We’ve all been there before, slicing up moments into measurable units in order to ensure some sort of fairness, whether that is equal opportunities in combat or ensuring lanterns last the full 6 hours. Time keeping is an essential part to proper pacing and resource management within a TTRPG and yet often falls to the wayside in the misguided effort to streamline gameplay.
This article will be broken up into 5 sections:
Phases of Play,
How Time is divided in most TTRPGs,
Time as a Resource,
Time as a Narrative Tool, and
Time as part of Pacing.
Took the City ’bout One A.M, Loaded — Phases of Play
Almost all TTRPGs, even the ones that aren’t fantasy, take place within three phases of play:
Travel
Exploration
Combat
Notice that a large majority of games also list movement within these three phases. 24 miles a day to 120 feet a turn to 40 feet a round. More information on how all these time definitions interact in the section below.
Travel is the largest abstraction from direct action. Characters walk, eat, rest, ride, chat, etc. This is always where many DMs have difficulty keeping the fun and tension up. Travel is usually broken up between Hours, Watches, and Days (or weeks and months if playing a Science-Fiction).
Exploration is the main state Characters are in. They are cautiously moving through uncharted territory, searching for secrets, listening for danger, disarming traps, etc. Exploration is almost always made up of Turns within an Hour.
Combat is the tightest and most dangerous phase. When someone is dying, violence is erupting, fires are spreading, or oxygen is precious, Characters are in Combat. This is the shortest time and can be from 3, 6, or 10 seconds all the way up to 1 or 2 minutes.
I Hear the Ticking of a Clock — Time Divided
Segment
The concept of initiative was strange and unique in the 1970s. Wargaming was a “My Turn, Your Turn” affair but breaking down wargames into individual combatants made things a little more complicated. Thus a Segment was born.
A Segment is a minute broken down into sub-units in which decisive action can occur. So a Segment is either 6 or 10 seconds depending on the type of die used. A 6 Second Segment uses a d10 (there are ten 6 second chunks in a minute) and a 10 Second Segment uses a d6 (there are six 10 second chunks in a minute).
Assuming all things are equal, ties cannot occur. Direct bonuses to Initiative, weapon speed and size, and other miscellaneous rules help to ensure each dude in in their own little temporal reality1 ready to stab a guy. This also probably makes a lot of assumptions about groups and number of combatants but whatever, the point is: a Segment is between 6 and 10 Seconds.
Round
Rounds have a large number of definitions, including being a synonym for a turn (and often used interchangeably by accident during table play when such specifications aren’t needed). Within TTRPGs, a Round is a turn taken in combat. This can be voiced as “it’s your round” as in “your turn” or as a “complete round”, which is when all combatants have taken their actions and initiative resets.2
Within the OSR, a Round mostly references 1 Minute. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons uses Rounds to contain Segments to prevent the previous confusion though that is largely moot within those in the hobby. So when all Segments have concluded, a full minute will have passed, and thus a Round. Other renditions argue that a Round can be anything from 6 seconds to 2 minutes, which honestly doesn’t matter in the large scheme of thing.
In Modern D&D, a Round is 6 seconds. This represents the breadth of actions available and removes abstraction3. Modern D&D also does not use a Segment (though to be fair, only AD&D uses a Segment), and so Round holds the same purpose as a Segment.
Within Combat, a longer round insinuates Hit Points are not direct physical blows but instead combinations of skill, luck, and stamina. It is thus when those Hit Points hit 0 that a mortal blow is actually stuck. Short rounds could also play out like this but the need for specificity leads to hits being actual hits and misses being parries.
Turn
Here is an OSR term (and that OSR is spelled “Old-School Ruleset”). A Turn is 10 minutes. It is used to abstract time away while exploring. Encounters, light, magic, speed, and many actions are expressed in Turns. A safe bet is that any action that takes time will take 1 Turn.
Hour
Finally some normal time measurements! Usually an Hour is used to capstone 5 Turns and force a rest Turn4 (so a full hour passes). Travel is also often broken into Hours but this is more for Miles Per Hour.
Watch
A watch is something like 6 or 8 hours. There are 3 or 4 within a day and usually involve Wilderness encounters. Note that this term does not refer to the watch stood at night to ensure everyone gets 8 hours of rest. Games will also call Watches “dedicated actions”.
Day
The final unit of measure that anyone should see in a TTRPG with mechanical significance will be a Day. Some will say “… within 24 hours” but we all know what they mean. A quick side note for DMs, please don’t take the definition of once a day literally. It will lead to rotating time keeping that hurts everyone.5
We took time for granted and paid the price! — Time as a Resource
I was once running a 5E game deep in the Dungeon of the Mad Mage. One of the players would say he is searching each time he moved, and then roll the die. He did this because searching was basically free and if he got the right number at the right time, he’d find something nice.
If you have a player who tries to cram every action into a single actual action (I search the door for traps using the 10 foot pole and pouring water around the bottom to see if it seeps to the other side, listening carefully before holding my attack for anything I find on the other side as I quietly open the door as fast as possible.), I recommend looking at time as a resource.
The most standard way to do this is just having everything cost 10 minutes. Some games also hard code a 10 minute break at the end of every hour but I don’t employ that. Some players may think 10 minutes to walk 120 feet is ridiculous but if you remind them that this includes all the trap searching, all the listening, all the actions they would take as a precaution, it makes more sense. And after an area is rendered ‘clear’ they can then move triple speed.6
While this doesn’t seem like a resource, adding torches, encounters, hunger, and rest then create tension. There’s enough tension just exploring but knowing that every extra action may find you being discovered helps. And honestly, 6 actions an hour, between 72 and 96 a day, is plenty.
But that’s just the mechanics. The truth is you tracking time on its own and reminding players when an hour passes helps them feel like progress is being made, that the world didn’t stand still for their crawl, and they aren’t static. Actions take time.
No One Told You When to Run — Time as a Narrative Tool
Narration can be difficult at the best of times, especially when eyes glaze over or attention spans wane. Time is a tool to help ensure Players are focused on the task at hand. Sometimes we don’t need to directly calculate time but rather need to use it as a direct threat. “The ceiling is coming down. You have two rounds.” Or “The seal buckles before bursting out a torrent of raw chaos.”
In the first example, we’ve given a strict time limit to ensure pressure. Two actions, then you are crushed to death. No saving throw, straight to Jill Sandwich. In the second example, time is implied to be short and escape is necessary.
Another example of time to increase narrative tension is giving a real life time limit. Shadowdark apparently does this (I haven’t played) with torches. Sometimes I go on a little piss break and tell my Players to have a plan ready by the time I get back. Or I put a timer on my phone and throw it down on the table. This gears up the players to start interacting with the world or perk up.
Basically time can be a tool to further player engagement with your game and push the narrative.7
You’re Older Than You’ve Ever Been, and Now You’re Even Older — Time as a Pacing Tool
Let me spin you a yarn.
We were playing the FOREVER CAMPAIGN8 and I realized it had been about a week in-game and our players were about to hit Level 4. The absurdity of this hits me. Like why would anyone bother being a farmer when they can flood a gopher hole, gain a level, raid a minor dungeon, and walk out with years of farming worth of gold? Does this mean they could hit Level 20 in a month? Why doesn’t everyone do this and upset the power balance of the world?
So I implemented Training being required to gain levels. It was New Level x Week x 50gp. So it cost 100gp and two weeks to hit Level 2. And to ensure this didn’t get ridiculous, it would only be for levels that gave a Hit Die (so levels 1 to 9). Now we’ve explained why a Farmer can’t become Level 1 and why hitting Level 9 is such a major milestone.
This is to allow the world to grow and react around Players before they grow too powerful. In a setting where it takes months to travel anywhere via ship, a vigorous party of adventurers can clear out an entire enclave of evil doers without much of a comeback for the baddies. By the time reinforcements do arrive, they have to decide if its even worth retaking their base or if they should relocate.
By slowing down leveling, causing travel and training to take time, and pacing the downtime actions to be daily activities instead of instant, Characters are now a part of the world as it grows and reacts around them. While training, they can hear about news and rumors, dungeons that weren’t fully cleared can repopulate, baddies can construct revenge plans, etc.
In our current game (ACKS, we were using Heroes and Hexes in the example above), there is no cost to train, instead the game takes time with downtime actions, such as selling and healing. This has worked well with 3 in-game months passing within 4 real-life months. Healing doesn’t happen with just 8 hours of sleep but also requires an entire day. Learning spells, studying, and gathering rumors cost time. Lots of things that allow the world to grow and react to Player actions and have Players feel like their time is valuable.
Conclusion
Phew! Well I hope some of this time related talk helps you and gives you another tool for your belt.
Time is often abstracted throughout a day of play, often waiting on key events to trigger time passing. While this is fine for keeping the plot moving and good pacing, sometimes a good cue or timer will keep Characters and Players on task and drawn into the game.
While crawling through dungeons or enemy territory, turning time into a resource maintains pressure on players and helps them plan their actions better. It reduces useless rolls and further pushes Players into making interesting choices if they planned poorly.
Finally, allowing time to pass allows the world to grow with the players and the plot to match pace with PC actions. If PCs could speed run the game mechanics, they game world itself begins to lose meaning. Time is a good pacing mechanic to ensure the world does not fall to the wayside.
I actual don’t favor individual initiative but that’s covered more in my article about initiative. I actually favor Phased Initiative the most with players rolling to beat my single roll. Those who win go first, those who fail go third.
We’re so weird with our jargon. We just allow Round to mean both an individual’s time to act and the entire combat’s measure of time.
Abstraction is a good thing. Without, more arguments can occur with players demanding to know how something could have occurred in 6 seconds or the DM flooding a room with enemies too fast. With abstraction, one can just allow those details to be filled in by whatever their justification is.
A lot of our society is actually built around resting for about 10 minutes every hour. School schedules encorporate a 10 minute break. Our own natural habits when not “in the zone” also happen to fit a break in every hour or so.
Okay so you can only heal once every 24 hours, right? So you start sleeping at 10pm and wake up at 6am, get the hit points at 6am. Well now can’t heal again until 6:01am. So its easier to just abstract that as long as no one is being a shithead and abusing technicalities.
Let’s do some quick math with some assumptions. Let’s just assume 40 feet a round is fine. (120 feet a minute if you run.) Then that’s 120 feet in 10 minutes of constant caution, to not include actions on doors or walls, just senses prickled up. 360 if you move quickly without a care. That’s 36 feet a minute, so we lost 4 feet. Where did it go? Does this math? Well we just maintain the suspension of disbelief. Maybe they have to stop to tie their shoe.
Perhaps this section was supposed to talk about how time is used in narration but I chose to interpret Narrative to mean player engagement with the plot.
Don’t forget to check my After Action Reports about the FOREVER CAMPAIGN! Also watch me accidentally audit myself and be wrong about the time it took my players to level.