: https://stopwatch.online-timers.com/multiple-stopwatches which is great since you can have multiple separate timers and name each one.

Quote from: Chris24601 on December 16, 2024, 06:02:04 PMI guess as a general rule, the biggest difference between the different levels is how much incidental player decision-making can be conducted.

At the realm level, a turn might be a season so even if the players spend an entire game session kibitzing on what actions to take, it has zero influence on how many turns pass at the realm level.

At the dungeon crawl level, spending 10 minutes discussing what to do next while searching the room you just cleared isn't going to impact how time moves. It's incidental.

By contrast, an encounter with turnd measured in seconds puts a fairly tight constrait on what can be communicated between PCs, but at that point too resolution mechanics also take longer than the span of a turn so keeping some sort of real time clock makes little sense.

It's a whole continuum.

During a dungeon crawl 10 minutes can be significant. It represents one game turn. Beneficial spells can expire, and a wandering monster check could be triggered.

Time is handled differently, depending upon the situation. Most of the time I hand-wave passage of actual time compared to game time. As others have noted, a six-second turn in combat takes a lot longer than six seconds of real time, while a 10-minute dungeon exploration turn can take a lot less than ten minutes of real time.

Here are two examples off the top of my head of real time being used in an RPG:

(1) In OD&D, Gygax and Arneson used to have certain things tied to the actual calendar. If your wizard was making a magic item and it took 2 weeks to make, you couldn't use your wizard character for two actual weeks of calendar time. Players had to use a different character while that wizard was occupied with item creation.

(2) The Shadowdark RPG uses real time for torches, if I remember correctly. Light a torch and make a note of the time on the clock, because it goes out in one hour of play time.

I track 10-minute turns in dungeons, 30-minute turns during outdoor adventures, and 1-day turns during wilderness exploration and downtime. My method is simple: in my college-ruled notebook, each line corresponds to one turn. I number the lines down the left-hand column for my own reference; to the left of the number I track time-dependent effects like torch duration or spell research, and to the right of the number I note what actions the players take that turn.

I have formatted different sheets that I like to use. One is a "dungeon time" tracking sheet, another is a "overworld time" tracking sheet, then there's a "calendar sheet".  10 minute turns are segmented out in the dungeon sheet, I forget how big the segments are in the overworld sheet, 6 hours? 4 hours?    Then its days/weeks as needed on the calendar sheet.

I roll for random encounters ahead of the time, mark them on the appropriate dungeon turns that they were generated for. I have room to make notes if I feel like I need to on the dungeon tracker sheet, otherwise I just check off the turns as the players spend them exploring the dungeon

@sword devil. I like that idea.

To be clear, I am looking at the games where dungeon time records are critical, and part of the game. So I am indeed looking at turns, and I want to communicate the passage of time to the players to create tension. So I want a visual representation for the whole table.