Thanks Andy for a profitable and interesting one-on-one session last night. It also generated a shit-ton of homework for me so that's fantastic! Seriously, I love D&D homework. When the players don't generate it for me, I make up assignments for myself. I'm especially excited for 2 of the 4 assignments I got last night.
PLAYERS & CHARACTERS
I sent out a snapshot of everyone's characters' statuses as I like to do periodically. Andy agreed to let me use his for an explanation about reading these.
Player stats indicates how many days it has been since the player last joined a session and the percentage of sessions he or she has attended since first joining. Each of the player's characters have a rating of 1 to 4 which represents the number of weeks of training needed for the next level. This was discussed in June, although not submitting any downtime orders, no longer has a negative impact on a character's rating. The "days behind" column just shows how far in the past each character is relative the character(s) furthest along the timeline. It happens that Calvis is one of the characters at the forefront, so I should point out that this figure is relative to the "globally" most advanced characters, rather than just the player's most advanced character(s). The rest of the columns seem self-explanatory to me, but please don't hesitate ask me about any of these, or anything else about the game any time.
There are a couple of other columns that I track and haven't included, notably the maximum age column. It doesn't come up in play much, especially at lower levels, but every character has an expiration date (unknown to the player) somewhere between age 62 and 139 (for humans), though most commonly between 86 and 119. The primary reason this matters is that some undead drain years of life and some powerful spells cost casters years of life. This unnatural aging counts against the character's longevity limit.
One reason I wanted to highlight this today is to discuss how "1:1 time" is operationalized in our game. As is often the case, Andy pushed the limits of my previous thoughts on this, so I have more clarity on how this works to share with you all.
SCHEDULE
Last night was the last game of 2025 and so I feel compelled to write a brief wrap-up/summary of the year.
- We played 23 sessions with an average of 2.7 players.
- Tuesdays and Thursdays both averaged 2.8 players with 9 sessions falling on each of those days of the week, and the 5 Saturday sessions averaged 2.2 players each.
- We began the year with 4 active players, ended with 6, and peaked with 8. We had 9 different players in game at some point over the year, and there are 4 people who have indicated their intention to join in 2026.
- There were 9 player characters killed in action.
- There are 11 player characters currently active.
- The highest level character is 5th. There are 4 characters at 2nd level and 2 of these are on the verge of 3rd. The remaining 6 characters are all 1st level.
TIPS & TRICKS
While I've discussed the principle of how our "1:1 time-keeping" works, there are some quirks to operationalizing this that have become apparent. The basic premise is that between game sessions, time from the characters' perspective flows at the same rate as time from the players' perspective. During sessions, time might speed up or slow down as makes sense for handling the character's actions in the game world. Cross country travel taking a couple of days of game time can often be resolved in a matter of minutes, for example. When that happens, the characters' "clocks" are advanced the two days even though we are still on the same day in the real world. If we end a game session, as Andy and I did last night, with a character clock at February 14, 1480 on Dec 16, 2025, then on Dec 17, the character's clock ticks forward to February 15, 1480.
Character Clock Holds: An exception to the character's clock advancing with the calendar has occurred a couple of times so far. In both instances, the players gave me orders that I needed time to resolve in excess of the time passing. In both cases, I held the characters' clocks to the date at which those characters would have had the information that I was providing them so that they didn't lose game days on account of my processing time. Once I provide the results, character time begins ticking again, but they haven't lost any game time due to my dawdling.
Character Orders Must Be Proactive: Another quirk which arose recently was when a player who had not issued any downtime orders for a character that hadn't been played in some time wanted to designate how the character's time had been spent. This retroactive sort of play is fairly common in modern games. I've certainly done it as both player and referee in the past. At those times, when it has been agreed that there would not have been a "game fiction" impact for those actions to have been taken earlier, this was acceptable. It runs against the intent of 1:1 time-keeping, however. If a character is already at such and so date, it is not possible to issue back-dated orders. The player has already missed the opportunity to execute those orders in the past, and must execute them in the future if he or she wants them done.
If the player was allowed to designate what the orders for the last 4 weeks would have been at the end of that period, the character is getting the fruits of that effort without paying any price--the game time has already passed, after all. Instead, if the player is issuing the orders proactively, he or she is "paying" for the results by rendering the character unavailable for use. It's an opportunity cost that can only be paid in advance to be meaningful.
Limits to Downtime Orders: Another quirk that has only become apparent to me through experimentation with using this style of game time-keeping, is just how far to allow out of session action to run. If session play can advance a character's game clock, and game time between sessions runs at 1:1 with real time, does that mean that downtime orders take as many real world days as game days?
Imagine that Andy has a character currently at game date January 30, 1480 in Castlenoe. Barry has a character in Killarney at February 12. There is a session schedule tomorrow in which these two players would like to run both these characters in Killarney. If downtime orders only execute at 1:1 time, then even though it would only be February 2 by the time Andy's character made the journey from Castlenoe to Killarney, 10 days earlier than Barry's character's current date, Andy wouldn't be able to do that unless downtime orders could be executed faster. They can.
Downtime orders can advance the character's clock until hitting the clock of the most advanced character. So they can't advance the global game clock, but they can catch the character up to it. That is the limit on downtime orders. The "days behind" indicates how much slack each character has available to exceed 1:1 time on his or her orders.
Further Thoughts: Remembering when characters were where while they are not all synchronized to the same clock is a little bit of a cognitive load on this referee. For the moment I seem to be keeping my shit together, but I foresee a day when I will fuck it up. Probably badly. It's possible that I will need to force clock synchronizations at some point, so keep in mind your "days behind slack" in case I call upon everyone to use or lose that time at some point in the future!
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