I just created something I call a "watch Clock". It has an outer cardboard disk divided in to 24 hours, with Midnight, 6am, Noon, and 6 pm marked. An inner circle of cardboard is divided in to four six hour watches, and a single hand points to the hour. At the beginning of the day, when the party wakens, I set the inner circle to the beginning of the first watch, and then count off the hours as the day progresses. I measure my party's progress based on the number of miles they can walk in an hour on various terrain, and I follow their progress on a hex map, and calculate how far they can travel in one 6 hour watch. This way I can always keep track of activities by watch, and know what time of day it is to enhance the description of the world, and thus immersion. In a dungeon I just estimate how long things would take based on the action, and move the hour hand along as seems appropriate. It's a fairly simple system, and you always know where your party is in the world, and what time it is... but it's only for those who like using hexmaps for travel... the world builders.
I like the idea. Bascially turning the dungeion into a node-based design with each room being a node. And depending on the rpg system, the time increments of the wheel could obviously be different. As could the things that need reminding of (sleep, food, recharge batteries). And then of course time wheels with added rings for longer/shorter periods. Or separate time wheels for weeks/months/years.
@@TomPalsson as a new GM, I am so happy to have found your video. Blessed algorithm moment. My games have been verging more and more towards procedural play, and event-based play. This way, I lean towards what you said in the video: "everything takes a turn". That's wisdom right there.
We do a similar thing only based on light/View distance (some times the slowest party members move rate will become important too). Essentially the party can see what they are moving into and yes "everything is a turn" is a great and useful short hand which works in most cases.
Going to steal the timewheel idea immediately, lol. My own personal system uses "Zones" that equate to rooms in this demo, but it all breaks down to node-based dungeon crawling, as someone else in the replies already said. I had a relatively equivalent, but far less elegantly presented, time tracker that used check boxes to do what you do with pie slices in your timewheel, but under consideration, it's far less flexible than what you're presenting here. One of the big advantages of the timewheel that jumps out at me immediately is the ability for the GM to place markers at certain slices of the while to indicate when an event happens, a check needs to be made or a resource/spell-effect/etc. runs out. Overall, great stuff!
Thanks for the video! It is a very interesting idea, I've heard about similar things before...but yours is a bit more streamlined and I like your tracker circle :)
a downloadable time wheel image would be very nice to have and to print out, thank you very much. Did you know that, contrary to what most ttrpgs would tell you, historically torches burned for around 2 hours, not just 1 hour?
Interesting video/concept. A few things ... I agree tracking exact movement rates is no fun and should be converted to rooms/zones. Most modern game systems are going this way for this reason. In combat, some of those bigger rooms would probably also have sub-zones but that is "fast time" (rounds) so doesn't matter for the purpose of this video. As far as tracking time, I too build in an automatic time period for searching, being careful, etc. Mine happens to be 15 minutes, but tomaytoe/tomahtoe. I like the wheel idea as it is more visual for the players. I will try and do this in my VTT somehow. It would give the players a bigger sense of urgency. One thing that bugs me though, is being a stickler for "realism" when it comes to torch duration. I mean, you are ditching exact movement rates and times to make things more fun right? So now a lowly human that must use a torch is stuck carrying dozens of torches? Like, looking at your dungeon layout, just to get through it, we are talking 54 turns minimum assuming they KNOW where the secret doors are and there are NO fights. That 54 turns is 9 torches. Per person. In a practical dungeon run with random encounters (I really hate "random" encounters and refuse to waste player's time with them, but that is another topic entirely), you are probably talking 2-3x the needed "turns" so someone is carrying at least 27 torches? I really want to play the NPC selling torches to your party at the entrance! They'd be as rich as a king :-)
Haha! Yeah, that would be more profitable than actually delve into the dungeon. I have found that most of my players tend to favor the oil lamps for its effectivness, and that torch are more backups like if they split the party or something.
