The Topic of Time

This is part of a series, which starts right here.

Gary Gygax made a big deal about timekeeping. Here's what he said in original Dungeon Master's Guide (1979):

"Game time is of utmost importance. Failure to keep careful track of time expenditure by player characters will result in many anomalies in the game. The stricture of time is what makes recovery of hit points meaningful. Likewise, the time spent adventuring in wilderness areas removes concerned characters from their bases of operations – be they rented chambers or battlemented strongholds. Certainly the most important time strictures pertains to the manufacturing of magic items, for during the period of such activity no adventuring can be done. Time is also considered in gaining levels and learning new languages and more. All of these demands upon game time force choices upon player characters and likewise number their days of game life…YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”

Clearly, he cared deeply about the matter. This is the only "official" suggestion that HSI makes at the start of the book. It suggests breaking a day into 4-hour increments, referred to as a "watch." There are 6 watches in one day, with the last two being at night. This makes time into an easily-trackable resource and it feels a bit board-gamey... in a good way. The author suggests using poker chips for this purpose, which works perfectly.

Traveling to or exploring a hex costs 1 watch. In fact, just about any kind of overworld movement on the map costs a watch. That's it. It's a resource to be managed, and my players were always very careful. The nighttime watches were used to track time through the night (duh).

In my game of Hot Springs Island, the players explored less than 1/3rd of the possible locations. I credit this exclusively to timekeeping. After running two other hex crawls without keeping time, I saw the difference. Without time, travel is a trivial, boring and meaningless. This is why it's largely extinct in the official published adventures.

So yeah, tracking time leads to all kinds of interesting situations that simply wouldn't exist otherwise.

Next, let's learn how I simulated an ecosystem with random tables.