The passing of time

The idea for this week's post came to me while watching this video, which talks about the rule present in OD&D The Underworld and Wilderness Adventure Booklet and in AD&D 1e's Dungeon Master's Guide about time between sessions passing in the game world at the same rate as in the real world: if a week passes between sessions, a week passes in-game.

As SupergeekMike says in the video, this system has become obiquitous in OSR games, with 1:1 timekeeping even turning into somewhat of a meme, while in more "modern" games like 5e timekeeping basically doesn't exist because downtime is more often than not non-existent, or if it exists it's usually done in-session, with something like "Ok, you spend 2 weeks in town to do this, let's continue from after that". Obviously I'm not saying that everyone does it, but it's the most common occurrence I usually see.

But which system is better? Well, it depends.

If your game is more open table, with different players at each session, using this "technique" can definitely improve it: while some characters are in town recovering from their wounds (the old school style of You recover one HP per day of rest of similar ties in nicely with it) or researching a spell, an item, a rumor, or building a keep, some others can go exploring a nearby dungeon, and that will influence what the first batch of characters will find if they decide to visit the same dungeon when they get back to the table. Players could also have multiple characters, so that they are not forced to miss out on sessions while one is doing one of those downtime activities. And by using the 1:1 rule, bookkeeping is kept to a minimum, reducing headaches for the Referee.

On the other hand,  if you have a stable group of players this approach's usefulness will be very limited, because while you can handle downtime between sessions, there's no practical reason to keep it 1:1, as you can just, as I mentioned previously, handwave whatever time is needed, either between sessions or directly during the session itself.

So, what was the point of all this? I'm not sure really, I'm just expressing my thoughs on a topic I found interesting. That's what blogs are for, right?

This is all for this week, see you next Sunday for my next post!
 
May your dice never betray you,
Kirhon


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