PLAYERS & CHARACTERS
We have no changes to the player roster since the last newsletter, but I have dropped the "1478" from the web site name, making it simply "Erin" since we're all now into Dec 1480 and Jan 1481.
I'd like to give you all the heads up that I will be seeking a vote on rules in the next month or two. We've agreed to play AD&D "by-the-book" in this group, but "the book" doesn't cover all of the situations we have run into during play in an unambiguous way. As a result, there have been a number of rules extensions and interpretations that the referees have been following to cover these. It is essential to our style of play that we all agree on those rules, hence the upcoming vote.
Some of you may feel unqualified to vote, or unsure about the rules interpretations. Most of these have already been brought up in Discord, though feedback has been fairly limited. Nevertheless, discussion and debate is more than welcomed. It's criticism and debate that will help us refine these rules into a game we all want to play. In the next newsletter or two or three, I'll present the rules that are up for confirmation, rejection, or refinement.
SCHEDULE
Our next scheduled game is a Thursday, 17 Sep. I'm soliciting feedback for next year's schedule. If there are particular days of the month that don't work for you, or others that would be more convenient, please let me know. The Wednesday, online session for example, has been dropped from the 2027 calendar since it was never used in 2026, but I have feedback from one player requesting it be included. This is the kind of feedback I'd like to have.
TIPS & TRICKS
The Flow of Time in Erin
YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT.
- Gary Gygax, Dungeon Masters Guide (TSR Games, 1979) p. 37.
One of the central rule constructs in Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is time-keeping. Pages 37 - 38 of the Dungeon Masters Guide (DMG) summarizes most of the rules concerning time, although like the rest of the rules in this game, many parts of the rules are scattered throughout the books. The author apparently expected readers to read the entirety of the rule books with perfect retention. In all capital letters, as Gygax does in these books for emphasis, he wrote the strident admonishment quoted above.
During play sessions, time is tracked in days, hours, turns (10-minute chunks), rounds (1-minute chunks), or segments (6-second chunks), depending on the activity in which the characters are engaged. For example, time spent in the relative safety of a settlement resting, information gathering, shopping, hiring, and so on is typically tracked by days. Hit points are recovered by healing on a per day, or per week, basis, so counting the segments would make no sense. For some quick activity in a settlement, such as stopping briefly to change horses, time might be counted in hours as it is part of an overland journey which is tracked by the hour. Hourly tracking of such travel is usually necessary, because the terrain through which the characters travel may vary and the type of terrain, as well as its degree of civilization, affect whether or not a random encounter might occur during each period throughout the travel day, and what that encounter could be. Time in the dungeon is tracked in turns, and in rounds during combat, occasionally segment tracking comes into play in special circumstances such as surprise and spellcasting in the midst of combat.
While carefully tracked, time in the session is also elastic. Mere moments might be spent resolving the results of days or weeks of character time in the game world, or half an hour resolving a few minutes of a complex combat. Such elasticity is normal and expected during a session.
Most D&D tables pay at least lip service to in-session time-keeping as described above, some more strictly than others, perhaps. At our table, the referees track time in the session as carefully and correctly as they are able, understanding that sometimes mistakes are made. Players should always correct the referee when he or she makes any sort of error, time-keeping included.
Outside of the game session, time flows for characters at the same rate as real world time, tracked in days. Although many tables ignore this rule, it is explicit in the rules of our game. Though somewhat buried in an example, the rules state, “it is best to use 1 actual day = 1 game day when no play is happening.” For this reason, it is imperative that players get their characters to some place of relative safety, or articulate some plan for self-preservation, before adjourning a session of play. A character left in the dungeon at the end of a session with a couple hours of lamp oil, a few days rations, and no orders to somehow exit or hole up, is unlikely to be alive when the next session is played if that is a week or two later.
In our game there are several players, and even more characters, and they aren’t all played in the same sessions. Because of that, and coupled with the elasticity of time within sessions, characters end up being in different times. The rules are clear that characters who have extra time, called “slack time” in our game, because other characters have gotten ahead of them, are permitted to accelerate their time, or “fast-forward” as we call it. A player may choose to fast-forward a character in order to catch up with another with whom the player would like to play his or her character in a session for example. Likewise, a character tied up with level training, or healing, or some other time-consuming activity might fast-forward through it, provided that character has sufficient “slack time” to do so. It is only characters being played in session who have the benefit of truly elastic time and may therefor advance the time “horizon” for the campaign. The DMG suggests that there is a limit to how far that horizon might be advanced, but leaves it to the referee to quantify: “Being aware of time differences between groups of player characters will enable you to prevent the BIG problems. You will know when the adventuring of one such group has gone far enough ahead in game time to call a halt.” At some point the referees in our game will need to decide on a standard for this, and input from all of the participants is invited to inform that decision.
Gygax articulates the reasons for such time-keeping quite well:
The time lines of various player characters will diverge, meet, and diverge again over the course of game years. This makes for interesting campaigns and helps form the history of the milieu.
You may ask why time is so important if it causes such difficulties with record-keeping, dictates who can or can not go adventuring during a game session, and disperses player characters to the four winds by its strictures. Well, as initially pointed out, it is a necessary penalty imposed upon characters for certain activities. Beyond that, it also gives players yet another interesting set of choices and consequences. The latter tends to bring more true-to-life quality to the game, as some characters will use precious time to the utmost advantage, some will treat it lightly, and some will be constantly wasting it to their complete detriment. Time is yet another facet which helps to separate the superior players from the lesser ones. If time-keeping is a must from a penalty standpoint, it is also an interesting addition from the standpoint of running a campaign.
Beyond the general case of time-keeping articulated above, there are exceptions. When the referees take time to process orders, as they sometimes do, characters must not pay a penalty in lost time for that. In cases where this happens, the characters' time is advanced only as the processing of their orders catches up with those orders' time requirements. The burden on referees is to ensure that orders processing is completed in a timely enough fashion that characters are caught up to their time line far enough ahead of sessions that their players have a reasonable opportunity to issue orders for the rest of the time they have between the completion of their characters' orders and the start of the characters' next session.
As complicated as it is, this does all get easier to keep in one's head with practice!
