Tracking Buffs out of Combat

[Nagoras]

Hello @ All

I have a little Question at all GM´s and Players.

Our Groupe and GM hase a little Problem with tracking Buffs out of Combat. We dont know, how we should track them how many Time is left.

Example, we use a Spell with 10min/level and like we Say, we are lvl 1 so this Buff will be there for 10min. Our Combat start, we finish it in 10Rounds and have 9minuts left of the Buff.

Normally you would say, start a timewatch and look at it until 9mins are gone and the Buff ist finishd.

But you cant compare Pathfinder IC time with RL time. You always have a few minuts where player must think wath they to, look up skills etc etc etc.

So how would you track this, and say like now are 9mins gone and your buff is off?

Or is there a Rule that says the buff works like this, or would you even say, Out of combat the Buff works forever?

gz

Nagoras

[avr]

Try and guess how much time is passing in game. Certainly the buff doesn't last forever, and a RL stopwatch sounds like it'd be an inaccurate measure of IC time as you say.

If the party is moving through a dungeon without IC delay then 9 minutes of walking down corridors and checking rooms can be quite a lot of RL time. If the GM thinks that the RL arguments would be happening IC as well them the 9 minutes can vanish before you know it.

[SheepishEidolon]

As a GM I usually keep it simple:

Rounds per level lasts for a single encounter (if it doesn't end before)

Minutes per level lasts for two or three in a row (if at the same location, usually a dungeon)

10 minutes per level lasts for an entire area, and might even be long enough to survive an area change

Hours per level work all adventure day, unless people are still low level

If you want something more reliable, your group could agree that post-encounter stuff (heal, loot, identify, search for secrets) always takes 5 minutes or so.

[HighLordNiteshade]

Nagoras wrote:

Hello @ All

Our Groupe and GM hase a little Problem with tracking Buffs out of Combat. We dont know, how we should track them how many Time is left.

tl;dr - we track every effect, its duration, when it ends, on what initiative it ends, and this means we have to precisely track rounds both in combat and out of combat.

I do it an extremely complicated and annoying way while using Fantasygrounds, but the group has accepted it. The combat tracker in Fantasygrounds tracks each effect separately and by character / NPC / monster, so when the duration is up on a specific buff (for a player) you get a notice in the chat window and the effect drops off the character. For enemies only I as the DM see that an effect has ended.
This combat tracker makes it easy in combat, but more difficult once combat is over.

Once a combat is over, if the party is going to do things like search a room, open chests, or open doors (basically anything where buffs will still be relevant) we continue to do things in initiative order. That means we're cycling though a round for the rogue to search the chest, another round to disarm the trap, another round to pick the lock. During that time the rest of the party is usually making sure all enemies are dead-dead, looting bodies, detecting magic, etc. This process is a bit painful as we're still walking through initiate and making sure actions are still only what can be done in a single round, but this process ensures that players are fully aware when things are ending and how much time they have to do dangerous things before buffs end. This also means that if they open a door and down the hallway are rooms with enemies that we'll continue to walk through initiative order as they move down the hall and potentially start another encounter.

If the party wants to stand around after a combat and talk about next steps, then I mark the time and once they are done discussing and ready to take action I look at how much actual time has elapsed and I advance the combat tracker that many rounds. This can REALLY eat up a lot of rounds, so the party usually keeps this to a minimum unless they think they are done with an area and buffs won't matter anymore.

[Mark Hoover 330]

I get a tad more granular than SheepishEidolon. After combat wraps any rounds/level buffs I just ignore. Similarly for hour/level buffs I generally handwave it as just being on for the duration of the area the PCs are engaging at or perhaps even in a completely different site.

For all the other durations though, I try to keep track of character actions. I don't care about PCs talking/discussing things, time players spend in RL looking through books or my own narration time, but specifically what actions PCs are taking.

For example, if the PCs have 9 minutes left on a buff and are in a dungeon, what happens if they come to a locked door? If you're my players one of the characters has Disable Device and is trying to pick the lock. In my games though, its rare that doors in dungeons that actually STAY locked have anything less than an Average lock on them.

An Average lock is a DC 25 to disable. The action of Disable Device is a Full-Round action but often times my players at low level opt to Take 20 unless they're actively being pursued in the dungeon. This means the PC doing the Disable Device skill takes 20 rounds, or 2 minutes, opening the lock.

So that one action eats up 2 minutes of the 9 minutes of the buff. The PCs also had to move from the previous fight site to the locked door; this may have taken up another minute of time. I jot these down which, yes, can slow play a little but we're not in combat so my players generally roll with it.

One other thing I do: if a minute/level or a 10 minute/level spell, by my accounting is close to expiration (in the last minute) I'll give my player a warning. Firstly I feel the character would be keeping this in the back of their mind and heck, its magic - maybe they would even feel the last of the spell fading or something. Also I'm not a fan of "gotcha" gaming, where I spring an attack on the characters and then laugh "ha ha! You let your Magic Stone wear off and JUST as it does, you're surrounded by skeletal archers!"

Now a lot of this tracking goes away for me once the spellcaster delivering these buffs hits either level 5 with the ability to put Extend Spell on their buffs or reaches 10th level themselves. When simple minute/level buffs last 10 minutes AND longer running buffs go for nearly 2 hours minimum, I stop watching the clock on those and only pay attention to rounds/level buffs.

[Mark Hoover 330]

HighLordNiteshade wrote:

Nagoras wrote:

Hello @ All

Our Groupe and GM hase a little Problem with tracking Buffs out of Combat. We dont know, how we should track them how many Time is left.

tl;dr - we track every effect, its duration, when it ends, on what initiative it ends, and this means we have to precisely track rounds both in combat and out of combat.

I do it an extremely complicated and annoying way while using Fantasygrounds, but the group has accepted it. The combat tracker in Fantasygrounds tracks each effect separately and by character / NPC / monster, so when the duration is up on a specific buff (for a player) you get a notice in the chat window and the effect drops off the character. For enemies only I as the DM see that an effect has ended.
This combat tracker makes it easy in combat, but more difficult once combat is over.

Once a combat is over, if the party is going to do things like search a room, open chests, or open doors (basically anything where buffs will still be relevant) we continue to do things in initiative order. That means we're cycling though a round for the rogue to search the chest, another round to disarm the trap, another round to pick the lock. During that time the rest of the party is usually making sure all enemies are dead-dead, looting bodies, detecting magic, etc. This process is a bit painful as we're still walking through initiate and making sure actions are still only what can be done in a single round, but this process ensures that players are fully aware when things are ending and how much time they have to do dangerous things before buffs end. This also means that if they open a door and down the hallway are rooms with enemies that we'll continue to walk through initiative order as they move down the hall and potentially start another encounter.

If the party wants to stand around after a combat and talk about next steps, then I mark the time and once they are done discussing and ready to take action I look at how much actual time has elapsed and I...

Just a quick aside, being the Disable Device nerd that I am: disabling a trap is technically 2d4 rounds of time spent using the standard skill, though I suppose Feats or Class Abilities might speed that up, I don't know.

[Belafon]

There is no particular rule for this, although time does pass outside of combat. What I do - (and I make sure the players know I am doing this)

Any time spent talking, planning, or debating is real time. Presumably you talk at roughly the same speed as your characters. If it takes the players a few minutes to decide on a course of action, well then it probably took their characters a few minutes to decide on a course of action.

After a combat, I abstract the passage of time by assuming it takes around 30 seconds to find, remove, attempt to identify, and distribute each item NPCs are carrying. So 6 items means 3 minutes pass. Healing and the like happen while the identifying is going on.

Traveling from one place to another is just a rough number, and doesn't correlate well to real time. Down a hallway to the next room in the dungeon is going to take less than a minute, even if they are searching for traps the whole way. Half a mile of twisty alleys? Eh, 6 minutes. Longer trips can use the overland movement rates if people are running 10 min/level buffs.

[Nagoras]

Thx for all the response, im glad you all shared your experience with me and i told my Gm abouut it, now its her turn to decide what she wants to do ^^

[yukongil]

I just use a best guess estimate on how much time has passed and tell that to the players and let them adjust accordingly as to what spells have ran out or what is still going.

The spell tracker app for Pathfinder is pretty handy for that, as you can tell it how much time has passed and it will adjust all the cast spells accordingly