Timekeeping in TTRPGs, Part 1
Identifying the essential distinctions
Keeping causality straight is one of the more demanding aspects of playing a game that largely occurs in the mind of participants. Despite the importance of this task, discussion of different techniques used to track time routinely devolves into clashes of convention, misaligned intuitions, and total semantic confusion.
In this two-part examination, our goal is to establish a simple baseline hierarchy of time-related concepts and then examine the advantages and disadvantages of different techniques. Throughout, we will use examples from real campaigns where different timekeeping methods were employed.
To begin, we’ll seek an understanding of the tools and methods in use, focusing on practice over theory.
Session Time
When completing an activity in the gameworld results in a well-established time elapse (also in the gameworld), we will call that timekeeping method session time. For any gameworld activity X, there is an associated Y amount of time it takes.
Session time is the most important and immediately accessible method of timekeeping. It allows a table of players to communicate complex ideas in an intuitive and practical manner. As a result, it is central to managing TTRPG sessions.
Examples of Session Time
An evening meet
Player characters (PCs) have previously agreed to meet an NPC at dusk (in gameworld time). If the PCs completed all their desired activities by noon, they could simply declare “we play cards until dusk” or similar. This “session” of card-playing is envisioned as a block of time from start (noon) to end (dusk).
If no other independent activity intrudes on this time block, the players and referee can mentally cruise forward in time, and play can continue but with dusk as the new start time.
A journey interrupted
PCs have accepted a task to deliver a sealed letter to the mayor of another settlement, Orctown. The town is quite far, and the trail to get there passes through rough terrain. The journey would take them a total of 24 hours travel at the speeds they can consistently manage. They designate a caravan order and other logistical concerns; the plan is to travel 8 hours a day for three days.
If there are no disruptions, the table can jump forward to the third day. The game time will be 8 hours after the caravan would have started traveling on that day, and the PCs and their caravan will simply have arrived in the settlement as planned.
But the game rules state that travelers must roll for an encounter for every 6 hours of travel. Since there will be 24 hours of travel, regardless of how we slice it up, this implies there will be 4 separate encounter rolls.
If we assume safety from interruption while not traveling, we can represent this trip as a 24-hour block of travel time. We can split that time into three blocks of 8-hour traveling that represents our days. We can additionally identify 4 points of possible interruptions from encounters.
Imagine that the PCs travel as planned and the time E1 (the first possible encounter) comes along. The referee rolls; an encounter occurs. If this encounter is disruptive enough, it can push the whole plan out of alignment—necessitating a new plan. For example, if the encounter caused damage to the road, it might delay the caravan by several hours.
But imagine instead that the referee rolls for E1 and it’s clear. He can immediately roll for E2. If that is also clear, the plan is still undisrupted—no changes must be made. The referee can continue on to roll for E3. For a table with a stated plan, an experienced referee can identify points of possible intervention and carry them out.
Planning & Execution Management
This is the reason that session time is the most powerful, intuitive, and widespread tool for managing TTRPG sessions: its ability to efficiently juggle proposed plans of action. The table makes proposals which fit neatly within session time’s logic and organization. The referee, keeping these proposals in mind, interrogates the game rules to discover if and when disruptions or changes occur.
Session time perfectly coincides with how tables develop, communicate, and hold themselves to agreed-upon propositions. It is the foundational tool for running a TTRPG, and all other timekeeping methods must necessarily work with or rely on session time.
Summing Up
On reflection, how much game-time passed during the full session of play?
If we consider the Example A journey interrupted, the PCs are proposing a plan where they travel 8 hours per day to reach a location 24 hours away. We constructed a travel-hours diagram to reason about the situation, but the full game-time duration is the addition of everything that happened.
If we assume all encounter rolls came up non-disruptive, we could add up the time as follows:
Day 1: 8 hours travel + 8 hours misc + 8 hours rest
Day 2: 8 hours travel + 8 hours misc + 8 hours rest
Day 3: 8 hours travel
That’s 56 hours duration to reach the destination in that case.
A huge number of things could have taken place during a “misc” session, but we know by its inclusion and the implications of session time that those things cannot add up to more than 8 hours duration. Session time lets us maintain strong causal consistency with great ease and speed.
Cinematic Time (Pause Time)
When we watch cinema, we are experiencing a medium that characteristically crunches the passage of time down to efficiently relay a story by displaying particular events and their downstream consequences to relevant characters.
In TTRPGs, cinematic time (or pause time) takes on a very different feel. In seeking the sleek, efficient style of cinema, players organize things so that game-time pauses between table sessions.
Examples of Cinematic Time
Dungeon delving
It is August 1st (in world-time), and the table meets for a play session. A harsh moon in a backwater star system is giving off a signal. Scans indicate a massive power source beneath the surface of a ziggurat. The PCs grab their laser rifles and walk the ziggurat’s perimeter until they find an entrance.
The dungeon is filled with dangers, including defense systems and malevolent creatures. The evening (world-time) grows late. The PCs backtrack to a room with one entrance and cover the door. Game-time is paused. On reflection, 3 in-game days passed.
It is August 13th (world-time); the table meets for another session. The PCs are covering the room’s entrance with their rifles. They continue exploring, eventually finding a path below after many fights and much resupplying. They glimpse a cave system before ending the play session. Game-time is paused. On reflection, 4 in-game days passed.
It is August 22nd (world-time); the table meets again. The newly glimpsed cave lies before the PCs, and they finally discover the power source—an urn-sized metallic device. It’s a valuable collector’s item or scientific curiosity, and they decide to end the session after their ship exits the moon’s atmosphere. On reflection, 2 in-game days passed.
Lining it all up, we can diagram the game-time compared to the world-time. If we naively relate the passage of game-time and world-time, we can see that over a duration of 23 world-time days, our campaign world experienced only 9 days.
Town defense
It is August 1st (world-time); the table meets for a session. A neighboring kingdom has declared war on the PCs’ homeland, and scouts report massing enemy armies. The PCs are tasked by their lord to stay and command the defense of the town until the king’s army arrives—which should be in five days.
The PCs coordinate with the militia to prepare. On the morning of the third day, an enemy force arrives. The battle is desperate. The evening (in world-time) grows late, and the players decide to count casualties and pause the game-time before morning. On reflection, 3 in-game days passed.
It is August 5th (world-time)—another session. Two in-game days pass with no sign of the king’s army. Concerns about supplies and morale grow. Four more in-game days pass. On the fifth day, an enemy force arrives to siege the city. The force spends two days building a camp, but they strangely charge into the fortifications on the morning of the next day. The battle is bloody, but the town holds. The evening (in world-time) grows late, and game-time is paused. On reflection, 10 in-game days passed.
It is August 13th (world-time). The townspeople are growing desperate, and the PCs decide to scout neighboring areas. They unluckily cross paths with an enemy cavalry column and are all killed. They roll a new party of characters belonging to the enemy kingdom. They enroll into the army and train before marching to war with a third kingdom. They are killed in their first battle. On reflection, 90 in-game days passed.
A diagram reveals that, in principle, cinematic time durations and world-time durations are completely uncoupled because the passage of time in one can never predict the passage of time in another.
Operational Considerations
Using cinematic time as a timekeeping method boils down to gluing the end of one play session to the beginning of the next. If we look back on the campaign history, we see something like a movie. The individual sessions of play form one uninterrupted flow of hands-on action.
Since no play happens outside of table sessions, table time becomes a premium item.
Individual play examples like
a ranger investigating the nearby woods
a scientist testing the properties of an alien artifact
an alchemist creating a new batch of potions
are costly in terms of table time. Attention given to individual play comes at the expense of everyone else at the table. These kinds of activities become successively minimized until they are a combination of absent and heavily abstracted—very often the term “handwaved” is used.
The concept of “a party” or a “main party” is quickly arrived at. This has the best alignment with maximizing the expenditure of table time on as many participants as possible. If “the party” is engaging in some activity, then all players present are engaged. This is the clear optimal style of play with cinematic time because it supports the movie ideal of a primary protagonist force on an adventure and pragmatically avoids misallocating players’ limited time.
Reference Time
An alternative to cinematic time is reference time (also called 1:1 time, 1:X time, or Jeffrogaxian timekeeping); it stresses usability and communicability between and across tables. When using reference time, the events of sessions are placed and noted on the world-time calendar so that anyone participating in the campaign can reference events and understand the history of a campaign as it relates to the passage of world-time.
The most important practical method of reference time is syncing the real-world calendar with the in-game calendar. For each day that passes in world-time, one day (or some fixed number of days) passes in game-time. This seems to contradict the methods of session time, but the two work together by correctly anchoring sessions in the real-world calendar. A demonstration is necessary for true understanding.
Example of Reference Time
A mysterious island
It is August 1st (world-time). PCs (we’ll call them Alec, Bob, and Carl) arrive at a small New England coastal town to meet a contact but discover that he is missing. They experience a host of oddities in town: distant noises at the docks, locals preventing access to places of worship, strange lights emanating from a mansion in the hills, and so on.
The players decide to investigate the docks, renting a boat and necessary equipment. They shove off on the second night and end up lost in a deep fog. They arrive on an island. For two days they wander, stalked by shadows. The next day, they find holy water and defeat the shadows, lifting the fog around the island (August 6th game-time). Far off in the distance, they can make out the shore. They head back and end the session in town. On reflection, 6 game-time days passed.
Lights in the mansion
It is August 3rd (world-time). The same players gather at the table to play. When the previous session’s events are placed using reference time, it is clear that those characters have not yet returned by August 3rd. Those PCs are in “time jail” until August 7th, finishing out their adventure. The table rolls up a new batch of characters and decides to pursue the lights in the mansion.
The PCs (Don, Eric, and Fig) spend a day asking the town about the mansion, gaining little insight. The next day, they go to the mansion and meet a scientist who claims he is studying the town’s strange fog. He invites the PCs to view his experiments in the cellar late in the evening. It was a trap! Eric and Fig die. Don draws his cutlass and slays the scientist. Eric’s disembodied voice screams for help from an odd machine, the fog swirling about it. Don swears to get to the bottom of things. The session ends; on reflection, 2 days have passed.
A dark mission
Before the next play session (August 8th) comes up, Don’s player details that Don will continue investigating the odd machine. At some point on August 6th (game-time and world-time), the fog swirling around the machine vanishes—Eric’s disembodied cries go silent.
It is August 8th. No characters are in time jail. Don’s player wants to keep trying to save Eric; thus, he chooses to play Don this session. The other two players, controlling Bob and Carl, make their way to the mansion and encounter Don, who explains the situation. Bob and Carl relay how the fog disappeared after defeating shadows, and Don insists they return to the island to look for some way to “power” the odd machine.
The group spends a day preparing and making the journey to the island, where they spend two days searching. They recover only an oily substance where the shadow was defeated. On return they apply the oil to the odd machine, and a voice begs for help! After tinkering with the machine, Eric’s unnaturally cold body stirs with motion; he seems disoriented and confused, but Don is ecstatic. The players decide to end the session here. On reflection, 5 days have passed. This session ends in game-time on the evening of August 12th.
The creeping threat
August 13th (in world-time) arrives, but no additional sessions have been organized yet. As time marches forward, each of the players can specify what their characters are doing in the gap between sessions (most often called “downtime”). Alec is investigating hiking trails and other public places for signs of the contact he originally came to meet. Bob, Carl, and Don are using the mansion to rest and recover (in preparation for the next time the players can meet).
However, Eric is not actually Eric but a shadow possessing Eric’s body! Shadow Eric attempts to silently murder the occupants of the mansion. Bob and Carl are killed in their sleep, but Don manages to evade death and escape the mansion, horrified by this turn of events. Don spends the remaining time between sessions hiding from Shadow Eric.
Unsimple revenge
It is August 16th. Only two players can gather for the session. Don’s player offers Alec (his other character) to the other player. Don and Alec meet during the course of downtime and fill each other in on various events. Both Don and Alec are motivated to hunt down Shadow Eric and begin formulating plans to trap him.
They spend a day seeking out a large amount of holy water—and one more day scouting the area around the mansion. After hopeful constructions designed to prevent the creature’s retreat from the mansion grounds, they burst forcefully into the mansion during the afternoon daylight. Shadow Eric is present and in a weakened state. Alec and Don drench the creature in holy water, evading its attacks; Shadow Eric finally succumbs.
Alec and Don bury their friends on consecrated ground the next day. They are resolved to get at the root of evil in this town; they spend a day spying on the locals. The session is ended; on reflection, 5 days passed.
Representing what happened using reference time, it becomes clear that it is more practical to track individual characters (including NPCs!) and events rather than simply placing session blocks. Reference time makes it possible to wrangle complex world-driven decisions and events—it’s a matter of knowing where and when.
Operational Considerations
Implementing reference time comes down to efficiently reconciling the use of session time with the desire to have a synced calendar. We do this by placing sessions at the correct start date and treating the session’s events as part of the campaign canon. When a day in world-time passes, a day (or a fixed number of days) in game-time passes.
Players snap back to the world-time date after a play session ends; thus, the events in a newly played session represent a carved out future space. Since the rate of the passage of days is known, it is easy to make judgments such as “on Wednesday evening when we have our next session, the town will not yet have burned—the shopkeeper there should still be alive.”
Characters stuck in the future (i.e. time jail) must complete their journey before being accessible—this includes NPCs! But the events and changes that characters have already caused can and must inform any further play.
Similarly, if there is a gap between the end-date of a previous session and the start date of the next session, that gap represents fully playable days of time. Characters can shop, build, scheme, and even die in these spaces between sessions. This is the fundamental essence of reference time—a world that never sleeps.
Cinematic or Reference?
We have established crucial and practical distinctions between session time, cinematic time, and reference time. With these three constellations of concepts, it becomes possible to compare the advantages of cinematic time and reference time without the usual baggage of terminological confusions.
The utility of these two timekeeping methods relies on their ability to consistently juggle session time. We will examine this all-important aspect (and more) in Part 2.
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I’m gonna havta re-read that.
Or, easier, I could shout THATS NOT HOW WE DID IT IN THE 80S WHY DO YOU HATE FUN