whosplayerthree:

clitcheese:

here’s a bunch of weirdly in depth d&d questions i have that’s going to take me years of experience to answer so it’d be helpful if someone knows any of this already: so when gygax says, pretty much constantly, that keeping track of in universe time is essential to dungeon crawl campaigns,

1) does this still hold up as true? is there really no way to wing it that DMs have found in the last 30 years?

2) does it still hold up if you abandon wandering monsters for a dungeon with only keyed encounters?

3) what’s the easiest way to count time at the table? should i get an abacus or an app or something like that to calculate time spent?

I have never been in a dnd group where time meant a dang thing when it came to the dungeon crawling parts. I’m sure it could be relevant in some games and used somehow, but it being essential isn’t true any more j guess. Now, OUTSIDE of dungeon crawling I’ve seen it be relevant and used in some interesting ways once in awhile, but even then, still not totally relevant. Only time it’s consistently relevant is when spells that last for a certain amount of time are used, and if it’s not during a match, during which time is easier to track because TECHNICALLY every round is 6 seconds long in in-game time (though rarely seems plausible lol), dms usually just spitball the time that’s passed and let players know when"yeah I think [amount time specified in rulebook that the spell lasts] has passed" or not. Or at least from all my various experiences, including my own short time dming. Didn’t see anything in the rule book about how to track time out of battle and if it’s necessary or not in 5e, and don’t even remember anything about it from when I used to play 3.5e.

yeah that’s the thing i’m interested in DMing 5th but also i’ve read a lot about the Basic editions from the 80s and they sound fun and i’ve been reading bits and pieces from all over the game’s history, mostly because a lot of things in 5e make a lot more sense if u know more about the history. and i’m specifically thinking of this bit in the 1st edition DMG that’s Gygax being like, he will personally come to your house and eat your dice if you don’t track what your characters are doing for every minute they’re inside a dungeon.

the old versions have this thing where turns and rounds are different depending what you’re doing. so it was everything happens in 10 second rounds in combat, but outside that there’s 10 minute exploration rounds. the idea being that your character takes about 10 minutes to scour every 10×10 square in an average sized room and spend the right amount of time finding secret doors and traps and hidden stuff and making their map. and 10 minutes every hour is spent taking a break, and every few hours you get a random encounter to tell your characters to search the dungeon quicker. and 5e has this only as a table saying how fast you can travel and still find hidden things, but it doesn’t have anything on dividing up time outside of combat. but the earlier versions make it really clear that if you don’t track every 10 minute chunk of exploration, you’re doing the game wrong. like, As Wrong As You Can Possibly Be, and u should fuck off to play a different game

and I know 5e must work perfectly well without tracking time like this, otherwise it would be in the rulebooks. I was just thinking specifically because old versions had a very different default play style, where there were megadungeons that took up whole decade long campaigns, or it was one dungeon and then wilderness travel and then the next dungeon, and having a storyline was something that came secondary to Hauling Treasure. i think if it’s a game like that, if i play through a megadungeon in 5e that’s like 50 levels deep and that’s most of the campaign, then i’m pretty sure i’d need to start counting time again. to keep track of hours for wandering monsters and when to force rests on them, because the game then becomes really focused on attrition and resources like light and food, and it’s like “every minute that we don’t get healed up again or find a safe space to rest we’re probably going to die”.

which sounds fun, i’m just a bit in the dark about all the specifics, and i’m also not even sure how well 5e as a system copes with something like that, and how i can simplify something as math-heavy as this to fit my DM style and not be dead weight at the table.