Time Golem
And now, for your consideration, a stupid dramatic scene. Ahem:
PC: “What do you mean my aura of fatuousness has faded? I just cast it in the last room!”
GM: “Well yeah, but you then proceeded to search that room.”
PC: “How long could that take? A couple of minutes, tops? Aura of fatuousnesslasts ten minutes per level.”
GM: “You failed your initial check to search the ogre’s collection of gently-used chamber pots though. Remember?”
PC: “Sure I remember. I got it on the second try.”
GM: “But that ‘second try’ was a take 20. Your exact words were ‘I search for as long as it takes.'”
PC: “Well yeah. The friggin ogre ate my Kentucky fried pants of seasoning. You know how expensive it is to enchant all 11 secret herbs and spices?”
GM: “Your motives are understandable, but they aren’t the issue. Under normal conditions it takes two minutes to search a large size chamber pot. Take 20 means it takes 20 times as long to perform the action. With three chamber pots to search, you spent 120 minutes looking for your spicy pants.”
PC: “But I’m 13th level! There was an extra 10 minutes left over!”
GM: “We spent that time arguing about whether an ogre could fully digest magical trousers.”
PC: “That was an out-of-game discussion! It shouldn’t count against spell duration!”
GM: “I seem to recall you using your in-character voice with the party wizard.”
PC: “That was for comic effect! We weren’t actually having that conversation in-game. Give me my tasty britches and magic spells, dammit!”
And, scene. I warned you it would be stupid. The above does gesture towards a real issue though. As a huge nerd once said, “You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept.” Yet players are not capable of feeling the same passage of time as their characters.
In my humble opinion, this is one area where d10 system mops the floor with d20. You guys know I love me some White Wolf, and their method of letting effects last for “one scene” always seemed more natural to me the “minutes.” I’m not tracking the exact passage of time in the game world, but I have a pretty good sense for when one “scene” has stopped and another has started.
The only other solution I’ve found for this one is letting the dice decide. If a buff may or may not be active, I’ll sometimes roll to decide how many rounds are remaining (1d12-4 or 1d6-1 or some such). It’s not a perfect solution, but it’s at least more impartial than, “Your spells have expired. Eat it.”
What about the rest of you guys though? When a module says something like, “If the players search for X minutes they find ___,” how do you like to handle it? Do you ask them how long they search? Do you start an IRL stopwatch to track spell durations? And how do you make a fair judgement when these situations are essentially ambiguous? Give us your best efforts at “strict time records” down in the comments!
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May I just say that I love today’s page?
😀 Go, go, time golem! I hope it’ll be a recurring threat.
The entirety of my art request for today’s comic:
“Cleric walks into a boss arena. A smug Time Golem menaces him. (I dunno… Make it out of clocks or something.)”
Laurel responds well to strategic vagueness. 😀
As a fellow White Wolf enthusiast, I’m there with you about the tidyness of scenes over minutes. When I am running 5e, my players tend to push as far and as fast as possible through a dungeon to maintain their buffs, so I simply call it that an hour is equivilant to either three fights or ends at a short rest.
I’ve rarely seen an upcast for spell duration, so an hour or 8 hours is the longest I see at my table. And 8 hours is long enough that the players never really have to quibble about the spell’s duration, though I do really like the idea of rolling for ‘remaining rounds’ as that could add some extra tension for long duration spells in my game.
The problem then runs into when an effect lasts 4+ hours In Game because the scene lasts that long in game, and later a scene lasts 5 minutes and the PCs immediately enter another scene where they’d like to have the effect still active (without having to pay to reactivate)… the effects have a rather variable time length.
For some abilities, that’s fine, for others, it leaves something to be desired.
I’ve seen folks track ammo with a similar style, rolling a die each time they fire. On a one they drop a die size until running out below d4.
The issue there is that it gets to be A LOT of dice.
Time can also be an element(al). They’re also jerks. I know from AP experience.
The trick is to cast Grease on them three times. That way time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the future. 😀
Personally I much prefer the “real-unit-of-time”-durations of dnd to the “arbitrary-looseness” of “scenes” and such like.
My games tend to be much more flowing from moment to moment rather than being full of clear distinct cuts.
This makes it much easier for me to say things like [X amount of time] later or ask how long it took to do X/how long it has been since we did X than it is for me to clearly know when exactly the scene shifted during the process.
For instance, a few sessions ago we where walking through a forest
I also dislike the way scene length effects can cause such strange things as people who tried to run away from a fight (shifting to a chase scene instead) might suddenly no longer have any reason to actually run (because all their enemies scene-long buffs and debuffs instantly ran out – unless they get caught too swiftly in which case I guess it’d retroactively have been wrong for them to have run out and they should have been active during the chase?).
As both a GM and a player I also prefer to play in a mode centered around people in a world (which does have things like minutes and the continual passing of time) rather than actors on a set (with things like the ending of scenes). The latter makes me think to much of implied directors yelling “CUT” and takes me out of things.
In other words, I prefer for my fiction only have one layer of fiction and to not call attention to it being fiction.
For your question about modules saying stuff “If the players search for X minutes they find ___,” I prefer to handle that by telling players how long it’d take.
So if a player says they want to search someplace, I might say “This room is full of stuff so it’ll take 20 minutes, give me a [relevant roll]” and then leave room for them to say “that’s too long I’m not willing to spend that long” instead of rolling. (I’d then also ask the rest of the players what they do in the meantime before saying the result).
Sometimes I might like to say some bonuses or penalties they could get from spending more/less time to do it, to give them a bit of choice (for a different room say 2 minutes for a roll with penalty, 10 for no penalty or 1 hour for automatic success if I’m not playing in a system with that sort of thing built in like taking 20, or gurps timespent skill modifiers)
In a relatively recent skulls and shackles pf1 game, we did experiment with dice-rolling to determine timing for spellbuffs and ship-to-ship boarding action.
Through that was spells with the short one-round-per-level duration.
Our GM ruled that we could try to time our spells to be active when our ships got attached and the battle would be joined, and to do this we’d roll 1d8 or 1d10 (I can’t remember which one) and that’s be the number of rounds since we cast the first spell. At our level that game a nice mix of a chance for the spell to have run out or to still be in effect, or perhaps even of being in effect but with a short enough duration that it could run out during combat.
Agreed… but mostly…
It looks like your sentence effects ran out before the scene did 😉 :
“For instance, a few sessions ago we where walking through a forest”
Oops.
That example turned out to be a convoluted multithreaded mess so I decided not to include it anyway.
The facts show that I accidentally didn’t quite remove that entire paragraph.
Personally, since scenes are an abstract unit of time anyway I would be especially willing to fuzz the rules on effect durations when they produce nonsensical results. In your chase scene example, I’d definitely count the chase scene and the combat scene as the same scene for effect durations, and I might be willing to have effects run out in the middle of a scene if that scene stretched out for a particularly long time.
We don’t track time particularly closely, but someone will usually ask if they think it’s relevant — e.g. for spell duration — at which point the GM will make a ruling.
It mostly comes up in the context of those spells with an intermediate duration… 10 minutes or an hour, like Magic Weapon or Locate Creature. Anything less is effectively gone by the end of the encounter, and anything more is effectively until you get a chance to sleep… but those intermediate ones can be tricky to track if you’ve been bouncing from scene to scene without much downtime.
Any rubric for rulings when that midrange duration is in question?
In 5e, buffs usually either last for an hour or for a minute. Rare is the spell where we need to keep track of the exact amount of time that has passed.
However, we did at one point have a guy immediately chug a potion of giant strength we found which lasts one hour… shortly after we told him not to because we were going to take a short rest, which is one hour. Nobody was pleased, but boy was he buff during that rest.
Buff timing, lol.
“We gotta rest!”
“But the clock is ticking!”
“Then rest buffly.”
I’m lucky in that my players and I are on the same page in regard to time management:
-) Our combats rarely last more than 5 rounds, so anything measured in “rounds per level” I hand-waive as “one encounter.” Only if the rare combat is taking significantly longer (or if X is arriving in Z rounds) do I bother to count the minutiae. The players accept that RAW say that they’re getting roughly 6 seconds of cool per “round” of in-game time, so once one out-of-combat interaction or fight occurs, that effect is done.
-) Things measured in “minutes per level” I usually round to the nearest quarter hour (close enough for most purposes). That’s just enough for a Take 10 or a Take 20 to eliminate or take a huge chunk out of the duration.
-) Things measured in hours per level last nigh-forever, until you have to account for travel time, short rests, long rests, searching every chamber pot, etc.
The last time anything was an unpleasant surprise was when a PC donned an unidentified *ring of stoneskin*. It activated automatically (surprise!) the next time she took (what would have been a lethal) melee hit. The PC was giddy with her new bulletproof status and pretty much waltzed through several fights with only energy attacks being a worry. This being a desert environment, she had been diligent about keeping her Endure Elements active (1 day duration), so anything over a few rounds of duration she began to think of as a 24-hour protection. She also knew that she still had nearly 100 points of DR remaining in the ring’s daily charge. One short rest later, however, the 2.5 hour duration (150 minutes) on the ring’s Stoneskin power was spent, and the poor mage found herself suddenly very squishy again. The player was (as I mentioned) unpleasantly surprised, but when he reviewed the spell’s text he recalled that he had made the appropriate Spellcraft and Arcane Knowledge rolls AND that we had discussed how the spell functioned at that time (X damage absorbed OR Y minutes elapsed, whichever comes first). He acknowledged that the whoops was of his own making and made a note to himself to be more mindful of the ring’s duration.
Always an odd moment when the “but my wizard is smarter than I am and would have known that” comes up. Good of your player to acknowledge that even the very clever can make an oversight.
Since Pathfinder 2e makes a lot of common exploration activities take 10-minutes (Treat Wounds, Identify Magic, Repair Item, etc.), as a GM I have a time tracker that splits every hour into 6 boxes that I check off as PCs do things outside of combat. If it is ever unclear how long something out of combat takes – I generally rule that it takes 10 minutes to match other expectations.
I also track a rough sunrise/sunset times, and inform my players the position of the sun and/or rough amount of daylight (in hours) remaining as they take up time during the day.
Regarding Buffs, I’m rather thankful that PF2 makes most buffs last 10min or be sustained (have to spend an action every round to maintain). Makes it easier to track as it clearly lasts through combat, but any pause between combats (like healing) will mean the duration expires. Maybe you can chain multiple combats in quick succession, but any meaningful combat will often need a break to Treat Wounds and/or look around.
Damn! You’ve got an actual system and everything! Does that ever get cumbersome?
How I handle game time is that I assign rooms an approximate value of time. A small room is a five minute search, a mid sized room is ten minutes, a large room is 30, and a gigantic room is subject to time dilation. At it’s most general, this means at low levels, unless you stay in combat going from room to room, your buffs stay up for one room. Most *fights* are over in 6-8 rounds when I GM, so it tends to work out.
My thought process is even if the fight lasts only twenty seconds, afterwards everyone takes stock of their injuries, shakes down the bad guys for loot, and maybe takes some time to search the room. Saying that takes at least 5 minutes (more with larger rooms) is something people kinda’ nod along like yeah ok and it’s pretty simple.
Something I’ve been kicking around is your buffs last 1 encounter per ten minutes. This is easier to comprehend and keep track of. It might favor the PC’s more than *some people are comfortable with,* but honestly, you can always just make up for that by being creative.
I like this “room based” structure. Seems more online with the way people actually play.
I suppose that real time is more satisfying from a verisimilitude standpoint though, but that’s the only real advantage I can see. :/
It makes sense with how I GM with the VTT and make maps with lots of rooms. Even my outdoor maps are subject to having “rooms”; just the boundaries are trees and thick vegetation.
Your Druid is welcome to pass through the green wall and get solo’d by the gribblies on the other side *any time.*
I came across this blog post from the Angry GM once :
https://theangrygm.com/hacking-time-in-dnd/
I haven’t GM’ed since, but I’ve been meaning to give it a try. It seems like an interesting solution that speaks well to the rule-lover in me.
Reminds me of rolling for the haunt in Betrayal at House in the Hill. It’s a good approach for tension and dangerous environments.
One gripe I have with Paizo adventure paths is the complete disregard for anything resembling a realistic timescale.
Our party in Curse of the Crimson Throne just reached 9th level.
We’ve been adventuring for maybe a week or two of in-game time, and we already threaten some of the more powerful people in the region.
There was an entire PLAGUE that went by in the blink of an eye because it had to conform to PC timescales.
I remember that. Our GM had told us that there was a sickness going around the city at the start of the game, and it had turned into a full blown plague a few sessions later.
As a GM myself, I’m not sure what the optimal solution is there. It’s an early module arc, which means there’s not a lot of build up time. A lot of CotCT felt like it was an earlier effort by Paizo (which it is); so that’s likely a factor too.
I think allowing for “time passes” between adventures is a big thing here. Gotta insert those time jumps between major arcs so dudes have a chance to live life.
Key word here is optimal. From what I understand though, the module is written in such a way that there’s no time to be skipped. Everything happens one thing after another inside of like a week or two until you finally have to leave the city Because The Plot Demands.
…like I said, it feels a bit like an earlier writing effort. The crafting check was probably like like a 12 after bonuses.
“What about the rest of you guys though?”
I track time fairly ‘strictly’, but no stopwatches as I often run message board games and “IRL” time has nothing to do with in game time at all.
But I do inform the PCs how long things might take and there is always a variance based on Skill Checks. So if I say, okay fixing the starter on the car will take 20 minutes, but the PC makes a good roll I will reduce how long it takes based on the Margin of Success (or inversely increase it based on the MoFailure) and a critical success might turn it into 2 minutes as it becomes an “Immediate Action”*, ie “tap on the starter a few times with the wrench and the car turns over when [other PC] cranks it it”.
.* “Immediate Action” is a term for clearing jams or other malfunctions with firearms. Ye olde “tap-rack-bang” technique of clearing a jam is formally referred to as an Immediate Action, it’s a method of ‘repair’ that is fast and field capable. “Immediate Action” started in the military and carried over into civilian life, my groups use it to refer to any ‘field repair’ that takes relatively no time.
“When a module says something like, “If the players search for X minutes they find ___,” how do you like to handle it?”
I tend to ignore any such lip from a module. Who does that module think it is? It ain’t my boss…
Seriously though, I mine modules for inspiration, I don’t run them.
“Do you ask them how long they search?”
Essentially. I tell them how long an action will take and then they decide if they want to try to speed things up or “take as long as it needs”.
GURPS has a skill modifier based on long or short PCs wish to dedicate to Long Tasks (any task that isn’t a “combat turn” task):
Extra Time: Taking more time than usual for a task (as specified by the rules or the GM) gives a bonus to a noncombat action: 2x as long gives +1,4x gives +2, 8x gives +3, 15x gives +4, and 30x gives +5. For instance, taking a work day (eight hours) to do a onehour task would give +3. This bonus only applies if it would make sense to take extra time for the task at hand (GM’s judgment). You can take extra time to open a safe or figure out an alien artifact, but not to neutralize poison or chase a fleeing suspect!
Haste: Hurrying gives a penalty: -1 per 10% less time taken. For instance, attempting a task in half the usual time (-50%) is at -5. The maximum time reduction is normally 90% (taking 1/10 the prescribed time), at -9. In a cinematic game, the GM might allow one attempt at -10 to complete a task instantly; e.g., a Mechanic roll at -10 to fix a machine by kicking it! However, you cannot hasten tasks that require a certain amount of time due to natural laws (e.g., a chemical reaction) or the limitations of equipment (e.g., the top speed of a vehicle). When in doubt, the GM’s decision is final.
My games all tend to be at least mildly cinematic (Die Hard levels at the minimum, all the way up to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) so I always allow the -10 option.
“And how do you make a fair judgement when these situations are essentially ambiguous?”
It’s not ambiguous, PCs are told how long actions will take, they know how long their spells last (as do I). Nothing ambiguous about it.
Coming back to the last question… if the Players )or PCs) don’t know how long something will take, because something is messing with their time sense, or something, then I track it and inform them if effects, spells, etc have ended.
But usually I’m up front with the Players how time is passing, even if the PCs can’t track it. I don’t like playing ‘gotcha’ with the Players, and I trust them to play their Characters appropriately.
PBP certainly makes it easier to track. But the “essentially ambiguous” bit has to do with searching, travelling, and conversation. These aren’t discrete actions, and deciding how long they take is often a GM ad hoc.
One thing we do is kinda like the effort system on Godbound. In that game you got a pool of effort you use for your abilities. Some gifts of the godbound require the effort be comited for certain amounts of subjective time, either for a scene, a day or as long as it remains commited. That represents the effort being used across a day or a scene, either as a sudden and draining effort or a constant one. So for time we use somehting like that even outside godbound. If you change room, or depending on the flow spell may have ended. Always between scenes, not fun to have spells end mid combat. Same if time passes 🙂
Is there group effort or individual?
Individual 🙂
when a wizard casts a spell, I just assume that they can „feel“ the duration clocking off.
Potions are a different matter, as the caster doesn’t know when it’s cast and the drinker might not know at which caster level it was made at.
I think I remember reading in Pathifnder 1e that you count as the caster of your potion. Yeah:
> Potions are like spells cast upon the imbiber. The character taking the potion doesn’t get to make any decisions about the effect—the caster who brewed the potion has already done so. The drinker of a potion is both the effective target and the caster of the effect (though the potion indicates the caster level, the drinker still controls the effect).
Weird corner case where you “count” as the caster for some purposes, but not for others.
Potions and scrolls are among the most immersion breaking items in the whole game.
Think about it-while obviously some mages are better than others, how do you realistically tell the difference between a Potion of Cure Light Wounds (3rd level) and a Potion of Cure Light Wounds (4th level)? It’s not as though the person drinking it has any context of those things…. or hit points or that how one bottle is incrementally better enough to justify being 25gp more expensive (which is a LOT of money; the average peasant supposedly lives off of 10gp a year).
And what makes scrolls different? Penmanship? Do higher leveled wizards just write better?
I’m going to stop before I get carried away, but the who ‘cost based on caster level’ business is shamefully obtuse.
the most emersion breaking thing is „overthinking“ ;-p
Scenes are one of my favorite ways of measuring time in-game. We can all argue over minutes and seconds, and if we can squeeze just a little bit more time out of a spell, but practically every spell with a duration more than a minute is lasting until the end of a fight anyways. So why not use a measure of time that a) everyone who’s read a book or seen a TV show already knows on some level about and b) makes it a lot easier for game designers to make balanced effects that last a short but significant amount of time and c) not only cuts off a lot of arguing about exact times to help keep a game running smoothly, but also conveniently gives the GM direct control over all that to help balance encounters and smoothly progress from one moment to the next. That’s a lot of benefits for barely any cost at all, and I don’t know why D&D ever decided to go back to minute-and-second based haggling
I said this a lite further up thread, but I suppose that real time is more satisfying from a verisimilitude standpoint. Spells in the fiction wouldn’t last in ‘scenes,’ and it’s nice when mechanics can mimic reality.
Ah, but spells in most fiction last until the end of the scene. In basically everything that isn’t itself based off of D&D (like the Forgotten Realms) they’re rarely given specific limits like that. It’s always more vague, like a character only being able to use an ability for “a few minutes” before running out of juice, or only having enough stamina to use a certain spell/attack once or twice without having to take a break. And even when it is explicitly something like “I need ten minutes to recharge” or “This technique only lasts for four minutes”, it rarely actually lasts that long, instead running out just when the enemy is shifting into their next phase of the fight or recharging just in the nick of time for the character to jump in to provide reinforcements, if not simply being available as soon as the combat is over. The realism of having to wait exactly 10 minutes is passed over for the purposes of making a better narrative and keeping the story moving.
Sure, tying things to narrative convenience may not seem as realistic as tying it directly into time at first, but it does tie really well into the narrative beats of the shows, movies, books, and video games that so many players are trying to imitate with their characters anyways. People are already stretching their disbelief to accept that dragons, elves, and fire elementals are living in their world without running into all the problems stopping them from existing IRL. Why would separating time into scenes of flexible length make any less mechanical sense than only being able to cast Magic Missile four times a day before having to switch to more powerful spells? If it runs better, helps prevent time arguments, and it makes it easier for a player to have their Rogue pull a Batman and appear out of the shadows once-a-combat instead of having to park it on a park bench somewhere for a short rest, then there’s a good reason to use Scenes over the time-based system that D&D 5e uses.
I don’t disagree with your calculus. I’m already on record saying that I prefer “scenes” myself. But I think it’s fair to say that pinning duration on a narrative concept like “a scene” feels less concrete than an element that exists in the fiction (e.g. five minutes, concentration, etc.). It’s a subtle reminder that we’re just playing pretend rather than inhabiting a secondary world.
I currently have a printed-out, vaguely PbtA/BitD-inspired clock image I put dice on to track the current time for my table (https://i.imgur.com/xnWgL8N.png), which I started mostly because there’s some implied time crunch to the scenario the players are on and they can’t exactly stay at Neverwinter to learn and gather resources forever. It also helps with other clock-inspired skill challenges that would otherwise lack stakes–for example, a skill challenge based around doing research at a library to learn more about the challenges ahead, with successes advancing clocks that give lore handouts and failures taking precious time–more time if you fail 3 times consecutively with the same approach.
(For anyone who doesn’t know: https://bladesinthedark.com/progress-clocks)
Sure, I have to make some arbitrary calls about how long things take sometimes and sometimes I forget to track what everyone did over any one given time period, but it has proven useful. It’s also had some influences on how my table plays–like choosing to take a long rest with a friendly NPC instead of continuing the dungeon past sundown.
When I get around to running PF2e for them, I’ll probably modify it to use 10 minute intervals instead of 15 minute ones, mostly because 10 minutes seems to be the main arbitrary “time quantum” that system uses for exploration activities/spell sustaining.