The closest I've ever been to playing with 1:1 time is by progressing time in the world at the same rate as between sessions. This means 1:1 time was only ever relevant for downtime. That worked reasonably well for me.

One thing that's never been clear to me about 1:1 time - I've seen it implied by some groups that they assume one session = one day in the game world. That would seem to make sense with some of the aspects of the game - the proximity between dungeons and town, the X/day abilities, and how some groups roll on a table when the party fails to return to town by the time the session ends. The assumption seems to be that your simply don't do multi-day delves where you camp someplace near the entrance of the dungeon. This is very different from how I've always played - dungeons were a destination. You'd form an expedition, travel to the dungeon, and camp there for several days until it was clear you needed to return to town to lick your wounds or sell your loot. Getting lost, wasting time on wild goose chases looking for alternate dungeon entrances, or pacing the delve across several days was normal.

If players cannot fast forward beyond the current date in the game, that seems very interesting and I'd like to try it out. But I don't know how to make this work in practical terms. If the party says they want to set up camp out in the wilderness and return to the dungeon the next day, I don't feel like "no, you can't" is a reasonable response and if the DM told me that I'd feel ripped right out of the immersion of the game. Players fast forward actions all the time and we abstract a lot of it away with the dungeon turn. It seems reasonable that the party would want to pace themselves. If the party wants to go back to town, assemble a work party to go and rebuild a bridge or clear a minor cave-in or something, should the answer be "no" or "wait until you let me know your actions during downtime" or something? If the party says they want to thoroughly search a hex during a hexcrawl and repeat that process to explore a frontier, you'd need to fast forward several days? I just don't see an alternative.

I know how to make this work if I keep 1:1 time restricted to downtime. I just can't make it make sense outside of downtime even though I've heard too many stories of people playing this way for it not to exist. Has anyone played this way and how did you manage time or situations where players wanted to fast forward time? Did I misunderstand something about this playstyle?

I'll deviate from 1:1 time during a session or across sessions as necessary, but the clock catches up. So eg if you spend 8 IRL weeks on one battle, that adds 8 weeks to the downtime once the battle ends.

I use 5e D&D with 1 week long rests, and Dragonbane with full rest only at a place of safety, so I don't see many attempts to 'camp out' during the session. A session might take 4 hours IRL and say 3 days in-game, usually from extended travelling to/from the delve site. The world clock adjusts back to 1:1 once the PCs return to a place of safety.

In the extreme case where the players are effectively demanding downtime mid session, like a 1 week long rest or even training/study time, I will say "OK, see you in a fortnight!" and end the session - if they're just trying it on then the threat is normally enough to have them say "OK, just one more room..." etc. If they really truly need a break, say their PCs are mangled, then we will indeed end the session there. That doesn't commonly happen until pretty near the session's natural end.

One big benefit of the 1:1 approach is that PC & player are aligned in seeing time as a limited resource. I definitely find this enhances play.

With 1:1 time I think it's important to distinguish between (a) the natural progression of time, which might mean the session goes over a couple game days, and (b) players wanting to disengage from play and take significant downtime/resource recovery time. These need to be dealt with differently IME.

"If the party says they want to set up camp out in the wilderness and return to the dungeon the next day"

Well, IMCs camping out in the wilderness as a small group is usually a resource drain, not a resource recovery, so PCs are motivated to complete the mission and get home ASAP. Camping out near the dungeon entrance is often close to suicidal.  Those aren't videogame sprites in there, they'll come get you!  If the PCs bring along such a sizable camp & followers that they can actually long rest, that is treated as a mobile home base for downtime purposes.

"If the party wants to go back to town, assemble a work party to go and rebuild a bridge or clear a minor cave-in or something, should the answer be "no" or "wait until you let me know your actions during downtime" or something?"

That would typically a downtime activity IMC yes, and involve a major resource expenditure in hiring the workers, guarding them while they work, etc. To be practical you'd need to have cleared/secured the local area, which usually is a major undertaking. If the dungeon was that safe, it would have been cleared already.  If the work is so trivial it can be done in a few hours, I'd expect the PCs to do it themselves.

"If the party says they want to thoroughly search a hex during a hexcrawl and repeat that process to explore a frontier, you'd need to fast forward several days?"

Maybe because I'm British, the idea of wilderness so empty that nothing is encountered for several days in a row never sits well with me. My wilderness maps are typically 2 miles/hex or 5 km/hex, and there is a lot going on. A PC group may expect several encounters/day, I'd say 2-3 is typical, not all being hostile of course. So I don't see any 'fast forward several days' unless it's an extended ocean voyage. Even high level flying PCs are probably seeing several things on the ground each day, though they may not need to engage.

Quote from: S'mon on July 05, 2023, 05:32:29 AM
I'll deviate from 1:1 time during a session or across sessions as necessary, but the clock catches up. So eg if you spend 8 IRL weeks on one battle, that adds 8 weeks to the downtime once the battle ends.

Right - not so different from how I made it work when I was doing 1:1 time purely for downtime.

Quote from: S'mon on July 05, 2023, 05:32:29 AM
One big benefit of the 1:1 approach is that PC & player are aligned in seeing time as a limited resource. I definitely find this enhances play.

Yes, this is my interest in trying to pull it into the session itself and not just downtime. I find the dungeon turn, wandering monsters, etc. makes time a crucial resource to manage, but the time resource for an expedition feels less restrictive.

Quote from: S'mon on July 05, 2023, 05:32:29 AM
With 1:1 time I think it's important to distinguish between (a) the natural progression of time, which might mean the session goes over a couple game days, and (b) players wanting to disengage from play and take significant downtime/resource recovery time. These need to be dealt with differently IME.

I normally handle them differently - I'm trying to grok this idea I've seen about a playstyle where a single session lasts for 1 in-game day. If you aren't back in town by the end of the session then you're lost out there in the wilderness and you roll on a table to see what kinds of unfortunate mishaps befell you before you wandered back into town. The idea seems to be that you need to keep delving until you no longer want to play anymore and then you end the session. So if the players try to rest mid-session, you essentially do the same thing you do when somebody tries to do training mid-session. It's totally foreign to me because I don't know how to square this concept with any setup other than the dungeon being a few hours walk away. If I'm doing a hexcrawl, that feels like a thing that's happening at the table and we need to be able to fast-forward time over the course of several days. If the players get some scheme and need to go back to town to arrange it and that takes a few days, that again feels like a thing that might make sense mid-session but is impossible in this playstyle. If the players need to travel overland to the dungeon as a destination, that seems difficult here too because sleep is going to naturally be a part of the journey.

Quote from: S'mon on July 05, 2023, 05:40:08 AM
Well, IMCs camping out in the wilderness as a small group is usually a resource drain, not a resource recovery, so PCs are motivated to complete the mission and get home ASAP. Camping out near the dungeon entrance is often close to suicidal.  Those aren't videogame sprites in there, they'll come get you!  If the PCs bring along such a sizable camp & followers that they can actually long rest, that is treated as a mobile home base for downtime purposes.

I don't play 5e, so long rests are not on my radar. Most other editions of D&D allow recovering some spells and some HP (though a paltry amount) from a night's rest. In 2nd and I think especially 3rd ed I remember a lot of abilities that have a limitation of X/day. So if you're playing in an older edition, it's more likely resting will recuperate you (assuming the rest doesn't kill or seriously debilitate you with a wandering monster or enemy raid or something). The connection between resting for the night and regaining some resources is why I was thinking this 1:1 delve time might make some sense - your players have time and resources directly connected in a way that feels pretty tangible. If you have 2 slots on the sleep spell, then you have 2 sleep spells for the game that day. At the very least, the natural cycle of day/night introduces the potential that the party might want to hold off on a particular action until they safely have daylight backing them up (of course it won't matter much for the dungeon, but wilderness and overland play to me seems like too big of a part of the game to ignore).

I agree that obviously you can't sleep outside the dungeon entrance if you hope to survive. Nevertheless, if you can tolerate the several-hour walk to and from town to the local dungeon in principle, I don't see why in principle it's much different from setting up your encampment a few hours walk away. Unless you leave a trail (and to be fair you might with all those coins), it seems unlikely the dungeon denizens will track you several miles overland to raid your camp. I guess it depends on what lives in the dungeon and how much of a mess you've made in their home. Regardless, I personally enjoy the camp element because it means you can't delve to exhaustion - you need to leave some in the tank to survive the wandering monsters or what have you. Town being categorically safe is IMO a little less interesting than the setup that a camp involves. Our group plays with hirelings so it's not unreasonable to have some people tend to camp.

Quote from: S'mon on July 05, 2023, 05:53:55 AM
Maybe because I'm British, the idea of wilderness so empty that nothing is encountered for several days in a row never sits well with me. My wilderness maps are typically 2 miles/hex or 5 km/hex, and there is a lot going on. A PC group may expect several encounters/day, I'd say 2-3 is typical, not all being hostile of course. So I don't see any 'fast forward several days' unless it's an extended ocean voyage. Even high level flying PCs are probably seeing several things on the ground each day, though they may not need to engage.

I simply mean that if we assume one session is one day, then a hexcrawl procedure seems difficult. Even with several encounters, it's entirely possible for the players to miss details in a hex, or choose not to engage with them, or even simply engage with them and move on to the next hex before the session is drawing to a natural close.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on July 05, 2023, 02:08:54 AM
The closest I've ever been to playing with 1:1 time is by progressing time in the world at the same rate as between sessions. This means 1:1 time was only ever relevant for downtime. That worked reasonably well for me.

Unless you're running multiple tables in the same shared setting, then there's really zero point to 1:1 time.

The original point of it was that the expectation was that the GM would be running multiple groups in the same setting at the same time and the players running multiple characters of different levels. In such a case 1:1 time is just the easiest way to keep track of what is happening when in relation to everything else.

If you've only got a single table where everyone is running a single PC where they're nearly always together as a group, then 1:1 time is either useless or outright counterproductive.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on July 05, 2023, 06:27:36 AM
[I'm trying to grok this idea I've seen about a playstyle where a single session lasts for 1 in-game day. If you aren't back in town by the end of the session then you're lost out there in the wilderness and you roll on a table to see what kinds of unfortunate mishaps befell you before you wandered back into town.

I tend to be very generous with that bit, often not even rolling for wandering monsters on the way home if we're out of time. I generally prefer to incentivise using all the available session time then reset at the end, if at all plausible. And assuming it's me that ends the session, it would seem unfair to penalise the PCs for eg my need to go swim before the pool closes.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on July 05, 2023, 02:08:54 AM
The closest I've ever been to playing with 1:1 time is by progressing time in the world at the same rate as between sessions. This means 1:1 time was only ever relevant for downtime. That worked reasonably well for me.

One thing that's never been clear to me about 1:1 time - I've seen it implied by some groups that they assume one session = one day in the game world. That would seem to make sense with some of the aspects of the game - the proximity between dungeons and town, the X/day abilities, and how some groups roll on a table when the party fails to return to town by the time the session ends. The assumption seems to be that your simply don't do multi-day delves where you camp someplace near the entrance of the dungeon. This is very different from how I've always played - dungeons were a destination. You'd form an expedition, travel to the dungeon, and camp there for several days until it was clear you needed to return to town to lick your wounds or sell your loot. Getting lost, wasting time on wild goose chases looking for alternate dungeon entrances, or pacing the delve across several days was normal.

If players cannot fast forward beyond the current date in the game, that seems very interesting and I'd like to try it out. But I don't know how to make this work in practical terms. If the party says they want to set up camp out in the wilderness and return to the dungeon the next day, I don't feel like "no, you can't" is a reasonable response and if the DM told me that I'd feel ripped right out of the immersion of the game. Players fast forward actions all the time and we abstract a lot of it away with the dungeon turn. It seems reasonable that the party would want to pace themselves. If the party wants to go back to town, assemble a work party to go and rebuild a bridge or clear a minor cave-in or something, should the answer be "no" or "wait until you let me know your actions during downtime" or something? If the party says they want to thoroughly search a hex during a hexcrawl and repeat that process to explore a frontier, you'd need to fast forward several days? I just don't see an alternative.

I know how to make this work if I keep 1:1 time restricted to downtime. I just can't make it make sense outside of downtime even though I've heard too many stories of people playing this way for it not to exist. Has anyone played this way and how did you manage time or situations where players wanted to fast forward time? Did I misunderstand something about this playstyle?

Well, what are you really trying to achieve?  One-to-one time was a way that EGG used to make sure that the multiple tables he was running were invested in the game and didn't do things in his shared world that were contradictory.  For example, if party A cleared half a dungeon and then went back to town to rest (ending the session), when they met again in a week, party B might have finished clearing the dungeon during their sessions so party A would just find empty rooms.

The utility of 1:1 time is in organization and structure, not in resource management.  Remember, EGG had dozens of players playing at all different times (some every day[!] and some once a month when they could travel down), and he wanted to use the same campaign for all of them.  So he needed some way to organize the campaign so he wasn't stuck in the middle of a dungeon for one player, while another had cleared it and moved on.  Also, he ran sandbox campaigns mostly, so the needs of a plot didn't weigh into his structure.  And think about the context.  If a player showed up at EGG's house, went down in a dungeon and got mauled in the first encounter, the player could have the character go leave and the session ended, even if this only took fifteen minutes.  For EGG, what's the big deal?  He might have another group that night, and he'd surely have someone else playing the next day.  In the context of my singular, weekly group, we're not stopping after 15 minutes.  We only get 4 hours on the one night a week it works.  So 1:1 game time would be a detriment...

If you want to make time important, there are much more effective ways to do so.  Limiting rests and healing, creating events at predictable intervals (so players can't just decide to rest willy-nilly), giving no experience for wandering monsters or only for "mission-based" activities (think about it before you reject it out of hand, as it's really worked at my table), etc.  Unless you have multiple groups in a shared world, or some other reason to try and keep your world time flowing for your players, 1:1 time really doesn't solve many problems.

Quote from: Old Aegidius on July 05, 2023, 02:08:54 AM
The closest I've ever been to playing with 1:1 time is by progressing time in the world at the same rate as between sessions. This means 1:1 time was only ever relevant for downtime. That worked reasonably well for me.

That is exactly how it works BtB. Ever since 1:1 time has become a key word, though, there's been a lot of garbage attached to it. If doing things some certain other way works for a lot of other people, then great. But it's not what's actually being talked about in that section of the DMG. You have it correct here.

QuoteIf players cannot fast forward beyond the current date in the game, that seems very interesting and I'd like to try it out. But I don't know how to make this work in practical terms. If the party says they want to set up camp out in the wilderness and return to the dungeon the next day, I don't feel like "no, you can't" is a reasonable response and if the DM told me that I'd feel ripped right out of the immersion of the game.

The key issue that answers a lot of your other questions/points/objections is right here. Feeling ripped right out of immersion is a perfectly valid feeling, but it is not a valid game consideration. And let me give you a simple example to show why, something pretty much all of us face.

Splitting the party. One PC wants to stray off to do god knows what. I, as GM, do not want to run for split parties for any prolonged period. I'm just not going to do it, period, end of story. It's a lot of extra work for me. And the players who do not have characters in the scene get bored, start scrolling through their phones, etc. So what, I'm supposed to cater to one jack-off's sense of immersion to go off on his own at the expense of the rest of the table being pulled right out of immersion?

Once you get this inherent contradiction, you understand objectively speaking immersion cannot be the god of the RPG. No matter how much you enjoy immersion, no matter how much some might have entangled their definition of RPG with immersion, it can not ever be a principle to which you sacrifice other principles.

Somewhere in the realm of abstraction there might be this platonic ideal where everyone can feel perfectly immersed at all times. For most tabletop RPGs, you run into a problem whenever someone wants to break off from the party. If you play an MMORPG, you're free to party up or go solo smoothly without breaking immersion, but the limitations of the programming and not having a human GM to make common sense calls sooner or later causes some immersion-breaking to happen. I'm involved in a 1E campaign where there is no DM; each player is running their own solo adventure using Appendix A, but we're doing it all on the same map. So our characters can meet, team up, and part ways however we see fit. So that solves the problem of the party splitting, and we've got the human element in adjudication. But there are a number of other immersion-breaking issues that come with having to create the dungeon as you go and control all the monsters, and so on.

There are no solutions. Only tradeoffs.

And that's how you have to approach 1:1 time.

Because here's another thing real gamers at real game tables face. Not everyone shows up every single week. And so I learned a long time ago, even before I started using 1:1 (which itself I started using around 30 years ago), that when doing a series of dungeon crawls, I'm going to require sessions begin and end in town. Because while that may rip you right out of immersion for the reasons you state, it also rips you right out of immersion when Donnie the Cleric doesn't show up, and the DM has to come up with some goofy half-ass shit to explain his absence, and you spend the next four hours scratching your head wondering why your party would continue crawling through this dangerous dungeon without a healer. Here again, you simply do not have the choice to not be ripped out of immersion. You're going to get ripped one way or another.

What's important is that how you implement 1:1 time fits in overall with what you're doing. The impression I get from the BroSR people is that they obsess over 1:1 and go way beyond RAW to enforce it, and the benefit seems to be they can run campaigns on a much grander scale. If today is today and tomorrow is tomorrow, that makes it a lot easier to coordinate where in time all of the characters are at. And yeah, that's going to come with a whole host of problems, too, but it probably is the best way to run a campaign on a large scale.

Me? I run it by the book. Which is just that it applies to downtime. You go in a dungeon, kill some things, take their stuff, come home. In the real world, our time is up for the session. You go home, come back next week. We just assuming your character was jerking off or something for 7 days. Then we pick things up there. If Donnie the Cleric had to begin 4 weeks of training to level up at the end of that last crawl, that character is still on lockdown for another 3 weeks game time. And you have the choice now to go on another crawl without Donnie (and Donnie's player will just have to play a different character from his stable of characters), or you can opt to fast-forward the three weeks so you can adventure today with Donnie. Whichever player's character is earliest in the timeline has the option of adventuring, or waiting passing control off to the player with the next earliest character.

As I say, I was already requiring you begin and end in town. What 1:1 added for my campaign was keeping time flowing forward, so that if we play weekly for 3 years, somewhere around 20 years will pass in game time. Character's age. Finding a mate suddenly became a goal, so you can have children to pass on your cool swag and wisdom to have a massive leg-up when starting over at 1st level with a new character. And so what started as a series of dungeon crawls that even the reel roleplayers, who refused to admit that's the more fun way of playing, showed up a lot more reliably than when we were doing more complex story arcs, over time this latent reward cycle revealed itself broadening the range of play goals, and in the end we got something that was more than just a series of delves. But you have to learn to crawl before you walk, you've got to learn to dungeon crawl before you plot, and you've got to learn to in-and-out in a single session, 1:1 time, before you start doing more complex things with it.

As others have said, 1:1 ONLY happens during downtime. That means any events that happen during downtime happen in real time. If you're in a dungeon, make sure it's safe and camp in the dungeon. That might not make sense for a full week of downtime. So plan your excursions, go in the dungeon, leave when you want and return as necessary. Factoring in real time travel to and from the dungeon into the downtime so you schedule the sessions properly. If travel time is consistent it's just a regular weekly game at that point. So plan your dungeons for times you know you're going to get your group for a regular amount of time. And stress that it's the player's responsibility to decide where they want to go, knowing how much time it will take and that the game session will be at the scheduled time. If they can't make the session next week, don't travel somewhere that will take a week to travel to.

Basically 1:1 is a wonderful way to schedule things and give the players responsibility. I guarantee you will avoid the dreaded "that day isn't good for me" if you use 1:1 time correctly. Your players play when it's good for them to play. If it's not, they can't travel until it is. Simple.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on July 05, 2023, 08:59:58 AM
The utility of 1:1 time is in organization and structure, not in resource management. 

That's certainly the main benefit. Making time a limited resource for player as it should be for PC is for me a beneficial side effect that helps with immersion. I also find that players very much enjoy being told they have X weeks down time & deciding how to use it, and having X keyed to real time progression just seems to work better and more fun than anything else I've tried, as well as making organisation of my many play groups much easier.

I'd love to know how many normal two-to-six player campaigns happen with 1:1 time.  I can't imagine it is all that many.  I'd also love to know how many of them happened back in the day- that number also seems low.  By contrast, teams of people who run megacampaigns likely run this sort of thing.  Those are rare, but this is about the only way to do it right.

Here's why I'm not sure there's much honest conversation about this topic.

1- A lot of people are going to associate 1:1 timekeeping with the "BrOSR".  These guys advocate this (and several other things, but this one is likely the most obvious and impactful rule change).   Since this group is effectively a highly-online, highly-political group, much of what's discussed in favor of them and opposed to them is going to be determined by real world politics.  This means that a lot of opinions and interpretations are going to bleed over very heavily.

2- I've not seen anyone recommend a constant, non-1:1 timekeeping scale.  For instance, if every day in the real world is a week in the game world, then the world will progress through decades rather quickly, with character aging and passing inheritance from PC to PC would come up too.  Sounds kinda interesting right?  And a player would need to quickly describe what is going on for their character's month-long downtime, for instance.  Or the reverse, a game where each real world day simulates only a few hours in the campaign world, allowing for a detailed treatment of a specific important time in the campaign.

3- I've not seen anyone recommend real time timekeeping (or constant scale timekeeping as in (2)) for certain sections of the campaign, then freezing time until every group has gone, then unfreezing after an event, etc.  I would expect this to come up pretty early in these sorts of things.

4- This is an MMO.  Everyone doing this is building an MMO.  Maybe it's a "private server" for just a 4 man party or maybe it's a megacampaign for a hundred dudes.  Really it's a MUD- a non-electronic Multi-user Dungeon.

5- I don't see people bringing up the world of darkness campaigns that ran throughout the mid and late 90s, all of which covered just TONS of people and told stories, some of the geographical areas having links to each others.  This was effectively also a MUD.  Wouldn't we hear from the storytellers of this golden age of WW LARP?  There's a lot of conceptual bleed-over right?  Unlike taking a line about downtime and building an online identity about it, why not take a lot of input from these leftwing wiccan-adjacent 40-50 year olds who actually ran something very successful for over half a decade?

Anyway I think the 1:1 timekeeping discussions are an exciting way to try to run a large campaign for some people, but many discussion participants are using them as a proxy for real world politics.

Quote from: Eirikrautha on July 05, 2023, 08:59:58 AM
In the context of my singular, weekly group, we're not stopping after 15 minutes.  We only get 4 hours on the one night a week it works.  So 1:1 game time would be a detriment...

Same here.  We operate on fantasy time.  A particular game session could be weeks of travel time or several hours of dungeon exploration or both.  Even though we play weekly, seven days of game time does not necessarily pass between sessions.  It could be one day or several weeks depending on what players decided to do on their downtime, healing, research, etc.   In the 40+ years we've played AD&D, I don't believe any of those in our group who have DMed  have ever used 1:1 time.

Quote from: Venka on July 05, 2023, 05:29:46 PM
I'd love to know how many normal two-to-six player campaigns happen with 1:1 time.  I can't imagine it is all that many. 

Well I only have one 5-PC group each in my two Dragonbane settings (Xoth & Misty Vale). Xoth always used 1:1 time, Misty Vale I went over to 1:1 time after the urgency of the "Save the World!" quest was done. I just like how it feels, how it takes away the burden of declaring an arbitrary time passage, or conversely seeing the entire campaign play out in a few weeks of game time. But I'd probably not have tried it if I hadn't been using it in my Faerun campaign, which at one point had over 20 players & PCs interacting across three main PC groups. For that kind of thing it's pretty much vital IME.