Let the game keep its own strict time records. I previously expounded on why it is essential to have time-tracking in your games. Making time matter and actually pass helps give weight to the players’ decisions. But you don’t have to take my word on its importance; Sean McCoy of Mothership fame recently interviewed one of the OGs (i.e., original grognards) of the old-school gaming movement, James Maliszewski, in which James helpfully articulated this point:

“JM: I do keep a calendar, mostly so that I can track the passage of time. That’s important for a couple of reasons, starting with the major festivals of the Tsolyáni year. Knowing when it’s time for the Visitations of the Dormant Lord or the Uncovering of Wisdom or even just the summer solstice is important, because these can be opportunities for fun roleplaying and engagement with the setting. I also keep track of bigger events in the world, like wars or political struggles, and knowing the date helps me track their progress.”

Shed a tear for all of the overburdened referees out there. Keeping a calendar and meticulous time tracking, as James describes, seems to be the most common tactic of old-school referees. While having to track fictional days, weeks and months is by no means the most arduous task referees are asked to do, all these various accounting tasks can stack up and overwhelm a referee. Where I can push off any mental bookkeeping from the referee’s mind, I do so. This frees up space in the ole noggin to run NPCs as three-dimensional characters, adjudicate the player characters’ actions fairly and present an interesting and dynamic world. So here is one method for letting the game track weeks and months for you. It is much less granular than than the typical advance of having a calendar and tracking the days and seasons or even the similarly abstract timekeeping system proposed by Dwiz at the A Knight at the Opera blog but a little more granular than rolling to see if a season has passed as was recently proposed by Chris McDowall over at his blog.

But first, what do I mean by the game doing it for you? I mean that it doesn’t have what Ava Islam on her blog calls the “Memory Problem”; it doesn’t rely on the referee remembering to advance the clock. And the method I’m proposing is basically just the overloaded encounter die, which as Ava uses as an example of a solution to memory problems:

“[T]o reduce the memory load of bookkeeping even further, we can think of something like the overloaded encounter die, where the result of the die will tell you when to tick down a torch’s duration, or when the party needs to rest. Rather than the GM needing to keep track of how many turns have elapsed, the GM just has to remember to do one thing: roll the die at the start of each turn.”

This system bakes timekeeping into the base procedures of the game. I tend to run games with various procedures, based on Necropraxis’ Hazard Die system, for the various sequences of play. Each sequence is distinguished by how “zoomed in” the action is, temporally speaking. In combat, we are tracking time rather granularly and most actions happen in a matter of seconds. When exploring dungeons and other adventure locations, we zoom out a bit where most actions (e.g., exploring rooms, picking locks or sneaking around corridors) can be measured in fractions of an hour. During overland travel, action takes place over in several hour increments. And downtime is measured in weeks. For each of these sequences the procedure dictates a sort of turn sequence in which players decide to act for that turn and the referee rolls the hazard die to see what else happens during the turn. Singing the praises of this method is its own subject, but that is just a bit of background so you have a framework to understand where I am adding in time-tracking elements.

Whether the Weather Be Fine

Weather is an important aspect of games that are ostensibly about outdoor exploration and should be more than mere set-dressing. My favorite way to make weather (and seasons) matter, and the simplest, is to make travel in certain weather conditions more difficult. This could be something as simple as the admonishment in Ultraviolet Grasslands that traveling in the winter is inadvisable and difficult, but I really like how Mausritter handles it with separate weather tables for each season, which tables result in progressively higher chances of difficult weather as the year approaches winter (this works especially well in Mausritter because a single year is probably the extent of a mouse’s adventuring days, given mice lifespans, so if their adventures start in Spring, travel gets more difficult over time in a very naturalistic way). I basically have adopted Mausritter’s weather rules, with a tweak to make them “Ladder Tables”, the ingenious random-tables-with-memory from Ty Pitre of the Mindstorm Blog.

But when does the weather change? In Mausritter, you check each day for the weather. This makes sense, but does rely on the referee remembering at the start of an adventuring day to roll for the weather. I have changed it up by making the weather changing a possible result of the hazard die during a wilderness exploration turn. So every wilderness turn has a 1/6 chance of the weather changing and there are 6 wilderness turns in a 24-hour period, so you’d expect the weather to change roughly once a day but not necessarily so regularly. However, this isn’t really “time tracking” in the sense that it replaces a calendar (except that one idea for simulating weather is to just reference an old farmer’s almanac and follow it day-by-day). The real meat is determining when the seasons change and we go from one season’s weather table to the next.

You Can’t Spell Downtime Without “Time”

Weather is dependent on the changing of the seasons, which requires quite a bit of time passing. If you aren’t tracking the campaign on a calendar, you need some method for determining when the seasons change. My answer, once again, is to make this part of the underlying turn-structure procedure of the game. This is somewhat similar to McDowall’s system of checking for a change in seasons after a quest, but instead of the more nebulous determination of whether something is or is not a quest, the potentiality of seasons passing happens when the player-characters are spending time in town, typically resting between adventures. However, a 1/6 chance of changing seasons each downtime turn felt like it would cause time to pass too quickly. So instead, I have sub-results for that type of “time passes” result.

Holidays should happen more often than the changing of the seasons. There is a 1-in-24 chance each downtime turn that the season passes, but a 1-in-12 chance that, for instance, a holiday happens. I’m not a big math guy, but that means that the player-characters will experience a couple holidays, on average, each season. And having holidays is fun! Below is an example table of holidays for each season. Contributors to this silly, little list include: myself, Joshy McCroo, Nick LS Whelan, Ty Pitre, Paolino Caputo, Marcia B and Elias Stretch.

Time Is Not Real

A lot of people will not like this system of “time-keeping.” if they’ve read this far, they are surely in a slow boil of rage at just how wrong I am. Some may balk at a lack of some supposed realism, to which I can only point you toward my own extended discursion on that subject. The more clear-minded detractors, however, may dislike how inconsistent this makes time. There may be several downtime turns and several whole adventures that take place entirely in a single season, while other seasons have nothing of consequence, and all of that depends on the vagaries of dice. I can understand this as a cogent criticism, but I disagree with it for two reasons.

First, this imitates my own experiences with time. There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen. This has especially been true in these times of plague. I feel simultaneously like it was just yesterday that I started this blog, but it also feels like it has been ages since I last posted on here (it has in fact been nearly a month, as of this writing). Adventurers, those people willing to risk life and limb delving dungeons for unguaranteed sums of money, are probably not on that grindset, making the most of each day. No, they bring their coins back to civilization just to carouse it away. Months slip them by. When they come to their senses, they may strike out for several months of productive adventuring, but time is no consistent, comforting and predictable presence.

The second reason I prefer this method is the same reason I like torches to have uncertain durations (torches actually function exactly like weather or seasons, except they are results during dungeoneering turns)—imperfect knowledge is fun. It is certainly no fun to have no knowledge. That makes the players’ decisions less meaningful if they have nothing to go off of. That is at the core of Chris McDowall’s ICI Doctrine, which itself describes an animating principle of old-school style play. But information need not be perfect for players to be able to make interesting choices. In fact, imperfect information provides a bit of uncertainty and a bit of risk. As an analogy, imagine player characters in a dungeon room with two doors. If the doors are identical, the players will just be randomly picking which to open. But if one has a pleasing odor wafting from the other side and the other has a pale green puddle of liquid seeping from underneath, they at least have something to go off of. They don’t know exactly what is on the other side, but they have enough information that they are making a decision and not just randomly picking one or the other. Under the system described above, players generally have an idea of how often the weather or the seasons will change, but they don’t know exactly. They have enough to make rough plans around, but it is not so concrete that they can just rely on it entirely.