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How do you track the passage of time you your game?
As a GM?
As a player?
Spell durations?
Overland Travel?
Any unified systems out there? Campaign calendars?
How do you track the passage of time you your game?
As a GM?
As a player?
Spell durations?
Overland Travel?
Any unified systems out there? Campaign calendars?
Often I delegate time tracking to player that I know reliable. With my first campaing I suggested that he could use tallies and I would tell about what day it is. As a plaeyr I'm now on duty to track the time and I suggested my GM that we use Golarion months [not "it is sam month as March in Golarion"] and I like to keep track on time.
Hmm spell durations. As a GM I often don't bother to check is spells duration "1 minute/level" or "10 minutes/level" beacause often gifhts doesn't take that long. Hour per level is same on lower levels and on higher level [10+] I decide that spells like Overland flight are almost always on when PCs are on move.
I use a neat time/calendar extension adjusted to Golarion for Fantasy Grounds II.
For spells and effects I use the combat tracker within the same program.
The players keep track of their own spells.
How do you track the passage of time you your game?
As a GM?
As a player?
Spell durations?
Overland Travel?
Any unified systems out there? Campaign calendars?
In a AD&D 2ed game about 10 years ago, I had an old calendar (from the previous year) and I'd write everything about overland travel in it, keeping tracks of days and rations and whatnot. The campaign had a lot of overland exploration and was very ranger oriented (2 out of the three main characters were rangers). As the campaign moved along, it became sort of the PC's traveler's log.
It was somewhat useful in-game, but it is one of my most treasured game artifact now. It has all kind of cool little anecdotes that I wouldn't remember otherwise, like "ran out of rations, ambushed by orcs while hunting"
For some reason, we didn't renew the concept once the calendar got full. Now that you remind me, I'll get one for my current campaign...
'findel
Yep.
I keep track of day by day time flow on a Golarion calendar that I printed out that someone here on the boards came up with.
Spell durations that go round to round we keep track of during battle of course (usually the player who cast it does so, often using a die to count down each round on his turn).
As far as minutes and hours outside of battle, I just eyeball it as necessary.
Usually we use that Golarion Calendar excel doc someone made, but uploaded to google docs so we can all see/edit it.
For Ft. Rannick last week we really wanted a play-by-play, so we added a page to the sheet with each row being 15 minutes or so (adding rows as we went for discrete events). Each PC had a column, and there was one column for even descriptions and one for time taken. When a PC cast a spell or other duration effect, we colored in his columns (adding new ones as needed) up until the duration expired. It was pretty neat.
I recently devised a system that tells us how much time it takes to search a room with a given level of caution. Because we were behind enemy lines in an ongoing battle and every second mattered, I timed their room searches and used my phone's stopwatch to time in-character planning breaks as well.
When I'm DMing, I use a Weather Generation program that I wrote to keep track of days and seasons. I'll just generate and print two or three months worth of weather and check the days off as they pass. It's one of those things that I can't see anyone realistically doing manually even though ranged combat, tracking and even a couple of Druid spells rely on it greatly.
As for spell durations, we aren't terribly precise with that. Once you get to level five, most spells will last a battle (1 round/level) to multiple quickly occurring battles (1 minute/level) to an entire small dungeon (10 minutes/level) to most of the adventuring day (1 hour/level).
I actually got a couple d24s from Chessex Dice for either rolling random times of day or for tracking the current in game hour. I also use calendar making software for printing a weekly organizer or daily organizer notes for the in game events.