Strict Timekeeping: OSR or BS, eh?

[Gringnr]

[NOTE: This thread may reference some prickly personalities in the RPG scene. Believe it or not, it is not my intention to stir up shit, or to incite arguments on non-RPG-related subjects. And, no, I'm obviously not trying to tell people what they can or cannot talk about here or anywhere else. I'm not a mod (thank f*ck). I'm just expressing my hope that this site, which IMO has the best RPG discourse on the 'net, can talk about this subject in an insightful and enlightening manner.]

So, I've seen a bit of chatter on the ol' interwebz about strict timekeeping in D&D. I'm sure most of you are aware of Gary Gygax's quote from the AD&D DMG (1979), which states:

"YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT."

A certain small group online has taken to the belief that AD&D should be played as RAW and literally as possible. They claim that doing so unlocks a style and experience of play unparalleled, and one that has largely been "forgotten." They extol the virtues not only of "strict timekeeping," but of demihuman level caps, weapon vs. armor, etc.

Seeing as the 'Pub seems to have a bevy of insividuals who are knowledgeable in matters of gaming history and theory, I wanted to see what the consensus was here.

I guess for me this begs a few questions.

1. Was this really the intended play style for AD&D? I've always been under the impression that most people tended to use AD&D "a la carte" style. Is this not correct?

2. Did Gary play this way? I've heard conflicting things about that.

3. If this was the intended way to play AD&D, what does that mean for other versions of D&D, as understood by Gygax? And can strict timekeeping have benefits for OSR games? Or would you need to take AD&D as a whole in order to really get the "full effect?"

4. Have any of you ever experienced this playstyle? Was it really all that and a bag of chips? If so, why? If not, why not?

I guess my own take on the matter (and I admit there is much I don't know, which is why I'm seeking others' experiences and opinions on the matter) is that the OSR/AD&D "purism" that I see seems largely driven by people who weren't there? Kind of like how black metal bands think it's "trve kvlt" to sound raw, "just like in the old days," when the reason bands from the past did that was that recording extreme music was a new concept (shout out to Scott Burns IYKYK), plus a lot of these old bands were broke. So a lot of Scandinavians who took metal WAY too seriously heard old demos and thought it was a matter of intent rather than circumstance.

In a similar vein, wasn't the absence of non-combat/non--dungeoneering aspects of early D&D more of an oversight than a design choice?

I started gaming around 1980-81, so I missed the first (OD&D) wave. I started with either Holmes, Moldvay or whatever who I happened to be gaming with had. I didn't play AD&D until much later and even then, I and everyone I knew treated it like dim sum. A little of this, a hunk of that, I'll pass on that one, thanks, oh, yeah, gimme some o' that right there.

I eagerly await my edification at the hands of the 'Pub's retrogaming brain trust.

 

[Fenris-77]

Well, I don't want to hazard any guesses over how Gary played versus what he wrote. I know that looking back over the many AD&D campaigns I played in that time keeping was all over the map from game to game. PErsonally, I think it's quite important if you want resource management to be a key player at the table. Counting arrows and especially torches and rations really only matters when strict timekeeping is in play.

 

[StubbornMule]

Over the years I've seen various interpretations of "strict" to mean anything from needing to know what every character is doing every single moment (in and out of game) to more or less having your out-of-game downtime pass in realtime (Your character needs 2 weeks to heal? You're sitting out of the game for 2 weeks.).

I personally view both of those as kind of absurd, but hew closer to the first -- more of how a chunk of time might be glossed over in a book (at least for downtime). But otherwise, keeping tabs on consumables during play/exploration is only possible by tracking the appropriate passage of time.

However, a lot of the argument does seem to originate from people who weren't there at the time wanting to play old-school DnD RAW, despite the fact that it doesn't seem anyone ever did at the time.

 

[Tulpa Girl]

I certainly can't speak to how things were done in the early Days - I entered the hobby about a decade after you did - although I strongly suspect that there were in fact a wide variety of styles and approaches, simply due to human nature.

I do think Gygax probably did make an effort, out of necessity, to keep a solid handle on the passage of time and the ramifications thereof, simply because by pretty much all accounts he was running games for different groups and individuals all within his campaign setting.

 

[Bunch]

Strict timekeeping seems like a reasonable expectation if you're playing the loot to level game. It's all a huge resource management/tactics game.

That didn't translate as well to the millions of 8-16 yr olds who picked up the game and saw a way to play fantasy novels. So you have a Wargammer(Gary) in desperate need of an editor who pushed out rules in a time when getting clarification took months if ever to get.

How people played and what Gary intended are completely unrelated in a lot of cases.

Then let's add how the books came out because you really can't talk early 1st edition and not talk about that. 1st was Monster Manual designed for Holmes Basic/ODD vs AD&D. Then later (maybe a year) you get Players Handbook. This discussed nothing about how to actually hit a monster so you still are hanging on ODD/Basic for those answers. Then maybe a year later you finally get DMG. So you're already playing a hybrid ODD/Basic/AD&D game before you even get the full rules.

.

 

[BedrockBrendan]

Time keeping was all over the map when I started playing (which was the mid-80s). I have messed around with 1-1 time and strict time keeping. It is like anything else, a tool that can help in some situations, but AD&D and D&D have so many varied styles of play that it won't make sense in every campaign (and even when it does, 'strict' can mean a lot of different things for time keeping). On 1-1 time, the value I found with it, is if you have two groups in the same campaign world, it can make keeping track of things that happen in 1 that might affect the other, easier.

 

[JAMUMU]

Question Asker: What were all the army details and troop strength numbers meant to be used for in the '83 Greyhawk boxed set? (paraphrase)

E. Gary Gygax: Those were simply informational pieces that the DM could utilize or not. The dates were those of my campaign...where timekeeping was not strictly adhered to. If the material presented was included in any DM's campaign the date could easily be altered to conform to their version of the WoG. (word for word, emphasis mine)

 

[T. Foster]

What he was saying is you have to enforce downtime - for travel, training, research, recovery, recruiting, etc - and characters engaged in some time-consuming activity might have to sit out one or more sessions or, if all the other players agree to wait around for them, the world still progresses in their absence - more monsters might move into previously cleared areas, existing monsters might recruit new members or fortify their lairs more, other NPC parties might swoop in and clear out a dungeon and the treasure, monsters might decide to leave their area and take their treasure with them, bad guys who are plotting mischief will have their plots progress unimpeded, etc.

There’s a lot of stuff players will want to do to improve their characters that takes time (days, weeks, or longer) and there needs to be a trade-off in doing those things rather than just handwaving “it’s now 3 months later but absolutely nothing has happened or changed during that time so effectively it might as well be the next day.”

He was also (as the extended example that follows the famous all-caps declaration illustrates) concerned about when multiple groups of players are adventuring in the same area to make sure they stay reasonably in-synch timewise and that each group’s actions are persistent with the other groups (if group A visits location X on day Y and group B visits the same location on day Y+2 they need to see the impact of group A’s actions, and if group B left off on day Y-2 the next time they play the DM either needs to fast-forward them to day Y+1 or at least declare they can’t go to location X until that day because “fate” has already decreed what the other group will do there). However, having multiple parallel player groups active in the same location like that isn’t something that has ever been common outside of Gary’s own campaign (because, honestly, no DM with a job or family is likely to have the time or energy to administer multiple groups like that - Gary didn’t have a full time day job, neglected his family, and also had a ton of (probably chemically-enhanced) energy and didn’t sleep more than a couple hours a night, but that’s not something many other people can or should emulate, outside of teenage kids during summer break) so of limited applicability to most people.

That’s all the “strict time records” thing means.

 

[ffilz]

Timeline for AD&D was:

December 1977 Monster Manual (introduction to AD&D)
June 1978 Player's Handbook
February 1979 AD&D DMG preview in Dragon #22 with combat tables (actually probably January) also in June/July White Dwarf #13
August 1979 DMG

As to how I ran my game back in the day:

I started my AD&D campaign sometime in early 1979. I may have started it before getting Dragon #22, but I suspect I started it after. Initially I used Greyhawk for treasure tables. I did not use Weapon vs. Armor. I don't think we kept very strict time tracking other than in combat, definitely not outside the dungeon. Once PCs had 2nd level spells, torches and lanterns were replaced with Continual Light. I don't know if we ever used XP for gold in that campaign (by then I had also ran Chivalry & Sorcery and RuneQuest). We did use demi-human level caps, though we might have busted some with wishes.

I DO try and keep track of time in RuneQuest, and I often fail...

My lack of good time keeping means seasons and weather are kind of ridiculous...

I have observed one definitely multi-playgroup campaign, Paul Gazis's Eight Worlds Traveller campaign where several PC ships operated at the same real time. I'm sure he kept some track of time, but I'm not sure how strict. The ships tended to explore in different directions I think so there was not too much risk of crossing timelines other than in the central worlds (the Eight Worlds).

 

[Skarg]

1. Was this really the intended play style for AD&D? I've always been under the impression that most people tended to use AD&D "a la carte" style. Is this not correct?

Intended? According to that quote, by Gary Gygax, about Gary Gygax' intentions, yes.

"Most people" is a different thing from "intended", and is also almost always only accurate about the people the current speaker/writer's has experience with. Groups and players vary, a lot, even if many of them like to think they know something true or meaningful about "most people".


2. Did Gary play this way? I've heard conflicting things about that.

I have no idea.


3. If this was the intended way to play AD&D, what does that mean for other versions of D&D, as understood by Gygax?

No idea.

And can strict timekeeping have benefits for OSR games? Or would you need to take AD&D as a whole in order to really get the "full effect?"

Of course strict timekeeping has benefits, for almost any game that pretends to be self-consistent, and that doesn't prefer warping time for motives of convenience or apathy.


4. Have any of you ever experienced this playstyle? Was it really all that and a bag of chips? If so, why? If not, why not?

LMAO, of course. I almost always do my best to have time be correct and matter and effect things. The GMs I've played with (well, the ones I liked, which is most of them) also almost all took time seriously.

When/if a GM says things like: "I don't know what the date is." or "I don't know what season it is." or otherwise shows they don't know nor care about time passing, and the opportunity that should involve for everyone to be doing something during that time, I lose a lot of respect for that GM, and a lot of interest in the current game, unless we've agreed on some playstyle where that's just not going to be a part of play at all, for some greater purpose, or because the campaign has a very limited context.

Why? Because it destroys my ability to treat the game situation as at all real, or the GM as at all taking a major aspect of any self-consistent situation, at all seriously.

And, because yes, it IS fun and interesting to me, to play a game that has self-consistent, rational, natural cause and effect, which definitely needs to include the natural effects of time passing. If not, the game becomes a surreal thing disconnected from time, and not in any interesting way - just in an apathetic and/or ignorant way.

That said, there are some players and GMs I can think of who I have a good amount of respect for, but who somehow do not have much appreciation for the value of tracking time. I have played with them as GMs and players, and it does tend to become an issue for me, unless it's just a player who isn't bringing it up.

 

[GhostNinja]

I am running Old School Essentials and I run Strict Timekeeping because that's the players want it. Do I think that you can play without strict timekeeping and I don't think it's something that makes or breaks a game.

 

[ffilz]

4. Have any of you ever experienced this playstyle? Was it really all that and a bag of chips? If so, why? If not, why not?

LMAO, of course. I almost always do my best to have time be correct and matter and effect things. The GMs I've played with (well, the ones I liked, which is most of them) also almost all took time seriously.

When/if a GM says things like: "I don't know what the date is." or "I don't know what season it is." or otherwise shows they don't know nor care about time passing, and the opportunity that should involve for everyone to be doing something during that time, I lose a lot of respect for that GM, and a lot of interest in the current game, unless we've agreed on some playstyle where that's just not going to be a part of play at all, for some greater purpose, or because the campaign has a very limited context.

Why? Because it destroys my ability to treat the game situation as at all real, or the GM as at all taking a major aspect of any self-consistent situation, at all seriously.

And, because yes, it IS fun and interesting to me, to play a game that has self-consistent, rational, natural cause and effect, which definitely needs to include the natural effects of time passing. If not, the game becomes a surreal thing disconnected from time, and not in any interesting way - just in an apathetic and/or ignorant way.

That said, there are some players and GMs I can think of who I have a good amount of respect for, but who somehow do not have much appreciation for the value of tracking time. I have played with them as GMs and players, and it does tend to become an issue for me, unless it's just a player who isn't bringing it up.

I have every intention of doing this, but somehow don't always manage to track time correctly... I am MOSTLY doing OK with my RQ campaign, though the seasons mostly don't matter other than just not traveling during Dark and Storm seasons. A barrier here actually is good weather tables and a good system for evolving the weather. For example, if you follow a storm, you should hit muddy roads for some time after the storm passes, not just the day the PCs are dumped on by the storm, how many folks track THAT?

I still don't really know what year it is in my RQ campaign because I can't find a good timeline to set it against. But fuck, I don't care about the official meta-plot, so does it really matter what the year is? What matters is that the PCs have been around for several years.

I do need to set a calendar and back track time in my Cold Iron campaign, but I do at least track time well enough to manage the magic system.

 

[Fenris-77]

I have every intention of doing this, but somehow don't always manage to track time correctly... I am MOSTLY doing OK with my RQ campaign, though the seasons mostly don't matter other than just not traveling during Dark and Storm seasons. A barrier here actually is good weather tables and a good system for evolving the weather. For example, if you follow a storm, you should hit muddy roads for some time after the storm passes, not just the day the PCs are dumped on by the storm, how many folks track THAT?

I still don't really know what year it is in my RQ campaign because I can't find a good timeline to set it against. But fuck, I don't care about the official meta-plot, so does it really matter what the year is? What matters is that the PCs have been around for several years.

I do need to set a calendar and back track time in my Cold Iron campaign, but I do at least track time well enough to manage the magic system.

Yeah, I don't care about locating my game within some kind of canon timeline mostly. For some games, mostly OSR or adjacent, I do like to keep a firm track of time. Other games, ones in which resource management isn't key component, I run in a much looser more episodic style.

 

[Bacon Bits]

There is often some argument that Gygax was arguing for strict "1:1" timekeeping, so that 1 day of real time was 1 day of game time. That I think is so completely outside the reality of the game that it's simply not credible. The key is that, even in OD&D, travel time was kept very differently than underground time, and it doesn't really make sense to tell the rest of the PCs that they have to wait while one PC goes to town.

I really think people need to read the entire Time section the 1e DMG and try to read what is written and not read between the lines for what they want it to say.

What I see Gary talking in the 1e DMG requires that the DM understands what it means that game time flows differently between adventuring parties. He specifically brings up that dungeon time and wilderness time are very different. Gary intends the DM to have the short-scale dungeon-crawling adventurers have calendars that line up with the long-scale wilderness adventurers. He's primarily talking about 1-to-1 correlation between groups of adventurers not mapping between game time and real time.

So, strict timekeeping was necessary in the situation that Gary Gygax found himself in. He was running a dozen or two different players each running 2 or 3 different characters in the same campaign world. Gary had a line out the door of people waiting to play any time he ran, and Gary wanted that realistic passage of time. Gary thought that everybody would be in that situation, because every DM he knew was in that situation. Gary's goal was that interconnected world, since he wanted PCs to be able to mix-and-match accordingly. In that situation, you absolutely need strict timekeeping to prevent continuity errors.

However, I have never once played like that because it's never really been necessary. I've only ever played with a GM that was running 3 to 8 players each running exactly one character. Even then, though, what Gary's talking about is still important any time the part splits up.

In the DMG, Gary gives an example of one adventurer leaving the dungeon to travel back to town. The different time scales mean that the PC will be gone for multiple game sessions of dungeon-crawing time. Gary is pointing out that leaving the dungeon to go back to town is very expensive in terms of time. He says resting, training, and other downtime activities will necessarily remove that PC from the next adventure.

This is all to say that what Gary is really saying to the DM is: "If a PCs chooses to leave the dungeon halfway through the adventure, then the different time scales will make it inevitable that the remaining PCs will have completed the dungeon in the meantime." Gary is back-handedly rewarding players who venture into dungeons. There will be more dungeon game sessions precisely because dungeon time takes longer the play out than any other time frame. Since the game is built around going into dungeons, this is a natural way to reward players who stick to the core gameplay loop instead of spending time building power by doing things that are far less risky. That's why the passage of time being the way it is is so important.

Time slows down as danger increases, which means the more risk and danger in your play, the more you get to play. This is an intentional facet of the game's design, and Gary wants DMs to follow it whether or not they understand why it's important.

 

[T. Foster]

Yeah, in the initial flurry of playtesting activity Gary was running Greyhawk Castje games 4 or 5 nights a week with multiple different groups -sometimes just 1 or 2 players, sometimes a dozen or more. Once he got busier writing books and running TSR he promoted Rob Kuntz to co-DM so Gary only had to run 1 or 2 games a week and Rob ran another 2 or 3. Since both of them were running in the same location and players and characters would freely go back and forth between them they needed to coordinate timelines and events - so Gary knew who played and what happened in Rob’s games and vice versa, so that if a group tried to go to an area that had already been cleared by another group (or an unscrupulous player tried to run a character who had been rendered out of action - forced into downtime, sent off into the wilderness, killed - in another game) they would know.

Gary did vaguely suggest 1:1 time between games as a way of keeping track, but that’s only necessary and only makes sense when you’ve got multiple groups active simultaneously and are running games almost every day. If you’re playing once a week (or less often) you don’t need to (and almost certainly shouldn’t) do this. And even if you are doing it characters can still get out way ahead of the “current date” - a wilderness expedition can easily eat up a month or more in a single session - and you don’t need to play that out in slow motion, and it’s also always an option to “skip ahead” if characters earlier in the timeline want to wait around for a companion to become available (there just might be game-world consequences if that happens - the monsters and NPCs will still do stuff even if the players are all idle).

This is also why all of the most active players in that campaign had multiple characters - so that if one of their guys got way out ahead in the timeline and was going to be unavailable for a few weeks or months they could still play while everyone else was catching up, they just had to use a different character. [It also meant that you could more easily play with different sets of random players since they didn’t always know in advance who would show up on any given day - having characters of several different classes, alignments, and levels makes it more likely you’ll have someone who fits in well with the other players’ characters, whoever they may be.]

 

[sharps54]

I guess for me this begs a few questions.

1. Was this really the intended play style for AD&D? I've always been under the impression that most people tended to use AD&D "a la carte" style. Is this not correct?

2. Did Gary play this way? I've heard conflicting things about that.

3. If this was the intended way to play AD&D, what does that mean for other versions of D&D, as understood by Gygax? And can strict timekeeping have benefits for OSR games? Or would you need to take AD&D as a whole in order to really get the "full effect?"

4. Have any of you ever experienced this playstyle? Was it really all that and a bag of chips? If so, why? If not, why not?


In a similar vein, wasn't the absence of non-combat/non--dungeoneering aspects of early D&D more of an oversight than a design choice?

1. Maybe?
A la carte is how we played back in the day. Today I play with a group that tries to play RAW for the challenge and we are having a great time with it. That said we would never think to tell another group they are playing wrong and anyone telling us we are playing wrong can politely jump off a cliff.

2. No.

3. See above.
Strict timekeeping is helpful, especially if you have slow healing, diseases, training to go up levels and so on. The reason is the world will keep moving while you are laying in bed or whatever is taking so long.
I don’t think so.

4. Yes.
I have really enjoyed it as a nostalgic adult, flipping and turning through the rules and trying to do it by the book has been fun for us but might not be for everyone. Remember in AD&D you don’t just have the three core rule books (MM, PHB, DMG) which override each other in the case of conflicts (DMG>PHB>MM) but you need to look to some of the other supplementary materials for the capacity’s of some items and other small details.

As for “missing” non dungeon stuff it was added pretty quickly and is present by the time we hit AD&D.

Edit to clarify we didn’t play RAW in the 80’s

 

[T. Foster]

As a sort of corollary to all of this I have an unwritten but enforced house rule in my games that if the characters leave an active area (dungeon or town) for more than a day or two they can’t go back to it until the next session (I have sessions every other week), because stuff happens when they’re not there and I need time to plan and prepare it. On the timescale of a day or two I can do it in real-time at the table because not a whole lot is going to change and I’ve usually got a week or so of activity already planned out. But on the scale of a week or more passing I need time to think about what has happened and probably reflect it in my notes - moving characters and monsters around, determining how far the bad guys’ plans have progressed, etc - and that’s probably going to take at least an hour or two.

When we were kids and regularly played weekend-long marathon sessions there would often by 2 or 3 or more expeditions into the same adventure area with downtime in-between in the same session and I always struggled to keep up and have the NPCs and monsters react. Nowadays I avoid that by just telling the players they can’t go back until next session - and if that means the session ends an hour or so early it’s not a big deal, because we’re only playing in 3-4 hour blocks, not 15+ hour epic marathons.

 

[Skarg]

I have every intention of doing this, but somehow don't always manage to track time correctly... I am MOSTLY doing OK with my RQ campaign, though the seasons mostly don't matter other than just not traveling during Dark and Storm seasons. A barrier here actually is good weather tables and a good system for evolving the weather. For example, if you follow a storm, you should hit muddy roads for some time after the storm passes, not just the day the PCs are dumped on by the storm, how many folks track THAT?

I have at least as good memory, and much better maps and weather knowledge, than the PCs, so I do as much tracking of weather and ground conditions as my brain, subconscious, and notes can easily handle, and that's been more than enough to satisfy everyone involved so far.

I still don't really know what year it is in my RQ campaign because I can't find a good timeline to set it against. But fuck, I don't care about the official meta-plot, so does it really matter what the year is? What matters is that the PCs have been around for several years.

What the current year is called isn't nearly as important, as knowing what the next season is, and how much time has passed during the campaign, and that if the PCs go someplace and return a year later, a year of events will have happened by the time they return, etc.

 

[Silverlion]

When I ran Basic and AD&D, it was not strictly adhered to for a variety of reasons. I kept track of time 'in play.' That is I only worried about it in a broad sense when we were seated at the table and actively involved in what was going on, whether that was a holiday for the PCs, an adventure or whatever.

However, I did not care about 'in-between' times that weren't played. Much like Pendragon and Ars Magic, I felt adventures were something they did not do
constantly. Sometimes they went home and slept, had a few meals, hung out, or did other life things if they could that we didn't want a play-by-play of at the table. The reason for this is because I focus on the stuff that most players want to deal with, and some occasional bits to drive home this was a living breathing world that the players were involved in.

As I got older and stopped focusing on D&D style play, the downtime/in-between stuff became more important because it helped me fill in details of the world, helped build emotional ties of characters, and otherwise made the game feel more real and robust.

 

[Triumvir]

I am currently running Hyperborea with strict timekeeping in response to player demand, and because the module I am using has timed events.

Separately, I remember an old article in the Traveller mag that suggested running a Trav campaign in real time, i.e. a week in jump would take 7 days in the real world; you sent your PCs into jump while playing on Saturday, and out they would pop in the following Friday's session. I think it was aimed at solo players (and would probably only really make sense in that context).

 

[ffilz]

I have at least as good memory, and much better maps and weather knowledge, than the PCs, so I do as much tracking of weather and ground conditions as my brain, subconscious, and notes can easily handle, and that's been more than enough to satisfy everyone involved so far.

I really really want someone to publish a good weather supplement in addition to a good travel time supplement. Those are things that could be mostly or completely system agnostic. There could be some hooks for "fill in with stuff from your game system."

What the current year is called isn't nearly as important, as knowing what the next season is, and how much time has passed during the campaign, and that if the PCs go someplace and return a year later, a year of events will have happened by the time they return, etc.

Yea, though I'm not very good with the living world stuff... But so far my players also have not interacted with the settings in a way that actually needs much of that.

 

[ffilz]

As a sort of corollary to all of this I have an unwritten but enforced house rule in my games that if the characters leave an active area (dungeon or town) for more than a day or two they can’t go back to it until the next session (I have sessions every other week), because stuff happens when they’re not there and I need time to plan and prepare it. On the timescale of a day or two I can do it in real-time at the table because not a whole lot is going to change and I’ve usually got a week or so of activity already planned out. But on the scale of a week or more passing I need time to think about what has happened and probably reflect it in my notes - moving characters and monsters around, determining how far the bad guys’ plans have progressed, etc - and that’s probably going to take at least an hour or two.

When we were kids and regularly played weekend-long marathon sessions there would often by 2 or 3 or more expeditions into the same adventure area with downtime in-between in the same session and I always struggled to keep up and have the NPCs and monsters react. Nowadays I avoid that by just telling the players they can’t go back until next session - and if that means the session ends an hour or so early it’s not a big deal, because we’re only playing in 3-4 hour blocks, not 15+ hour epic marathons.

I sometimes do stuff with a dungeon between excursions, but this is definitely a lost opportunity. On the other hand, these days most dungeons I run, the PCs make one excursion into.

 

[T. Foster]

I am currently running Hyperborea with strict timekeeping in response to player demand, and because the module I am using has timed events.

Separately, I remember an old article in the Traveller mag that suggested running a Trav campaign in real time, i.e. a week in jump would take 7 days in the real world; you sent your PCs into jump while playing on Saturday, and out they would pop in the following Friday's session. I think it was aimed at solo players (and would probably only really make sense in that context).

There was a notion Marc Miller was pushing (I think it maybe ended up in the T5 rules) that “every adventure begins and ends in a spaceport” - implying a game structure where each session begins with the party arriving in a new system, the session is filled with whatever they do there, and then at the end of the session they jump to the next world. Something like that would kind of work with the “real-time” model and I assume would produce a sort of episodic classic Star Trek feel.

I can say that none of our Traveller games ever worked like that, though. We might spend 4 or 5 sessions on a single world if something very interesting and involved was going on there (like a military campaign or an elaborate mystery) and then in another session might do half a dozen or more jumps, either trading or just trying to get from system A to distant system B as quickly as possible.

 

[T. Foster]

I sometimes do stuff with a dungeon between excursions, but this is definitely a lost opportunity. On the other hand, these days most dungeons I run, the PCs make one excursion into.

When I was running RQ the dungeons tended to be smaller and more “one and done” than in D&D, but I still ran into this issue when, for instance, I was running Griffin Mountain and the party would go off gallivanting in the Elder Wilds for a few weeks and then when they’d come back to Balazar I’d have to figure out what all the NPCs in the citadels had been up to while they were away. I think that may have been the very adventure that caused me to make my “mandatory session break for the GM to catch up” rule.

 

[ffilz]

When I was running RQ the dungeons tended to be smaller and more “one and done” than in D&D, but I still ran into this issue when, for instance, I was running Griffin Mountain and the party would go off gallivanting in the Elder Wilds for a few weeks and then when they’d come back to Balazar I’d have to figure out what all the NPCs in the citadels had been up to while they were away. I think that may have been the very adventure that caused me to make my “mandatory session break for the GM to catch up” rule.

Hmm, we'll see how my PCs do with Griffon Mountain. They are almost to Trilius after coming up from Prax and through Gonn Orta's Castle. Not sure all what they will do or what will spark their interest.

But the citadels are small enough that what's going on may be more relevant to the PCs...

 

[Bunch]

Time has always been a struggle for me. Even with things like VTT's automating the need to keep track of things like combat time. I just haven't been good about keeping track of underground travel time, lights etc. Somehow the business of managing everything else just gets in the way for me.

 

[T. Foster]

I’m strict about days on the calendar and I’m strict about segments within a combat round (in 1E AD&D), but lax about exploration turns. I don’t really track movement rates or time spent in exploration (or conversation) very closely. I always intend to make hash marks to show how many turns have passed in order to track wandering monster checks and rest periods and torches burning out and spell durations and all of that, but in the heat of play I almost always forget and will be like “hmm, it’s probably been 2 or 3 turns by now” at which point I’ll make several hash marks at once and a wandering monster check (which I also make ad-hoc whenever the party does something loud like busting down a door or having a conversation in the middle of a hallway) and maybe tell the players their torch is running low if it feels like it’s been close to an hour.

I don’t know why this is a glitch for me - my dungeon maps have scales and I have the party’s movement rate and know how long activities take so I have all of the tools I need, I just always forget to do it in real-time during play.

 

[ffilz]

Time has always been a struggle for me. Even with things like VTT's automating the need to keep track of things like combat time. I just haven't been good about keeping track of underground travel time, lights etc. Somehow the business of managing everything else just gets in the way for me.

Yea, I'm with you though I don't use the VTT to manage combat time - it probably doesn't handle things the way I run them anyway...

 

[Voros]

I get the sense that GG really meant this when he typed it in ALL CAPS, which is amusing and why we all remember it but he tended to change his mind minute to minute.

As T. Foster says there is obvious timekeeping intended in AD&D around training, etc. during downtime and in dungeon and wilderness exploration based around limited resources and random encounters as well.

Btw I noticed that Gygax refers to city adventures/campaigns in the DMG, not that surprising as Vault of the Drow is largely a city setting, something often skipped over by those who insist that dungeoncrawling and wilderness exploration are the only intended method of play for D&D.

 

[ffilz]

I’m strict about days on the calendar and I’m strict about segments within a combat round (in 1E AD&D), but lax about exploration turns. I don’t really track movement rates or time spent in exploration (or conversation) very closely. I always intend to make hash marks to show how many turns have passed in order to track wandering monster checks and rest periods and torches burning out and spell durations and all of that, but in the heat of play I almost always forget and will be like “hmm, it’s probably been 2 or 3 turns by now” at which point I’ll make several hash marks at once and a wandering monster check (which I also make ad-hoc whenever the party does something loud like busting down a door or having a conversation in the middle of a hallway) and maybe tell the players their torch is running low if it feels like it’s been close to an hour.

I don’t know why this is a glitch for me - my dungeon maps have scales and I have the party’s movement rate and know how long activities take so I have all of the tools I need, I just always forget to do it in real-time during play.

I DID manage to keep track of exploration turns with my OD&D play by post. I think the challenge there is that sometimes several exploration turns can pass with just one or two statements from the players as they go down a long corridor. Plus the GM may be busy describing the dungeon or exposing the VTT map or something. And the mechanical value is pretty low. Combat rounds tend to be very structured, and the mechanical value of properly tracking them, and tracking segments, strike ranks, or other smaller intervals is also mechanically important.

 

[Baulderstone]

I keep a calendar in my WFRP sandbox game. It's useful for keeping track of when NPCs will arrive in particular places, as well as how long it takes news of events to reach the players. WFRP also has long-term injuries, so I can just mark the date a player recovers on the calendar.

I find the whole conversation over whether OSR people are playing authentically to be tiresome. There were a lot of interesting ideas in early D&D that got left by the wayside, and its useful to look back for inspiration.

 

[sharps54]

I keep a calendar in my WFRP sandbox game. It's useful for keeping track of when NPCs will arrive in particular places, as well as how long it takes news of events to reach the players. WFRP also has long-term injuries, so I can just mark the date a player recovers on the calendar.

I find the whole conversation over whether OSR people are playing authentically to be tiresome. There were a lot of interesting ideas in early D&D that got left by the wayside, and its useful to look back for inspiration.

They were debating the right play style from the beginning, go back and read the old Alarums and Excursions zine and you’ll see lots of the same arguments we have today.

 

[Gringnr]

I keep a calendar in my WFRP sandbox game. It's useful for keeping track of when NPCs will arrive in particular places, as well as how long it takes news of events to reach the players. WFRP also has long-term injuries, so I can just mark the date a player recovers on the calendar.

I find the whole conversation over whether OSR people are playing authentically to be tiresome. There were a lot of interesting ideas in early D&D that got left by the wayside, and its useful to look back for inspiration.

I'm using the calendar from the Hogshead GM screen in my upcoming campaign.

 

[CRKrueger]

The whole thing about timekeeping was simple.

He had one world.
He had several players, each with multiple characters.
Lots of things in D&D take time, like training, researching spells, building keeps, overland travel, whatever.

So, you either…
Keep track roughly of who is doing what and where, and have some semblance of a chance at a campaign with a coherent timeline.
Or you don’t.

 

[CRKrueger]

For example, currently the same group of players have characters in three different groups in my campaign. One’s in Zingara, one’s in Brythunia, and one’s sailing to Vanaheim. If I don’t keep a campaign calendar, shit’s gonna get stupid, quick.

 

[Parkaboy]

[NOTE: This thread may reference some prickly personalities in the RPG scene. Believe it or not, it is not my intention to stir up shit, or to incite arguments on non-RPG-related subjects. And, no, I'm obviously not trying to tell people what they can or cannot talk about here or anywhere else. I'm not a mod (thank f*ck). I'm just expressing my hope that this site, which IMO has the best RPG discourse on the 'net, can talk about this subject in an insightful and enlightening manner.]

So, I've seen a bit of chatter on the ol' interwebz about strict timekeeping in D&D. I'm sure most of you are aware of Gary Gygax's quote from the AD&D DMG (1979), which states:

"YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT."

A certain small group online has taken to the belief that AD&D should be played as RAW and literally as possible. They claim that doing so unlocks a style and experience of play unparalleled, and one that has largely been "forgotten." They extol the virtues not only of "strict timekeeping," but of demihuman level caps, weapon vs. armor, etc.

Seeing as the 'Pub seems to have a bevy of insividuals who are knowledgeable in matters of gaming history and theory, I wanted to see what the consensus was here.

I guess for me this begs a few questions.

1. Was this really the intended play style for AD&D? I've always been under the impression that most people tended to use AD&D "a la carte" style. Is this not correct?

2. Did Gary play this way? I've heard conflicting things about that.

3. If this was the intended way to play AD&D, what does that mean for other versions of D&D, as understood by Gygax? And can strict timekeeping have benefits for OSR games? Or would you need to take AD&D as a whole in order to really get the "full effect?"

4. Have any of you ever experienced this playstyle? Was it really all that and a bag of chips? If so, why? If not, why not?

I guess my own take on the matter (and I admit there is much I don't know, which is why I'm seeking others' experiences and opinions on the matter) is that the OSR/AD&D "purism" that I see seems largely driven by people who weren't there? Kind of like how black metal bands think it's "trve kvlt" to sound raw, "just like in the old days," when the reason bands from the past did that was that recording extreme music was a new concept (shout out to Scott Burns IYKYK), plus a lot of these old bands were broke. So a lot of Scandinavians who took metal WAY too seriously heard old demos and thought it was a matter of intent rather than circumstance.

In a similar vein, wasn't the absence of non-combat/non--dungeoneering aspects of early D&D more of an oversight than a design choice?

I started gaming around 1980-81, so I missed the first (OD&D) wave. I started with either Holmes, Moldvay or whatever who I happened to be gaming with had. I didn't play AD&D until much later and even then, I and everyone I knew treated it like dim sum. A little of this, a hunk of that, I'll pass on that one, thanks, oh, yeah, gimme some o' that right there.

I eagerly await my edification at the hands of the 'Pub's retrogaming brain trust.

Gary didn't play RAW. His kids have recounted him running how he liked. I asked Gary about it once and he said the same (Circa 1992).

I never met anyone who played with all the options. some people did keep strict time, though. It gets to be like Twilight: 2000 resource management when you do. But even those groups who I played with that did that weren't real anal about it. It was more like a different challenge apart from traps and monsters.

 

[Sable Wyvern]

I haven't read through the thread, so these points have probably been raised already:

• There is a lot of value in STRICT TIMEKEEPING (where STRICT TIMEKEEPING means 1:1 Real World:Game World time) if you are running an open table or West Marches style game. It's certainly not the only way to do it, but I can see how it is one of the easiest ways to keep the campaign coherent and management with people dropping in and out.
• I understand why some people like STRICT TIMEKEEPING even in a more standard, modern campaign with a fixed group and one PC per player, but people claiming it is objectively superior or the correct way to play are the same as everyone else who's ever preached their One True Way.
• Strict timekeeping (in the more general sense) is going to have plenty of value for many tables, especially those running sandboxes, but I don't think this is controversial in any way.
• The OSR is a modern movement that draws on a lot of concepts that existed in the earliest days of the hobby, but which most certainly weren't ubiquitous. Again, any claim to know the One True Way is bullshit, just like it always is.

 

[Dammit Victor]

I can't really comment on how people really played D&D in the earliest days-- my mother foolishly believed I was "too young for D&D" in the years immediately preceding my birth and for a decade and change afterwards-- but I think the historical record can at least partially enlighten us on the context of a lot of Gygax's ex cathedra comments in the AD&D rulebooks and in supplementary material. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, among (many many) other things was an attempt to standardize and codify a lot of the FKR-style ad hoc mechanics from Gygax's (and other TSR staff's) long-running games... to get all of the people who'd taken their Original D&D games off in their own wildly divergent directions back on the same page, playing the same game. For several reasons running a broad spectrum of artistic idealism to commercial cynicism, despite my unfortunate tendency to overlook the former and focus on the latter.

So... a lot of Gygax's citable texts from the period reflect what he was trying to do with the game, with the actual gaming culture including both a lot of AD&D purists converted from OD&D games and joining the hobby as new gamers, and a lot of OD&D people treating the AD&D material like they'd already been treating all of their other D&D materials, and most unhelpfully a whole hell of a lot of people doing one of those things and insisting that they had only ever done the other for their entire lifetime.

History does not so much repeat itself as it rhymes, with all of the elegance and integrity of Kid Rock rhyming "things" with "things" over a looped sample of Sweet Home Alabama.

I will say, for as much as I consider so much of those AD&D rules to be needless cruft or outright ill-considered and ill-intentioned kack... a lot of what Gygax has to say about time and resource management in D&D specifically is fried gold for differentiating that style of D&D from the more genericized fantasyloaf playstyles of many (contemporary or modern) individual D&D tables.

Actually apply the perception and ranged attack penalties for using darkvision in 5e, then make light a 1st level spell that uses concentration, and make a regular point of asking your players how many torches they have left... who's carrying them... and having monsters notice and respond to the light. Doesn't have to be a dungeoncrawl campaign, and it actually works even better when it isn't.

Same goes for "STRICT TIMEKEEPING RECORDS". You don't need complicated mechanics for the turning of the seasons and the passing of time, you just need a model that's consistent enough that your players learn to make their plans around it and blame themselves when they forget about it and then the opportunities to use it pretty much write themselves. Combining a simple, robust calendar with the (very rough) economical and political models I favor for my NPC interactions goes a very long way to creating a world that players feel like they're a living part of, rather than just a backdrop for their personal adventures.

If, you know, you're into that sort of thing.

 

[Dammit Victor]

• There is a lot of value in STRICT TIMEKEEPING (where STRICT TIMEKEEPING means 1:1 Real World:Game World time) if you are running an open table or West Marches style game. It's certainly not the only way to do it, but I can see how it is one of the easiest ways to keep the campaign coherent and management with people dropping in and out.

Also, always worth consideration is the fact that the value of having a strict methodical ruleset is not always limited to obeying that ruleset. The more consistent and intuitive and... fundamental a rule seems to be to any given system, the more value that can be derived from breaking it.

Try running a West Marches style game, with a large number of players and multiple ongoing adventures/storylines running concurrently, except that every individual Player Character can diegetically be in... say... between 1 and 4 different places at once, doing different things at once, with either deliberately limited or deliberately unlimited capacity for shared knowledge between their instances. Firmly establish what PCs can do with their presence... then introce NPCs that can do more, and allow the PCs to slowly learn those powers.

 

[CRKrueger]

It’s also worth mentioning that Gary’s “God Emperor Voice“ about “How to Play“ was initially driven by deep frustration over the endless questions and arguments that arose once D&D got out of the hands of experienced wargamers.

As a result, there’s an expectation of those who have no idea what they’re doing to “Follow the Rules” and those who have more experience to “Do what works, because you will anyhow, but here’s some advice.” These ideas can show up on the same page of the DMG, if not the same Gygaxian Paragraph.

What was confusing and contradictory to me as a new, adolescent/teen GM makes a lot more sense now as an experienced adult.