What suggestions do you have for including a realistic passage of time.
Many campaigns are adventure/module based. Campaign starts out in a tavern, you go clear out the haunted abbey, sell the loot and maybe deal with a few encounters before you go clear the local dungeon. This is all wrapped up in a dynamic storyline.
What I am struggling with is trying to incorporate the passage of time. It seems a little silly for the first level, leather armor wearing adventurers to leave the tavern and three months later (accounting for travel time and a few dungeons) come back 12th level.
Ultimate campaign has some good stuff to deal with this and I could enforce a mandatory 3-6 month in game break between adventures with downtime rolls, but there is still the odd player who insists on daily minutiae.
I'd like to see a campaign where players actually aged a year before they became 20th level.
How do others deal with this?
The Jade regent Adventure path has long stretches of time-consuming travels built into it.
Our group handwaved much of the travel time so it didn't bog down the table, but the presence of a party magic item made everyone acutely aware of the time passing, as the requests of the entire party were limited by crafting time as well as financial impact of available resources.
For the average homebrew games, very few of them that I've played in have included any nominal downtime outside of travel.
We've joked about the problem your referring to "we went into that forest boys and came out men" but if the GM isn't actively trying to encorporate downtime, and no one needs it for crafting, the passage of time ends up described as "sometime later" days, months, years could go by in those two words, and no one questions it.
My players always get a base of operations at some point, this generates a lot of downtime if the players like it.
A Base of operation doesn't have to be an actual "base", it can be a village thats important to them, a buisness venture, they start by themselves or something else.
This has severall advantages and disadvantages
Pro
1. Players have a reason for downtime
2. Its a Giant Plotdevice
3. It gives Players something to do between Sessions
4. It can be used to explain the Characters Wealth (seriously, you dont find 10000 GP lying around in a Grave)
5. It gives Players a reason not to retire at level 5 (thats 10,500 gold each, why would you keep adventuring when you are one of the richest people around, a skilled crafter with +8 on his craft skill makes 468 GP a Year, Hello 22 Years of Income in my Bag)
Con
1. If done wrong it will become a giant buisness simulation instead of good old Dungeon Crawling
2. The Campaign will become very focused on the location (doesnt have to be a bad thing, but it wont work for every campaign)
Aside from that theres always the option of "undifined time" between 2 dungeons ^^