Keeping strict time records
In my game (4 scores over 3 sessions so far) we never actually said how much time passed and it makes me feel like we’re not having a meaningful campaign. Do you keep track of how much time passes in the fiction during a downtime?
I do, but only because my PCs have been contracted to complete two scores in a week so the passage of time has come up frequently as something to consider. If there’s nothing pressing, there’s no real reason to track time other than having htat little bit of flavor.
I feel like the game specifically has the Score/Downtime structure so that you don’t need to worry about how much time is passing if you don’t want to.
I’m tracking time passing because I’m very excited to use the Months, Seasons, and Festivals listed in the rule book. I’m taking inspiration from stuff like the early seasons of Downton Abbey, just because I want that atmospheric touch of “this setting is super old and everyone has their own shit going on and doesn’t necessarily have time to meet immediately when you want.”
“YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.”
Dungeon Master’s Guide (page 37), Gary Gygax
🙂
I want you to know Arne Jamtgaard that you made me snort really loudly with laughter
Arne Jamtgaard Oh man, then I didn’t had any meaningful campaign yet and finally I know why. Luckily all of the campaigns were a great time and lots of fun anyway 🙂 Take that Gary! 🙂
My time does what I tell it to do to make my player look awesome
I do. I also have a chart for tracking moon phases and a wee table for determining the weather randomly on any given day, information that is all included in the weekly “newspaper” handout I make for my players. I also refer to the hours of the day by their proper, in-universe name.
But I’m nuts.
Keeping time records, strict or otherwise, is not a prerequisite to having a meaningful campaign. In fact overall I’d say it’s entirely irrelevant. The meaningfulness of a campaign, ANY campaign, is never going to come out of charts and tables and number-crunching, it’s going to come out of the players’ connection and interest in the story, characters, and setting. No one anywhere has ever said “What I enjoyed most about that campaign was the calendar the GM came up with”, or if they have it was meant in a really snide and hurtful manner.
This might go for all of art and media, in fact. Outside of 24 I can’t think of a single show that gives more than token gestures towards tracking the “time” between episodes.
But by all means go for it if you want to. One word of warning though, don’t expect your players to care. If you’re going to track a campaign calendar, do it for yourself. It’s handy to have an immediate and precise answer to questions like “How long since we killed that guy?” or “When is the next full moon?”, but if you go beyond just casual mentions (or handout fluff) unsolicited, it’s at best going to bore players.
It’s a powerful and effective tool when you have an appropriate use for it. But when it’s just part of the background it’s about as interesting and relevant to most players as matching the Gregorian calendar to star dates, and will have no effect whatsoever on how “meaningful” your campaign ultimately feels.
Oh and I think I should add a note about my own methods, if you’re interested.
I do all my dating effectively retroactively. At the beginning of a session I give my players the current date in Doskvol (in the form of my fake newspaper handout). But the date for next week’s game is determined by the end of this week’s game, based on how much activity the players got up to between scores (downtime, planning, and free play or whatnot).
The score itself usually takes place over a few hours, or at least no more than a single day or so, so it doesn’t really require any thought. Most downtime actions suggest only a short amount of time, too. It doesn’t take more than a night of hard partying to indulge your vice, a day or two to consort with magistrates to knock your heat down, or a few days rest to heal cuts and bruises (or radical surgical procedures, as my particular group prefers). Extra downtime actions add to this of course. I tend to think of spending Rep as being pretty representative of the passage of time, you’re losing reputation because your group is focusing on tasks other than their criminal enterprises, and thus their influence on the streets is slipping while they’re “inactive”.
The other big time-builder is planning, and of course you can’t know how much time went into planning until after the score. That could be anything from a day’s “Gather Information” by casing a target looking for weaknesses, to weeks spent studying a target’s schedule and daily routines. In a previous heist my gang wanted to work out the schedule of a weekly payroll shipment, which pretty much demands multiple weeks to pass so they can track the shipment more than once before hitting it. We played it vague and loose at the time, but by the next session I used that information to determine that a few weeks must have passed since the last date I had given.
This brings me to the matter of urgency. Sometimes you need a deadline on a score. In the case of a heist thought up entirely by your players to hit a target that will always be available (rob a bank, steal a payroll, kidnap a magistrate…) you can of course give them all the time they need.
Other scores demand a deadline. The prisoner you want to break out before he’s shipped off to Ironhook, the gem-studded treasure of the old world on display only temporarily before continuing its tour of the Shattered Isles, the gang you want to hit before they take out one of your friends. You obviously can’t let the players spend weeks or months of game time prepping for these jobs. But my advice would be to be flexible and be vague. When will the prisoner be transported to Ironhook? Some time within the next few days. How long until the Billhooks launch their attack on the Lost? You have maybe a day or two.
This looseness of deadlines leaves more of the planning in the player’s hands, allowing them the breathing room to choose between a quick-and-dirty assault plan or a more prepared deception plan. If you give them more hardline deadlines, they might feel forced into a particular plan or course of action, and I don’t think that’s really within the spirit of the game.
Which isn’t to say you can’t occasionally have a “This has to be done TONIGHT” type of deadline for a score, just that it should be used sparingly. The ability of players to take the initiative and guide the action is one of this game’s strongest points.
Anyway I’ve wandered well off my original topic at this point, but to summarize the way I do my time records:
1. Give the players the date at the beginning of a session
2. Play fast and loose and by gut feeling/common sense for the passage of time during the session. Don’t be specific unless you have to.
3. For the next session, set the new date based on an assessment (mostly gut-feeling and common sense again) of how much time the previous session should have burned up. Long scores with lots of planning and prep-work (which will often come in the form of flashbacks) will have taken longer than seat-of-their pants rush jobs. Big downtime expenditures means more time has passed. Etc etc.
I only keep track of time with any seriousness whenever there’s an in-game deadline. “In 2 days they’ll get back to you” makes me pay attention, otherwise I’m very lax with it.