“You can not have a meaningful campaign if strict time records are not kept.” The phrase has become a meme. A way of poking fun at a self-important racist who receives more credit than he deserves for getting the ball rolling on this hobby. There’s a nugget of wisdom in his bloviating, though. Having some metric for the passage of time in a campaign is vital if you want to model the long term consequences of the player’s actions. This is particularly important for me, because I am a highly campaign-motivated player.
That said, the extent to which it’s relevant to track a thing will differ from game to game, or even from session to session of a single game. In discussing yesterday’s post about ammunition with my friend Eric Boyd, he pointed out that a character will rarely empty a quiver during a single-day dungeon delve. If you’re running that sort of game (which I am), tracking ammunition may be perfunctory. However, if the characters were to spend weeks or months venturing overland away from skilled fletchers to refill their quivers, ammunition becomes an interesting concern. A flexible approach, using different methods suitable to a given situation, is best. The same holds true for how closely we ought to track time.
My Saturday morning campaign, Dangerous Neighbors, is an exercise in playing through published modules. There’s very little of my own bespoke campaign design going on. No elaborate system of downtime, no room for the players to set lofty long-term goals for themselves. For Dangerous Neighbors, the setting is just a fluffy connective tissue that exists to get us out of the end of one published adventure, and into the start of the next one. None the less, after 3 years and 74 sessions that connective tissue has a personality. The players have adopted children, romantic interests, ongoing theraputic projects, and little cottages where they keep watch on the road between adventures. Sometimes they travel through the space occupied by an earlier module on their way to a new one, and they get to see the aftermath of their adventuring. It’s nice for the world to feel like it’s moving, for those adopted kids to grow older.
So I set a simple rule for the campaign: each adventure module we play takes one season. Journey to the Rock takes place in summer. When it’s done, we presume the players hang out at home for a bit before the next call to adventure arrives. We have a casual conversation about what they do with those weeks and months, which might be more or less involved as the mood strikes, but doesn’t include any kind of formal downtime action system. By the time they begin playing through The Sunless Citadel, the leaves are starting to turn and they must adventure in Autumn weather.
This method would be too lax for many other campaigns. On a Red World Alone, which was heavily focused on the players attempts to transform society, needed a much more robust calendar and downtime action system. And those systems are a ton of fun, too. There have been a couple of times when I set out on misguided attempts to graft such a system on to Dangerous Neighbors, because I miss playing with something like that. Thankfully I’ve always stopped myself. Different games have different needs, and this one works better with a loosier goosier setting.
Now I just wish I did a better job at remembering to think about the seasons when I’m running a session. Our current adventure is taking place in deep winter, and I’ve got a terrible habit of forgetting the players are supposed to be trudging through wasit-deep snow until we’re far enough into the session that it’d break the flow of play for me to actually enforce it.
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