How A Forgotten D&D Rule Shaped the Entire Old-School Gaming Culture | Stealing from Older Editions

[@SupergeekMike]

This style of play would also probably demand longer game sessions… what was your longest game session? (And did you drink coffee or tea during it?) Thanks so much to Many Worlds Tavern for sponsoring this video! If you are one of the first 100 viewers to visit manyworldstavern.com/discount/supergeek or use the code SUPERGEEK at checkout, you will receive 10% off of your order! manyworldstavern.com/discount/supergeek

[@hollyw8085]

I actually have sort of a ritual now where I usually drink a peppermint tea (or 2) during my d&d games. I'm definitely going to check out the sponsor (although shame I'm in Australia and will have to wait for international shipping).

[@lucasogden9457]

Yes! Our sessions could run an entire day. We used to have double-night sleepovers. Party went to town to hear rumors and gear up on Friday night. Saturday we'd get up and find the dungeon and work our way to a safe location, barricade in for lunch. Then seek out at least another spot for dinner. Return to Hommlet or whatever town when it was time for bed, recover and resupply for solving challenges. All day again Sunday. Then a couple weeks off to scour the countryside looking for a suitable place to start construction on a manor or whatever. Also, even more significant than xp leveling, not every class had the same xp requirement to level up. Far faster leveling a thief than a wizard, so that meant your party really had to protect the squishy.

[@goontubeassos7076]

Use a map of your campaign, use flags to represent events/enemy, use dotted lines for their route, each dot is a time passing marker, kinda like a war map from medieval war “ movies” I use this as a DM, and when I solo play. Each day I move the flags, if I do nothing the enemy advance, I use real life chores/work to hold off the advancement of the enemy daily. I put marker points that require battle if the enemy lands on it, that requires doubling my physical exercise that week, and dice rolling combat. There’s more to it, that’s just the basic’s. I plant trees self employed so I work that in as customers are NPCs paying me to hold back the enemy from advancing on my map. lol.

[@simontmn]

It doesn't need long sessions, no. It does work best with sandbox and megadungeon play.

[@joedafrogman]

back in highschool around about 87 or 88, we typically ran from roughly noon or 1 until around about 10 to 11 PM, so pretty damned long sessions, though we tended to run out a few miles down the road and pick up some dinner around 6-7 or so.

[@Grambo58]

One point that is not mentioned is that we also played more than one character. So if your wizard was trying to research a spell, you could play another character while he sat out for a few weeks.

[@RottenRogerDM]

True. Depending on the DM I ran both a cleric or fighter. As DM I let more experience people play two pcs. And Bola Bob was able to handle 3 pcs before his ninja ticked off his ranger.

[@Poldovico]

@@RottenRogerDM Single player PVP!

[@bpc610]

@@Poldovico the story of my life

[@RottenRogerDM]

@@Poldovico True. While Bola Bob did not do voices for all 3 PCs, each was an individual. And with him kill the ninja, we all agreed my homebrew ninja class was op.

[@amazinggrapes3045]

Why did they stop doing that

[@jrrarglblarg9241]

After watching this video I woke up in the middle of the night having an existential crisis about how many characters I’ve left to fend for themselves in unfinished adventures since 1986.

[@oryzomyspalustris4593]

Oh hell, now I'm thinking about it too, but from 1981. Gonna take an extra whiskey or two to sleep tonight.

[@abeartheycallFozzy]

Don't worry. Abandoned characters become NPCs. All your old heros are now villagers giving quests to new adventurers.

[@rurikau]

@@abeartheycallFozzyThis makes me even sadder. They are just a bunch of has beens who are telling war stories in taverns to unsuspecting PCs who just want to randomly meet other PCs and get on with their adventure.

[@trashcatlinol]

Honestly, they are probably doing fine without that meddling DM making their life difficult.

[@peppermintpig974]

@@rurikau I used to be an adventurer like you....

[@angiep2229]

This actually helps me understand a little bit about a really odd interaction I had with someone I used to know, back in the nineties. I'd met him and we started talking about D&D. I was telling him about the game I was playing, in which the god Cyric was causing conflict, and he stopped me. He informed me that this was not possible, because Cyric was dead, because his character had killed him. I've looked back on that so many times wondering how in the world he had thought what he did in his game had anything to do with what happened in mine. But now I wonder if he was in the shared world mindset that is being described in here. Still really weird interaction.

[@MorningDusk7734]

Wowza, could you imagine if everyone playing 5e was in the same shared campaign universe? Constantly in fear of a post on r/D&D saying something like "guys, I messed up, all followers of Pelor have lost their powers because my party just killed him", and you would just be obligated to say "okay, my paladin now suddenly cannot cast spells!"

[@SupergeekMike]

I think you’re probably right! Although yes, still a weird interaction lol. Maybe that’s why modern WotC is leaning so hard into the idea that “every D&D game is part of the multiverse” so people can have their cake and eat it, too. Ooh that might be a whole other video topic…

[@briansmaller7443]

You are drawing a long bow to say that is indicative of old school gaming. Been playing since mid 70s and never thought like that or any of the hundreds of other people I gamed with ever thought like that either.

[@angiep2229]

@@briansmaller7443 Seeing as I referenced something that he specifically said in the video I can only assume you didn't watch all of it.

[@ernesthakey3396]

@@angiep2229 LOL, that guy was somewhat of an exception to the general mindset, I think. Been playing since the late 70s, and our various groups basically did exist in the same multiverse - but whenever gods were involved, there was a shared rule - nobody ever actually interacted with a true god, instead the gods had avatars which would manifest to carry out their plans. Defeating an avatar was impressive, and might well derail one of a god's avatars, but it didn't actually kill the god - they could manifest another avatar. The hubris of thinking your one character could kill a god and remove it from all D&D campaigns everywhere is rather...amusing, in a sad way.

[@mcolville]

Hey nice shirt

[@SupergeekMike]

Hey thanks ☺️

[@lugh.i]

Collab? Collab? Collab?

[@rsbrehm]

That's actually wild. Imagine an old highschool gaming group getting back together in their middle aged life and then "pulling the party back together for one more go at it!" That's exciting!

[@BWeManX]

Krawgg deals -4 damage due to his herniated disc and tennis elbow.

[@rsbrehm]

@@BWeManX Marcus Termilius cast True Resurrection on his mom to go make them lunch.

[@BWeManX]

@@rsbrehm LOL it's good to have priorities

[@rsbrehm]

@@BWeManX ha

[@exarch404]

I saw a skit once ages ago (might have been before KZbin even existed) where that was the exact premise. Two players and the DM had kept the campaign going for years, while a third guy (the rogue, of course) had moved on with life. But they decided to play one more campaign all together, and the rogue basically messes up the entire party for shits and giggles.

[@ElrohirGuitar]

Interesting to hear a newer player trying to piece together how D&D used to be played. I have been DMing and playing since 1974. We had no real standard way of playing. Old School was developed by each group differently. That is one reason that DMs were so important: we had to make our own world, determine how to deal with our players, and how to run the games. This was before the books were published, so we had very little in the way of rules. Real world considerations helped us realize that some ideas we liked didn't work very well in practice. We learned that players progressing at different speeds made some players jealous and other players obnoxious. However, the overarching value we did have was that we wanted everyone to have a good time and working together gave us an enormous amount of satisfaction and pride in our adventuring group.

[@danielgehring7437]

Yeah that's the really hard part to always get across. You didn't just play the game back then, you had to invent it as you played. It always saddens me when I read a comment or hear someone say that they "can't use this" because there's no rule for that specific scenario, since man, we made up _everything_ back in the day.

[@hunterketch989]

Wait, you played before the books were published? How did you learn about the game then, I thought DND was invented then published, did word get out some how about it?

[@danielgehring7437]

@@hunterketch989 Hmm? There's no chronology problem with the OP, the original (white box) version of D&D came out in '74. Edit- Since i seem to be in Old Man Nostalgia mode right now, there was a version of the game available before 74, as well. It was officially called Chainmail, and was more centered on miniatures wargaming. Even if you ignored that, though, Gygax and the other creators when through some pretty extensive playtesting and would publish their findings and new supplements in fanzines of the time, as well as, er, 'more official unofficial documents' to buyers; they were pretty short on funds and trying to create an entirely new genre of game so they could use the income. It's all a pretty fun read if you want to dive deeper. I always kind of wish they'd done a movie about the early days of the game.

[@hunterketch989]

@@danielgehring7437 Sorry, I was confused because I was thinking about how the basic rules are published as a book now and how the box sets included manuals. Interesting to know that word did get out through fanzines though.

[@ElrohirGuitar]

@@hunterketch989 There was a box that gave you pamphlets that described how to play the game though third level in a very basic way and some monster stats. It also gave you an introductory module. It was actually a good way to introduce players to this new concept of role playing and dungeon exploration. It also gave us ideas on how to create our further adventures. By the time the first books came out, we had already developed our own version. We had three people making up parts of our world and took turns DMing. We would create adventuring parties from our character rosters we had made and, typically would have two players running two characters each and one of the DMs characters. Character would die or survive to begin their adventuring history. We had fun.

[@kythian]

The "oral tradition" part sparked a memory. When I was in basic training in 1992 and I was on fire watch or CQ (Charge of Quarters), some of us would play D&D from our memory of the rules. We cut out number cuts and drew them from a hat to "roll duce" since we couldn't have personal items during training. It was very "theater of the mind" and played in the dark while 50+ other guys slept in the same barracks. It was a very different way to play D&D.

[@paulcoy9060]

I brought my dice with me to Basic in 1986, and they made me throw them away, because they could be used "for gambling." Like, what kind of gambling uses a d20, sarge? Plus, the Senior Drill Sgt. yelled, "What are you, some kind of fucking Dungeon Master?" So they knew what it was for, they were just being dicks.

[@kythian]

@@paulcoy9060 They probably had their own war gaming group and felt threatened by your obviously superior gaming choice. 😉

[@paulcoy9060]

@@kythian It was Fort Benning, so they probably were all Confederate sympathizers.

[@altejoh]

Makes me think back to highschool. One person had some of the 3.5 books, mainly the core book, the monster manual, and one other supplement I cannot remember (probably eberron, because that was the setting I've been most hooked on since the very beginning). We also had a single d20. That was it. No character sheets, no dice sets. Your character could do whatever the GM for that day interpreted your character could do based on class, etc. And any point of contention/combat was settled by a d20 result. Live by the d20, die by the d20. It was very heavily narrative focused, but it really got me hooked on the game.

[@paulcoy9060]

@@altejoh Actually sounds cool

[@HLR4th]

Our D&D group from the late 1980’s ended up doing exactly this. For my 50th birthday (now 9 1/2 years ago) my wife arranged as a surprise to get the group back together for my birthday. (All of us were spread out all over the country, so they set it up over a video chat program. This was before we knew about VTT’s, so they just used character sheets and dice, and a white board on the video program). The DM had about the same amount of time pass for our character as had passed for all of us. It was intended as a one shot, moved to a restart of the campaign that lasted for a few years. It was neat seeing so much time pass. However, in the midst of play, I could see needing a very different narrative structure. It would make leveling make much more sense.

[@PatriceBoivin]

It's kind of why going up levels was at the base or village or local lord or wizard's place, between game sessions: Took about a week, sometimes more. In the meantime players would play other characters. Mike keeps referring to "the adventure." We used to refer to modules. Modules were location-based, almost one-shot things though sometimes DMs placed them inside their campaign world, like Gary Gygax liked to place his modules in Greyhawk. Usually we would say things like "We're playing S1 today" and play that module, then the characters (and players) would go home. No "adventure paths".

[@Xhalph]

@@PatriceBoivin A nice touch for a campaign with milestone leveling would be to have a lull in the story and some downtime whenever the PCs level up.

[@johnekare8376]

That's an awesome birthday present!

[@davidtolmie8142]

My old high school buddies and I are all turning 50 this year and next. We're all getting together-flying in from all over North America-to do a reunion game next month. :-)

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

@@Xhalph There are unfortunately no half measures. If you do not utilise 1:1 time in its fullest, you may as well not use it at all. When used with Modules, you should also look at utilising Patron Play. This way your High-Level NPCs are also constrained by the forces of time, however they are also a lot more active in the game. 👍

[@aricliljegren890]

As someone who started out as a DM in 1980 with the first blue-cover basic rule book and moved to AD&D the moment it came out, I can tell you that what you are describing was not everyone's experience. Much like today, different groups played in different styles. Yes, many groups stuck to dungeon modules (or made their own) but others did not. I was lucky enough to have a group of actors, writers, artists, and musicians in my group. Epic movies like Star Wars and books like LOTR had given be a grand vision for an alternate world. I lead a gigantic campaign that spanned over 12 years of real time and two centuries of game time. I had about thirty players over that span with players coming and going as people moved or changed schools (we started in 7th grade and continued a few years past college). The map we played on had seven kingdoms spread over three continents and nearly 200 named NPCs. It had all the complexity of GOT and when it ended around 1994, several players cried. I don't say any of this to boast - just to point out that there were sophisticated worlds being made from the very start.

[@SabersEdge]

I wasn't impressed with the blue book. I stuck with the books preceding it. But boy oh boy, once the other books came out I grabbed them up quickly. But, as all my players knew who tried to be "rules lawyers" "Thems is more like...guidelines."

[@mattosborne2935]

We pretty quickly moved to bookmarking our progress in modules, as some of them were longer than one session

[@zacharyr666]

Sound like one hell of a ride.

[@NarutoOrganisation13]

Please make a video of the story summary! That's an important historical reference for how D&D was played!

[@julienzakaib9744]

I think there are like 200 named NPCs in Storm King's Thunder alone :/

[@BreezyBeej]

Something GENIUS about this is that it really really makes roleplaying easy. If you haven't played with a certain player in a while, your characters will want to catch up with each other. It is such a strong scaffolding for in game friendships. Holy moly, thank you for covering this.

[@Zeathian]

With a week passing between each seasion Xanathars downtime activities would become more viable. Especially training which takes 10 workweeks (assuming no int bonus), would be greatly improved. Instead of waiting for an opportunity in the campaign to have your character leave and learn how to wear heavy armour, you can just get that by playing for 2,5 months IRL.

[@Slipfish]

I always use a hybrid model essentially for this purpose. Sometimes my sessions end on a cliff hanger and no time passes between sessions. But I always build in downtimes in the narrative fairly regularly to allow things to develop- but also to allow my players to spend time working on things off screen. Or sometimes we do this when a player can't make a particular session; instead of cancelling, the rest of the group does something small scale without them, and I work with that player to figure out what they're doing while they're gone. One of my players doesn't care about it all, and always spends his downtime drinking and gambling. Occasionally he meets a useful contact or stumbles upon useful information. So even his downtime becomes productive. Giving the story that space to breath makes it feel more realistic, and the longer timelines adds a weight and depth to the narrative that my players seem to really respond to, even if I started doing it just to give one particular character a chance to work on their inventions.

[@_AcatHat]

Yes back in the day we would use the time in between sessions for training time to go up a level instead of always gaming them out,

[@spacedinosaur8733]

@@_AcatHat In Talislanta they had a mentor availability chart. Your mentor is glad to see you, but they are very busy. They can make time to go over that lost tome you found in d3 days. or Since you had that falling out with your professor, they've viewed you with nothing but contempt. There is a 75% chance they'll answer one question, just to get rid of you, before they have you thrown out.

[@Cr3zant]

You mean not playing for 2.5 months? Since I doubt you're doing it at the exact same time as you're doing the actually play session, and I doubt your character would be in the middle of a dialogue with an NPC, the clock has struck midnight, and you all have work tomorrow so you pack up for the night to continue later, and then your character just begins training in front of the slack jawed NPC for the next week.

[@kylethomas9130]

I remember one time playing Daggerfall, noticed my ebony sword had been worn down quite a bit. Instead of picking up a new quest, I visited the Fighter's Guild for a discount repair. Even with the reduced price it would take a couple days. So I spent time training some of my lower skills, Reorganized my Bank notes, browsed all the local shops for interesting finds, chatted with the locals in the streets. It all felt very refreshing, so when my ebony sword was finished being repaired I was ready for a new mega dungeon.

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

Now imagine if while your fighter waited for their sword to be repaired. You had another character that could act on all those rumours you'd picked up around town??

[@boardsandstuff5008]

Damn mind fudge. Jajaja. Sometimes we get too invested in one character. I know my kids can’t leave their old characters out of campaign. They make me at least make them do a cameo appearances. It works that the new campaigns plays in the same world.

[@yuin3320]

@@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork Rumors don't all have to be adventure hooks, if that's what you're getting at. They can be just a hanging thread that the players are free to investigate, that potentially contextualizes or ties together with future events, or just provides a bit of information that can be sold to the right people/person. Just because there's a forseeable complication doesn't mean an idea isn't worth while.

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

@@yuin3320 I'm not saying the idea isn't worthwhile, I'm tempering expectations. I agree, you should be seeding your setting with true and false, even half true rumours. Patron players unleashing propaganda during the fog of war is a sight to behold.

[@yuin3320]

@@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork Ah, completely fair! It was a bit hard telling just off of your first comment.

[@deeterful]

Back in the day we’d use that time lapse rule when we were between adventures, but for multiple session adventures we’d pause time in between. The time lapsing rule made sense for the way we were running our campaigns. As one of the more knowledgable DMs put it, “a lot of boring, real life stuff happens in between the exciting parts.”

[@workingstiffdiogenes2195]

Back in the 1970s we fell into doing this even before it was a rule. The reason was that as a DM, I hated to role-play shopping for armor and changing gems for gold and so on. So I had each player make a list of one or two things they wanted to do each downtime day; that way when we reconvened I could approve their list and we could get on to the business of fighting monsters. If a session ended in the dungeon (I was fond of cliffhangers) then time froze until we met again. It is important to realize that back then D&D still had many vestiges of its tactical wargame origin. (There was never any convincing reason why a wizard couldn't have a sword, but it made sense to differentiate "pieces", the same way bishops move diagonally and knights move in Ls.) The idea was to get your "pieces" into the dungeon ASAP; campaign-level narrative wasn't as important. I think Professor Dungeonmaster still plays this way, ending each session back at the Keep on the Borderlands.

[@starcrafter13terran]

I know the reason for no armor on a mage back in the day for us was "you can't use the arcane energies unless they can permeate your body and armor blocks that, especially metal armor.

[@workingstiffdiogenes2195]

@@starcrafter13terran Yeah, they used to say that about swords, to which I always replied, "Then where do magical swords and armor come from?"

[@LJW1912]

I like that House on the Borderlands reference

[@TheWolfCub71]

I never knew anyone who used that rule. It just really wasn’t convenient. Around the 10:00 mark you get into why it wasn’t convenient. A DM would have to be a DM full time to just keep track of what’s going on between sessions.

[@midbc1midbc199]

Differenciating class items armor weapons blah blah.......that there is horseshit uhhhg why can I not use that So many heated discussions I have seen over that very issue

[@117jester]

So in college I was the president of a D&D club. We decided to do a shared world for our players. We had 30+ people with 6 different DMs. Without realizing it, we implemented this exact rule at a double rate. We said every week in real life was two weeks in game. All of the adventures started and ended in the starting city and the city was always safe.

[@deriznohappehquite]

MMTTRPG

[@jonathanreece4151]

As a DM that ran back in that timeframe (late '70s, early '80s) this was more-or-less what we did, but there were two key factors that made this sort of important but also not terribly. First off, and this really throws people, we had multiple DMs, each running their own "dungeons" and stories in the shared world. And all of these DMs (including me) had characters that were run by other DMs. And sometimes we needed to synchronize what was going on. But most of the time it just didn't come up, and nobody was strictly maintaining a calendar. But characters and magic items and events and NPCs were sort of a communal resource that we all used in various games at various times, and we sort of tried to keep it all more-or-less tied together. Was fun, but very messy.

[@MikeyAwbrey]

This is actually how a lot of Adventure League groups run online. They have their own communities of a few dozen player / DMs, sessions start and end in a home town that everyone shares (with some exception for specific games). The players usually impact the town for each other and drive the narrative. Very interesting that Adventure League Communities seem to have, in their own way, gone back to the original D&D style of play.

[@freelancerthe2561]

@@MikeyAwbrey You how all a lot of modern gamers complain about wanting "impactful choices"..... when what they really mean is that they want to decide the narrative. That basically can't work when you have a pre-baked narrative driven game; and I can essentially prove it by how easily a lot of DnD podcasts/streams can have their stories derailed by one player not taking a hint. You're stuck with a problem of forcing the player (and the events) to fall in line with the pre-written outcome and related story beat..... or rewrite the whole rest of the adventure to account for it, because narrative ones tend to hinge on certain conditions being met to move forward. IE: one player escaping into the vents of a prison turned what was supposed to be a 2-month (game time) prison mini-arc into a 6 hours (game time) prison break episode. However, it lent to one of the most absurd jokes about how the mage, who was separated from the party in Solitary with his magic disabled, went Uncle Iroh in preparation for the part where they escape..... in 6 hours..... That said. Sandboxes don't have this problem, because its more cause and effect driven. Any narrative or story beat tends to be compact, precisely to limit paradoxes due to order of execution. If you want an escalating threat, thats part of the world system, not individual story paths for the players. In a lot of ways, this would have way more impactful choices, as the whole design focuses more on world state rather then story beats. And actually can lead to better stories on an individual level, because the evolution of the world state is the story players will remember. To explain this better, Planetside 1 was a game effectively devoid of story, and mechanically just an endless war between 3 factions. But you talk to any of those players, and almost all of them have a collection of war stories of the most notable things they've witnessed. Stories that can be as tense as any well crafted thriller, to the comically absurd as to how a series of events unfolded. And thats just from ONE perspective. The unique thing about this game is that when you start combining stories from multiple sides, the collective retelling of events from multiple perspectives elevates it that of a Documentary. Stories like how the nightly Bridge battle between bases (which generally go no where for 4 hours) got totally turned on its head, when an enemy tank found its way into the back line, and started a roll that cleared over half a map that night. And how the majority of players stuck around for an extra 2 hours that night to keep the fight going, because it landed up in map territory that rarely sees fights during prime time. The only other online game I've ever seen to that kind of capacity is EVE Online. And that can only happen because EVE is a single shard universe, where all players are affecting the world state for each other at all times. And how one chat fight eventually escalates into an interstellar war.... mostly involving massive Corps who had no stake in the original spat, but very much noticed one groups fleet passing through their turf.

[@jjr6929]

Started play in 75. We ended up with multiple DMs and everyone had multiple player characters. The games were essentially pick up basketball games. Someone would want to play one of their characters close to a level and w e would build a party around them....sometimes we'd make a bad mix and pay for it. Live and learn. The time we would use was 7x....as we played numerous games per week. The 7x was necessary due to rule for researching a new spell....that was a time consuming activity for the magic-users. Which is why the mages would often get together to trade spells and scrolls would be so valuable.

[@jobobminer8843]

This is literally my dream game man.

[@Aspartem]

Our ex-playgroup of millenials is a bit younger, but that is exactly how we ran every P&P RPG we played, mainly bc we had the luxury of multiple people actually wanting to be a GM and tell their mini-stories - and that was like 15 years ago until a couple of years back when we stopped playin' regularly. So this style certainly is still around, bc it also just makes a lot of sense. Actually the shift to pre-written campaigns is something I never grapsed, bc with people I knew that also played RPGs this was very looked down upon. "A proper GM runs his own stories" was the mentality.

[@petedoro]

Thank you Mike for bringing back such fond memories. When I started playing the White Box set in 1976 (as a HS Freshman) we were aware of this rule and did employ it a bit in the beginning. This quickly became unreasonable in general and was abandoned pretty quickly. I do want to point out, as you alluded to, the style of play back then was MUCH different, and it was based primarily on dungeon exploration with few over arching story elements. Dungeons were usually located within a days journey or so from a town or village which was considered a safe haven to rest and recover between forays into the dungeon. Most of our sessions ended with the party beating a hasty retreat back to the town/village to rest/recover and restock. In those early days equipment such as torches, food, and water were much more closely managed. Also, adventuring groups often had pack mules/horses and hirelings who waited outside the dungeon and would not want to be left for too long unprotected. Random encounters were a threat avoided by heading back to town. TIME in game was a lot different then these days too. A turn of "movement" in the dungeon would take 10 minutes to move roughly 120 feet. Combat was 1 MINUTE per round, and after every battle the party was expected to spend 20 minutes doing NOTHING except recuperating. This added to the use of supplies such as torches and food. Also, healing from battle wounds was much more of a challenge then it is today. As your hit points increased it took longer and longer to "heal" through bed rest for example. I recall many sessions ending with the party limping back to town and spending WEEKS, recovering from their wounds!

[@winter9703]

I started playing D&D (both Basic AD&D) around 1981 and played throughout most of the 80s. Never once did we use the “real-time” passage of time rule, and I didn’t know a single person who ever did. I was vaguely aware of it, but everyone ignored it completely. I would say its importance to the “old school” playing style expressed in this video is greatly exagerated (to put it mildly).

[@wvanyar1801]

@@winter9703, we attempted to use the real time, but it worked like the original poster, we hit the dungeon and retreated back to the village each time the session ended. Then we got into a long battle and we finished it but it was late (1:00am late) and called it a night. We did not play until the next Friday, at which point we realized that the DM had to either let our PCs make it back to the village without us playing that out, or we were right where we left off. So, that time rule went out the window very quickly as impractical. But it does explain why a lot of the earlier D&D adventures that were written could be completed in a single session. Of course when T1-4 was published there was no way you could compete that game in a single session, or even explore it and retreat.

[@kevinerose]

I think he forgot something else in the original rules. One that is related to this rule. A large part of the original rules is about your character building a castle, or building a tower, or building a religious monastery, or a thieves' guild. This is of course later in the PCs career, but they were supposed to take time off to purchasing land, buying materials, overseeing construction, and ultimately ruling over your subjects. So early in the PC career, they are coming back to base camp and resting after battles, drinking beer, and puttering around camp. As they grow, they will get into more and more lengthy projects that take up a lot of time.

[@danielgehring7437]

@@kevinerose And training! I don't remember the exact algorithm for how much time it took to train up a level (which you could only do under the tutelage of a more experienced master, of course), but it could eat up weeks or months of downtime.

[@harrybryan9633]

@@danielgehring7437 One week per level - that was the easy part; finding someone willing to teach (that you paid) was the hard part.

[@SeanFrancis]

You could do a ratio of time... so 1 day passes in the game for every 2 days in the real world. That could mitigate some of the scheduling delays while still having time pass. This also makes the "it takes 1 week to make a healing potion" worth it because if you play twice a month, that is making 1 healing potion per game session.

[@SylviusTheMad]

It also makes the natural healing rules of older editions viable. In AD&D you'd only heal 1 hit point for every 24 hours of rest, so if you made it back to town injured and didn't have a Cleric handy, you might need that week off to recover.

[@DanSolo41]

Even 1 week real-time = 1 day game-time would be a good comprise, I feel.

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

Unfortunately, 1:1 time must be strictly adhered to. To be utilised properly. It does not work so well when you start to mess around with it. If you are going to hand wave time then it is better not to implement 1:1 time in the first place, lest you be disappointed by it.

[@DanSolo41]

@@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork Good point.

[@robertbrawn4052]

it absolutely works far better for crafting, research, training and other typical downtime items which gives a better 'overall' 'pseudolife' rather than more of the 'hack and slash' focus on combat. It may not be all THAT useful for dealing with groups consisting mostly of murder hobos but it can certainly benefit even those characters that are mostly strictly fighters.. as it gives them time to work with local militias, act as guards for merchants and other time consumptive networking events

[@scottmcarthur207]

In AD&D, there was so much time was spent in training, skill development, spell study & research that time passed very quickly in game. A month of training for a new level wasn’t unusual As you got higher in level, sometimes character had to travel great distances to find a higher level character to teach them (or for Druids and Monks, battle for place). New spell books took days to write. And bases of operations to draw henchmen and followers took weeks, moths or longer to establish. I recall our characters starting around 20 years old (for humans) and reaching their 30s by 8th level

[@leftcoaster67]

Explains why some classes like Fighters, Magic-Users, Clerics had strongholds, you needed taxes and a safe place to hole up while your were doing research.

[@Sukerkin]

That part about how people learned to play and how traditions formed was spot on. I started in the late 70’s and for a couple of decades I repeatedly came across games using house rules I created or being run by people who learned how to play from people I taught how to play. Likewise I would sit in on someone’s game and get the feeling from the style and setting that they had learned from a certain other Original Generation DM :).

[@MollymaukT]

The lack of downtime in current adventures is something I only really realized while DMing Curse of Strahd. Because I had to do a couple of homebrews to circumvent that (the most important was allowing the Wizard to create his own fine inks to add spells to his spellbook using their value in gems the party had found) and thank fuck he was an elf and didn't need to sleep cause otherwise it would've been a nightmare for him to find the hours needed to write them. Also in hindsight, I realize that there's one place where the 1:1 time ratio is kept alive. RP communities in MMOs because they're pretty much huge DnD games with hundreds if not thousands of players going about their game at different moments and with various levels of interaction and cohesion so that quickly becomes a necessity to keep the running stories from becoming utter chaos.

[@ArcaneGeek001]

If you think about it, 5e plays very much like a MMORPG. There are no lasting injuries. No permanent, or even long lasting, effects from spells. You can only use/carry so many magic items. Most player classes can fill most every role in a typical party. There is no morality system for behavioral guidance. And the systems are focused to encourage quick play and quick rewards.

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

True 1:1 timekeeping is kept alive by the LARP communities as well, though thankfully Jeffro Johnson and the good folks over at the #BrOSR decided to do a deep dive on a single passage in the 1e DMG: "In Ad&d it is emphasized even more: YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT." The successful thought experiment is still continuing, and we can now share our findings with the wider D&D community. 👍

[@AraliciaMoran]

I've had a similar experience as a player on the (pathfinder) campaign Rise of the Runelord; the player characters have been handling one emergency after the other, with barely enough time to breath before the next disaster occur. It's to the point that a sentiment of player fatigue has started to creep in.

[@20storiesunder]

My Curse of Strahd took two ingame years but I edited it significantly

[@freelancerthe2561]

@@ArcaneGeek001 IE: Remember 4e?

[@themejin93]

An option I have been toying with is having time "catch up" between adventures. Note when an adventure starts, how long in game it took, and when it ends. Afterwards there is an appropriate amount of downtime to add in based on the difference.

[@SupergeekMike]

Ooh I like that too!

[@honoratagold]

This is what is recommended in Kobold Press's Midgard setting book iirc. Their 5e stuff is written pretty "normally" for 5e adventures, but real time "catches up" between chapters/adventures/dungeons. [I believe the recommendation they use is actually 2x real time.]

[@andrewhallock2548]

I remember when I first got into D&D in 1984 having this discussion with my friends and we couldn't figure out why you would have time pass in the game world at the same rate as the real world between sessions. Now, so many years later, it makes sense. Thank you for a thought-provoking video!

[@SupergeekMike]

I’m so glad you enjoyed it!

[@joshuaclabeaux1470]

Yeah! I'm actually using this rule right now! I'm running an open-table campaign set in the Greyhawk world at my local game store. It's working really well! Anybody can play the adventure, and actions have consequences; a couple of the players found a way to steal a young adult dragon's treasure without killing him, and then the next session (happens a week later) began with a small army of the dragon's minions (lizardfolk, goblins, and hobgoblins, with siege equipment) surrounding the castle (home base of the PCs) demanding that the castle lord turn over the PCs who did it. The PCs decided to escape through a secret tunnel out of the castle. So yeah, this actually leads to some interesting stuff!

[@SupergeekMike]

I love it!

[@blackrock1961]

I've heard that story about cutting off part of a roast so many times from so many different people and every time it was something that happened in that person's family. Either everybody had a grandmother with a small roasting pan or everybody has adopted the story as their own.

[@SupergeekMike]

Neither would surprise me lol

[@googiegress]

There's also the story about the woman who stores her cans upside down. When asked, she doesn't know why, but learned it from her mother. Mom doesn't know why either, so they ask granny. Turns out grandma didn't like having to dust off her cans before opening them, so she would just put them in the cupboard upside down! The "secret family recipe" which was passed down from generation to generation after originally coming from the back of a mayonnaise jar! You'd be surprised how many grampas learned a salsa recipe from a guy they were in jail with in Mexico, who swore him to secrecy. You get a lot of this in martial arts schools too. When there's no attempt by each generation to learn the whole history, and the language, and learn from original sources instead of the game of Telephone that is a student teaching a student. So people start mispronouncing and mis-spelling things, techniques in forms get swapped out, the order of the forms changes, their names can change. But also the fine points of individual techniques can change. One student who starts his own school can teach a generation of students to stand wrong because they all watch him and he has a trick knee which has adjusted his stance. And then we drag in techniques we like from another style, stretching from yoga, etc. until it's difficult to say what is the traditional art.

[@kelpiekit4002]

The idea of running it like an excavation makes Dungeon of the Mad Mage much more playable to me. You're sending expeditions down to make the next layer safe to bring your base camp with its support personal and lore specialists. Between games the whole camp is doing the main work of discovery, research, diplomacy with any remaining groups there, training (possibly of languages that seem to be coming up as useful), etc. It will likely take a number of sessions for each layer giving you the chance to count it as scouting so you know what research may be helpful. One that might work strangely well with it is Princes of the Apocalypse if you dial back the hostility. Sure the cults have big bad plans that you know nothing about, but that'll take months. Meanwhile it's a much more political game as they are competing with each other for standing with local towns (especially if they want recruits), supply delivery safety, propaganda, secrecy and intrigue of their covert operations. Both the cults' work and the players' work would work well for downtime based intrigue and background research with a lot of investment in the locations. This would give them time to interact with the cults, their efforts, and their leaders outside of hostility. Similar slow investment could benefit Storm King's Thunder or reinforce the growing bleakness of the ongoing winter in Rime of the Fost Maiden.

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

Yes, these are indeed ways 1:1 time could be utilised, and I encourage you to check out "BDubs' Essential Guide to Patron Play for your D&D Campaign" to help flesh out how such things might be implemented.

[@xanthidinefelis8430]

Thank you for bringing this up. I started playing D&D in high school when it was stapled folded paper books, and stopped playing D&D when I hit grad school, because I didn't have time. That was soon after third edition came out. (Yay! Death to THAC0!) Anyway, I have just started back up playing again after seeing Critical Role got me back into it. I didn't understand why none of the other players/characters were doing anything between sessions, my bard was writing songs and playing in taverns and busking on street corners, studying for proficiency increases, and I was trying to set up library time for spell research, and my DM was looking at me like I was crazy... I've been freaking out because the Illithyd are trying to take 'Our world' over, and other players are cancelling sessions because life happens, and I've been thinking, "How are we going to stop their evil plot, it's been a month since we've had a session, the evil ones will have a huge foot hold now..." Oh... The other players don't think any time has passed between sessions in world. That explains so much!

[@JDB2552]

I stopped playing before my children were born and recently played in a session in my son-in-law’s gaming group. THAC0 is exactly the way I remembered playing and the new system they use now feels ass backwards. It was still a pretty fun session, though.

[@sonipitts]

#TeamDeathToTHAC0 🤣

[@JDB2552]

@@sonipitts that’s fine. You do you.

[@johnwoodward7236]

I started playing in 1979 using the AD&D system, but we didn't use this rule. In fact, there were tons of rules that we ignored, modified or just made up for ourselves. That's what I loved about the earlier systems - the Dungeon Master's Guide encouraged DMs to tailor the rules to their particular world or player group.

[@LB-yg2br]

I guarantee the real reason was that your DM just didn’t know what the rule was

[@LB-yg2br]

The DMG is also pretty clear about needing to follow the rules in order to create consistency between games because Gygax intended for dms to run big shared worlds and you, as a player, should be able to seamlessly move from table to table. Go watch stranger things and notice how when Erica (Lucas’ sister) shows up she doesn’t “make a new character”, she already has a character. Her character exists in the world already, the shared world with consistency. The dmg has one small paragraph that says “don’t let the rules tie your hands and force you into a bad, unfun situation” but early DnD was not all about tailoring the rules, that’s a 5E misconception of earlier editions

[@LB-yg2br]

@Steven Keck I can also vouch for each DM having their own (mis)interpretation of the rules but I think you are straw manning what I said...I was speaking specifically to what the DMG says (and you can go look it up if you don't believe me) and what Gygax had to say on the topic (which you can read in the DMG). Please avoid straw man arguments. They are not condusive to adult level conversations. Case in point, did you even KNOW that this time keeping rule existed? Thats why each DM had their own "interpretation". It was based on misconceptions and oral traditions that changed slightly over time as people misremembered things. I even had a DM that used the reaction adjustment for charisma as an initiative modifier...which was entirely based on his misconception of what "reaction adj" meant for DEX vice CHA. When DND was new, it was very much more akin to what Gygax's vision was, and it deviated from there. If you want to have a conversation about that, I am game, but don't mistake THIS conversation for what was being discussed earlier.

[@wlewisiii]

@@LB-yg2br If he didn't it was because of how piss poorly the DMG was written. Though I was spoiled by GDW - they actually knew how to write & the Traveller rules, while having some odd choices, were always much more easily understood than AD&D. I'll play Classic Traveller still (so does Marc Miller) but AD&D sits on the shelf gathering dust.

[@TiggerBouncey]

@user-hb9hs5dk7p Yes, let's go by what is the DMG says since you don't seem to know it. This is a direct copy/paste of the Afterword "AFTERWORD IT IS THE SPIRIT OF THE GAME, NOT THE LETTER OF THE RULES, WHICH IS IMPORTANT. NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU, IF IT GOES AGAINST THE OBVIOUS INTENT OF THE GAME. AS YOU HEW THE LINE WITH RESPECT TO CONFORMITY TO MAJOR SYSTEMS AND UNIFORMITY OF PLAY IN GENERAL, ALSO BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. WITHIN THE BROAD PARAMETERS GIVEN IN THE ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS VOLUMES, YOU ARE CREATOR AND FINAL ARBITER. BY ORDERING THINGS AS THEY SHOULD BE, THE GAME AS A WHOLE FIRST, YOUR CAMPAIGN NEXT, AND YOUR PARTICIPANTS THEREAFTER, YOU WILL BE PLAYING ADVANCED DUNGEONS 8 DRAGONS AS IT WAS MEANT TO BE. MAY YOU FIND AS MUCH PLEASURE IN SO DOING AS THE REST OF US DO!"

[@danmorgan3685]

Using real time also makes sense for the time period. Back in the day we had this thing called, "planning". You would setup a time and place to meet and count on people to show up. Back then all phone calls were pay by the minute so most people couldn't afford to be on the phone for that long. So using the real calendar helped get around some very limited communication technology.

[@bana2s]

I actually played “old school D&D” (1979 onward), and we never played that way, even between adventures. We knew about the rule, but none of us (and no player or DM we knew) followed it.

[@Hafaechaes]

It would honestly be cool for in game time to "catch up" with real time during downtime. So for example, you start the game in Summer in and out of game. If it takes three months out of game time to reach a point in game where you can reasonably have downtime, boom, three months pass in game and it's all "in sync" again. I'm thinking that for example Waterdeep Dragon Heist would lend itself very well to be run like this.

[@lordofuzkulak8308]

For the “what? What?! What?!!” Bit you should’ve edited in a clip of the Tenth Doctor doing that. 😉

[@SupergeekMike]

I was SO tempted lol

[@myrojyn]

@@SupergeekMike hey who turned out the lights

[@null-00000]

No they shouldnt have

[@datrux]

Doctor who?

[@DingoTheDemon]

Nah. They should have had a JoJo saying "nani?!"

[@JP-1990]

I haven't played D&D since I graduated high-school almost 15 years ago and just hearing this one rule has me incredibly intrigued.

[@SylviusTheMad]

I haven't played a live game since 2nd edition, and what Mike describes is how I think the game works. This explains a lot about why I find the newer rulesets confusing, because I'm trying to apply them in a context for which they are not intended. That characters heal fully with a long rest blows my mind.

[@GBS4893]

Hop on the train, d&d really came back at the front of internet these last years. There are numerous youtube channel to see interesting games, have people share stories or learn about intriguing monsters or ways to play

[@joelstein535]

A LOT of folks play on-line now. Many are on Facebook and most games are free. It's always time consuming, but still satisfying to do in the big bad guy! ;)

[@nationalsocialism3504]

@@SylviusTheMad current D&D bears little resemblance to original D&D... they are radically different in playtime, outcome, & expectations. Dungeon crawling was dungeon crawling... you started with a finite amount of resources & used them to explore as much of the Dungeon as the party could before having to retreat to town to refit/reequip. These long sprawling narrative campaigns were unimagined to what was basically an interactive math problem... same reason why Clerics are broken overpowered since Gary Gygax designed them to be used by women or DMPCs since they were vital but most players didn't want them for PCs. Whoever brought their gf would just make her play the Cleric otherwise the DM would need to run the "healer" resource

[@freelancerthe2561]

@@nationalsocialism3504 I think you just solved a potential concern I was having in trying to get the gang back together for a few one shots.

[@WhywolfSenpai]

This is wild and gives me a whole new level of respect for old school D&D. And seeing as me "weekly" game tends to be more monthly I'm def tempted to try shifting gears into more of this style

[@tannermilligan5060]

So, I think I would absolutely implement this with the caveat, "When we're in a dungeon, time stops between sessions. But when we're in town or traveling time flows as it does in the real world" I have a huge fixation on downtime since in most of the games I have played in, I didn't get any. So I make sure my players get as much as they want without much or any pain. Much like in the same vein when I run Kingmaker, I'm going to let my players roll two characters. One's their dungeon crawler, and one's their stand in for political affairs.

[@googiegress]

The adventurer busts in, to find her counterpart in bed with a Kenku. "WHAT IS THE MEANING OF THIS" "Darling, I am having a political affair" Kenku reaches over to the nightstand and shakes his talisman of office, for emphasis. "How many XP are in it for us?" *whisper whisper* "Carry on then!"

[@DozolEntertainment]

I created and managed a west marches group a few years ago, and out of necessity we ended up on these settings. The whole group (20+ people) all bellonged to the same adventuring guild, charged with exploring the new lands discovered and defending the new settlement from danger. Each session was an "adventure" or "expedition" and Time passed normaly outside game. Each week players would pick a downtime for their characters and do them. Some players bought land, homes, shops, others aquired tittles and started small settlements, a few players naded toguether and bought enought land and started to build a fort/temple there. We started with a blank map and the players explored, created and discovered hundreds of new places, ruins, dungeons, small settlements to ally or fight against. This was some of the Best Games i ever had over 21 years playing and DMing D&D. Unfortunately, personal problems and Covid got in the way and we had to end the group, but man it was fun.

[@artistpoet5253]

We always just played episodic. There weren't that many of us and so many games were one-on-one sessions with NPCs to take up the slack if needed. Downtime activities were montages with a few rolls and then back into the action. Also, a game I ran for one friend didn't overlap with any other game I ran. When we all got together for a group session, it was more of a one-shot but we all used our characters from the other games. These played out like many of the old Marvel-DC cross overs which were lots of fun to do.

[@mattewald9378]

My immediate idea to run this style of campaign is a parent running a game for their kids and their cousins and friends a situation where maybe you have a kid that wants to play D&D almost every night after dinner and you don’t wanna say no you have to wait for all your cousins to be here to continue that story

[@nationalsocialism3504]

Kinda... it's just a different perspective. The dungeon was the main "character" and PCs were way more disposable... all DMs had their notebook of grid paper with their dungeon in it, to play a game meant having a DM with his dungeon. Everyone could just throw together PCs in a few minutes then tackle exploring as much of the dungeon as possible before the party ran out of resources. Playing often with the same DM meant that you'd have "maps" of his dungeon that let you bypass all those areas for the most part... though most would repopulate "explored" portions to some degree. For the most part... everyone had their own Dungeon & working on it was part of the hobby.

[@BuckeyeNut123]

The 'Rule Books' are 'Guide Books', meant to give a basic structure to the Role Playing Experience. If I recall correctly, it is even listed in the 2nd Edition Dungeon Masters Guide (not Rule) book. Never let minutiae get in the way of telling... creating... an epic story.

[@sylveswe]

Yeah, everything in D&D & AD&D was simply a suggestion.

[@arborrhys9162]

I grew up playing in a decades-old world that ran in approximately real time with multiple GMs, and i wondered why my uni friends play so differently. I have a fondness for this style of play and this makes me want to do more. It does encourage you to skip some of the boring bits, and also makes it more interesting to play multiple characters when your other character is still in the world using their downtime for something.

[@KelsieMcA]

And I'm the mum that brought them up this way. We synchronise every three months.

[@vizerandevir6422]

I like the idea of doing realtime when the group ends in a secure space like a town or under the roof of a colleague, but the "pause button" style if the previous session ends on a cliffhanger or in the midst of a dungeon.

[@donnkasten4111]

I’ve actually been playing with the idea of an episodic campaign based on an isolated village. The players start out as ordinary townsfolk, with ordinary jobs answering the call to investigate some unusual disappearances. I like the idea of the time between secessions being an ordinary work week. Then we meet there’s another call to action and we start another episodic adventure.

[@SabersEdge]

When I was a pastor in Missouri i lived in the country. My players had to drive 2-3 hours to get to my game so not everyone was always there. I gave my wife (who was always there) a castle (ruin actually that used to be a castle, and my two sons 7 and nine were men at arms with her. One a knight and one an elven ranger/wizard) as a reward for killing an assassin who attacked the king. It had no men at arms, no roof, but a small town (that wasn't sure they wanted a Lord/Lady until she and the party began killing the bandits and marauders, trolls and orcs. But it worked well. IF a player couldn't make it his character was doing something to build the barony. One player wanted to raise horses. One wanted to patrol the kings highway in the area. Others chose other things that their characters were working on if they couldn't play that session. sometimes they would right out stories of what their "work" had been like and send it to all the players (after my approval, sometiimes I would add clues to their story that hinted at upcaming adventures I had planned. ) It worked well and kept it from having a strange feel because players were missing.

[@sonipitts]

@@SabersEdge I really like this way of handling players who often can't get together to play at the same time. Seems like it would make playing a lot easier for adults who have far less regularly and cohort-scheduled free time like kids and teens living their lives on the same public school timeline tend to have.

[@mentalrebllion1270]

I’m kinda glad that isn’t the case because my group lost a lot of people recently (the con of playing in the middle of the week) and so we have taken some time to recruit back up as the story has progressed into a point where we can’t afford to have our party too small to progress. I have pushed for downtime before this though. And I plan to schedule in some with some activities I have run by my dm. It would make sense. Just not right this moment as we are sorta questing for answers for one of the new players that has joined to introduce them. But it’s probably coming up soon.

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

You do not need a large group to implement or utilise this, the True "Always On" campaign benefits greatly from pairing the strict time keeping with Patron Play.

[@johnweibel1128]

If I recall, you couldn't gain a level or improve your character until you returned to town. That gave players incentive to wrap up the session and find out what experience they were awarded. And I had forgotten the flexibility of not overly worrying about who could make it this week. I have a friend who runs D&D weekly. He and his group, expect a player to commit to the weekly schedule, like if it was softball team.

[@googiegress]

It's a tradeoff, but one way of awarding XP is to do it immediately. The upside is the players understand what actions gave them rewards, which encourages more of that action. Downside is it's more bookkeeping, and players find out what treasure is worth when they haven't yet appraised or identified it. The old SSI Gold Box games worked this way. Or, the DM adds up the XP and awards it at the end of the session (or when the party returns to town, because they might be able to train). This is obviously easier, obscures the source of the XP, and if you're super tired at the end you can text the players the next day what their XP was. Anyway, this latter method prevents leveling mid-expedition because they can't level without awarded XP. Assuming you don't require training. If you do need training to level up, of course you must return to town to do it.

[@Rutanachan]

I understand now why back then you had one character that was really important to you, and you could just go to a group with this character and play. Why you didn't made another character for another group. This is so fascinating!

[@SabersEdge]

No one could play a character in my group that was not created for and built up in my group. It kept people from importing magic from a "Monty Hall - Let's Make a Deal Game" that passed out magic like candy.

[@l3lixx]

True fact. High level play, characters where portable between game groups. This is why many players kept a notebook(s) of thier characters exploits to document their level gains, magic items, titles and property

[@googiegress]

I came across a house rule for how to deal with that very thing: a DM might have someone show up with a decked-out PC and tell them, pick just 4 of these magic items that you have with you for this adventure - the rest are safe at your home and unavailable. This helped keep things simpler and easier to manage, and an insanely rich PC couldn't hand out magic items to his new party members. I saw that at work in a few other situations too. "You left the lab in a rush and instead of all the future tech you could only grab a couple things".

[@risperdude]

I kind of posted this on discord too but realized comment sections are what drives the algorithm, so i figured I'd add a little engagement here too. Playing early box set and AD&D, my core group of junior high school geeks really never had campaigns per se. We often we made new characters for each game session. We usually made small dungeons (or ruins) that were essentially one shots with out an overarching story. If we had a dungeon with cool characters that worked well together and it sparked the DM's imagination we would come back later after the other players had their turns. In those circumstances we would usually learn that "some time" after exploring the dungeon strange creatures were seen somewhere else close by, that our exploration had triggered some other evil to awaken. I think with one group of characters, we actually got through 5 or 6 sessions/dungeons I want to say we got to 17th level. Yes, we gave out WAY too much treasure, 'cause to us kids getting more gold than anyone could carry was as cool as fighting monsters (maybe more). We never had a designated DM, we all did it. Some of us were more in to it but it never became any one person's job. I do kind of miss that.

[@tarultoyarto]

This explains so much. If everyone in town is playing in the same world (with the same characters!) then it becomes much closer to a LARP group. If your DM is going to be busy for the next month, then everyone takes their characters to the other DM in the neighborhood and runs some adventures with another group. Level disparities would be expected and you could DM around them. Death is a much bigger deal, you'd be much more attached to your level 5 character knowing it would take several months to get another character to that level. You could conceivably play the same character for years in this group. Players who'd been around the longest would have higher-level characters and would be elder adventurers in your D&D community. The local community would be much tighter-knit by necessity. It'd be so much harder to get rid of players you didn't mesh with, which would lead to a lot of interpersonal drama--this explains so much about weird shit I've experienced from older players. Oh my god.

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

Not just the same in game town. Different campaigns, in different settings at different real-life tables. All linked by the simple utilisation of 1:1 time. A true Multiverse of Madness.🤯🤯

[@frankb3347]

For some reason this made me think of the Goblin Slayer anime.

[@ryanthomasjones]

I was surprised when I saw that video too. We never used that rule back in the day, but we played mostly BECMI and 2e, which had maybe already shifted. I can imagine Gary Gygax or Dave Anderson having dozens of people gathered around them playing whenever they could. If D&D was synonymous with playing Gary or Dave's game back in the day, I can see why it would have been a necessary rule.

[@aqrxv]

In my experience, very few people used the rule during AD&D 1st edition or OD&D either! Or at least, they didn't use it for long. And, of course, no one in the 70s actually new how Gary or Arneson played outside of their own group and friends - almost all of that information came out decades later.

[@deadlyDM]

Dave Arneson

[@ryanthomasjones]

@@deadlyDM Good catch. Sorry, I failed my save vs autocorrect.

[@chrislenz6634]

Great video. I learned to play in the Basic D&D era, before AD&D was published. Some of what you are talking about is 100% spot on. Some of it was not true in my groups. We would get together when we could, with who we could for a single adventure. But most of the time, we had a regular session with the same group. It was easier then, as we didn't have all the electronic communication, so we were better able to plan. We did run solo adventures in between sessions, sometimes they were just ad hoc sessions because a couple or three of us had the time, sometimes they were planned. But as for the time issue. Sometimes we played real time, sometimes we didn't. But I don't recall ever having a hard rule of 1 day = 1 day. It was much more loose. If we ended a session where we were in town, we just assumed time passed, and it was kind of assumed wounds healed, armor was repaired, etc. It was not something we tracked, for the most part, unless it was part of the adventure. But often we couldn't finish a dungeon or exploration adventure in the session, so things just paused there. But they were great times.

[@BitwiseMobile]

I started playing D&D before I was exposed to AD&D. They called it basic D&D. When I was finally exposed to AD&D, I felt that they kind of brushed over a lot of what made D&D what it was. It felt like a bunch of spreadsheets. It's rules like these that made "basic" D&D what it was and gave it the magic that I remember as a 14 year old geek in the mid 80s :D.

[@mikepowers8607]

I'm already running my games using old AD&D modules that have been updated to the current ruleset. And since one of my groups rotates DMs (each member of the group comes up with a one-shot or self contained module and runs it), it's literally months between sessions I run. Given that, it most definitely makes sense to use the 1:1 ratio. Explains the sudden level jump I need to give them, which also will come from AD&D. You didn't level up in the dungeon. You leveled up AFTER you got back to town.

[@ArcaneGeek001]

Yes. Leveling up was something you did when you were no longer in the "stress situation" and had time to reflect on your own actions. You had to train with someone who possessed skills and/or knowledge that surpassed your own by a good amount (2-3 more levels). The idea behind this was the same as doing "lessons learned" sessions after you finish a project at work. You look at what you did or didn't do, what went well, what could have gone better, how to make everything go better next time. You can't do that in the middle of a project any more than you can in the middle of a crawl through the underdark.

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

@@ArcaneGeek001 And what happens when those Trainers are High Level NPCs, controlled by other players. Patron Play happens.

[@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork]

Training to level using 1:1 time keeping is complimented by Patron Play. And by the sounds of it, also by running Henchmen/Hirelings. 👍

[@ArcaneGeek001]

@@AuthoritativeNewsNetwork You got it. Made for interesting interactions.

[@kereminde]

@@ArcaneGeek001 Question! I recall this being done in the NES port of "Pool of Radiance" (I have not gotten my copy of the Gold Box game to work on a modern PC... yet.) but I don't necessarily recall seeing it in the AD&D 2nd Edition book? It's been a LONG time so I could be misplacing it in memory but...

[@arobbo28]

I would absolutely LOVE to hear how this would go in a real campaign. It feel like it's super geared towards 6+ hour sessions, and I kinda wish I was able to try it. (I also really want to try Many Worlds Tavern's tea but the cheapest shipping would bring my total of one pack of tea to 45USD and I can't justify that expense :((( but I hope everyone who does get to try it enjoys it)

[@bludfyre]

Those are the ones most able to absorb travel, though. Spending 1.5 hours on a random encounter as you move from town to town, or town to objective, is half your play session if you only have 3 hours. Which means you make much less progress on the adventure.

[@colbyboucher6391]

Ehh, why would it have to be long sessions?

[@TheJoyofWargaming]

Here's a blog post guy using this method. If you want to chase the full ramifications of this rule, give it a read. One thing our host hadn't considered is how this One Simple Trick lets you tie together events on multiple campaign world run by multiple DMs. This is just the start of how to build those sprawling and epic campaign groups that were common back in the day. bdubsanddragons.blogspot.com/2021/07/jeffrogaxian-time-keeping-vs-variable.html?m=1

[@frankb3347]

Back in the 1990s an 8 hour weekly game session was the standard around here. Sometimes if we could pull it off we'd have an all weekend sleep over session.

[@asurethedm]

Honestly as it is what i run, bastarized a westmarches and hexcrawl in one big thing. I run the world as if it was a permanent one, players doing sessions or not. Villains do villains things, factions do enacts their plans, and consequences are done with absolute fairness and in an uncomprising manner. It is a bit time intensive on the dm part because you must have a good idea on what's going on on a large scale, but it can easily scaled down by limiting it to what the players have discovered. Playing on a VTT help a whole lot since we can play whenever 2+ of my players are on and Pathfinder 2e is really cool for multiple character to play with. Travel if it is what worries you is dealt tile by tile, with a tile a day on foot or on regular horses and doing a roll each tile for encounters&randomevent.

[@starlitelemming6929]

Outside of the USA, where there was essentially no access to conventions, experts, or linked groups, every group was fundamentally its own island. There was no sense of playing in a world shared with any other players and we did our dungeons at our own speed. Nonetheless, we did take our creative cues from published modules, so the larger worlds we developed and populated with our own dungeons did have a similar feel. Two things to note: 1) The concept of "homebrew" made no sense in those days. It was either our own adventure or a published adventure. We might have a few table-rules, but otherwise the rules were sacred, while the adventures were no more than a beginner's template. When it came to the story, what is now called "homebrew" was simply the norm. 2) Second edition modules were a complete waste of money. The Dragonlance precedent had created this strange need to retell existing stories rather than creating new ones. TSR started publishing modules that all simply rail-roaded the characters through a story already published in a novel. Here in Australia, those novels weren't really available, and there was no critical mass of gatherings to encourage people to seek them out, so we had no desire in playing the stories. We continued to create our own characters and personalities, and DMs were now forced to create their own adventures and modules, simply because the published ones were so awful. At least, that was my experience. Sadly, I see a lot of the same thing with 5e adventures. People get excited about playing (or even meeting) characters whose stories they've read. I personally don't understand why, but it's incredibly pervasive. They hang on every word of canonical, historical development in the Forgotten Realms, not realising that they're sacrificing their own heroic role for the sake of someone else's tale. Add to that, no-one seems to know how to build a proper dungeon any more. I love how 5e provides so many tools to flesh out and really role-play a character. But the published adventures both try to do far too much, while achieving far too little. And they serve as very poor templates.

[@yuudaemones2624]

This is genuinely fascinating and I can't believe I'm only hearing of this now.

[@Frostrazor]

Long time D&Der from OED Basic set 1982 when I started. Through the years of 1st and 2nd edition AD&D, we used this rule of thumb to time advancement. But we didn't necessarily end each session "back in town". Instead once the dungeon/quest/mission was completed, and characters returned to town, an equal time passes between the first session, and the start of the next one. So if we played on (real world calendar) June 1, ended our session without completing the dungeon and scenario, then played a week later on June 8, and still didn't complete it - but finally completed it the following week on June 15, then when we all got back together to start the next adventure on June 22, a total of three weeks have passed since the start of that first adventure (even though in-game the adventure only took 5 days to complete; the other 16 days spent in town). The players would then explain (within reason) how they spent that time. (For what it's worth, this is highly expanded upon in The One Ring RPG with Fellowship Phases - with players being allowed to free-form narrate what happened to his/her character during that 'downtime'). Mike, i think the aforementioned style may help bridge that gap you were concerned with about ending your game on a cliffhanger. Real time passes - but only after the current adventure/mission/quest/dungeon/crypt/tomb/keep/castle is completed. Occasionally for story purposes we'd alter - especially speeding up in-game time - such as if they wanted to build a keep, and per the DMG would take 6 months to complete, we'd FF the time by 6 months, so that we could start the next session with a completed keep. That type of thing. Or research a new spell, train in a new ability, etc.

[@SupergeekMike]

Cool!!

[@tvctaswegia497]

Good points on character stories and keeping them all in sync, that's how we've always played (decades) to the point where we would not play unless all can play. I love the idea of micro rp via text, email, chat between sessions. I would find that really engaging and make me thirsty for the next session. So what happens with the mysterious faces?

[@SupergeekMike]

It depends what you do when you see the faces 😈

[@JohnJackson66]

I think I remember this, I was quite young at the time. We certainly always returned to town at the end of every session, the end being determined by playtime remaining rather than objective completion. The parties could be more ad-hoc, which often resulted in some antisocial behaviour, ranging from exp hogging from monster kills, theft of the loot, to straight up abandonment or murder of party members for a bigger share.

[@TheKazragore]

Depending on the game, a different way to handle this is with the longer rest rules in the DMG. A short rest is 8 hours and a long rest is 7 days. This helps to slow the pace of the game down, and you learn to appreciate your class features, as well as encouraging players to not lean so heavily on them, but to solve issues in other ways.

[@googiegress]

That also importantly gives more time for wandering monsters to bother the party and interrupt the rest. What's supposed to happen is that the party enters an adventure zone, and they must make do with their resources available until they find an opportunity to rest and recover. So a dungeon should have a difficult entry that either burns resources or takes time which generates wandering monsters which burn resources. This prevents them from just leaving to rest, and thus prevents the 15-minute adventuring day. (Wandering monsters are to be avoided from a 1e perspective because they sap resources and grant little XP, because they carry little to no treasure. They're a stick mechanic to encourage efficient play.) The result of this is that the players withhold resources instead of spending them like mad money. If you have something that recovers only after long rest, you won't use it just to stunt on a monster that can be overcome some other way. You have to carefully decide whether it's better to use an action surge to get another action which you could use to kill a low-HP enemy before he gets to go and possibly cause a whole bunch of damage to a party member. If you can just all hunker down in a port-a-potty for an hour and get most of your resources back, then Short Rest abilities are all essentially per-combat. An 8 hour Short Rest also puts the natural healing rate back into line with earlier editions, although getting 1 HD per short rest is still a lot compared to 1 HP per day from earlier D&D!

[@PickleRick65]

I started playing D&D in 80/81, we applied time factors as needed. When you have to travel for 30 days you don't take 30 days to do it.

[@MoragTong_]

Wtf are you talking about? No one does that. Time OUTSIDE of the game passes at the same rate as real time.

[@SenorGato237]

I started playing in the old traditions. The new narrative style is definitely better for a dedicated group, but the old style certainly has a certain charm to it. I'm working on a supplement for campaign creation that brings in a lot of the older style, especially world creation and exploration. It's nice to see there is some interest in it.

[@ScottBaker_]

When you had a large number of rotating players, things just worked differently. I also never had to worry about "Bob" not being able to make the session.

[@lyudmilapavlichenko7551]

"old school D&D was more of a oral tradition" This is so true.

[@HansLemurson]

The exact quote at 6:18 was "A lot of early D&D was almost like an oral tradition", but that actually just makes your comment BETTER, since like a true Oral Tradition, you paraphrase.

[@lyudmilapavlichenko7551]

@@HansLemurson I'll pass that along.

[@nationalsocialism3504]

Old school D&D is for math nerds... new school D&D is for drama geeks. They aren't the same game and have little cross over demographic appeal for either extreme

[@offcenterideas]

Idea to use with time passing between sessions - have each player roll 5-10 d20s at the end of each session to be used for random events during downtime / travel. That way the DM can simply narrate the outcomes without needing to wait for the player to respond with a die roll. Could be useful, especially if some players aren't always the most responsive.

[@bludfyre]

This is an awesome idea! You could even have a mini "combat" that you narrate via text or at the beginning of the next session. You would just need to make it a relatively easy combat that reinforces that the world is dangerous, but couldn't lead to a PC death.

[@spacekitten357]

that always seemed weird to me, i love creating characters so much, with cool backstories, and specifc traits and flaws, and most times i had at least 3 or 4 characters ready to go,waiting impatiently for when i finaly get killed so i can start that new character ive been hoping to roleplay as soon as i could.

[@stuartm7009]

If I were running a campaign with this rule I'd probably allow sessions to be multiple days, keeping the variable time in session, then between sessions let time "catch up" to the extra days the party has played out, then have downtime/travel like you were suggesting. It kinda allows for more play, along with letting side stories occur naturally

[@dizzysnakepilot]

I started in 1977, and that rule worked well as we played characters in multiple games and always ended up back at town, as you noted. When modules with long story arcs became available we didn't use it as much.

[@evieoverride]

What's really interesting is how this also shaped a lot of early CRPG games too! I always thought it was funny how games like Wizardry or The Bard's Tale expected you to go back and forth, traversing the same ground & swapping party members as you slowly made it deeper and deeper between returns to town, but knowing it was part of the culture of the time, it makes perfect sense.

[@tonydorsett33]

I started playing with what is known as BECMI today in the early '80s as a kid. I haven't played since then, but I do like to watch D&D on KZbin... it's nostalgic. The biggest issue I have with 5e is it seems like it's played like a video game. The fear of characters dying is gone. It isn't as gritty and scary as it should be IMO. I mean the name of the game is DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS and dying should be on the minds of players all the time. As a kid, we had such epic deaths of loved characters, and some kids even cried over it. D&D should be tense as well as fun and silly at times. I like the time rules, 1 HP healing per day, avoiding fights because your party is weak etc. It made you actually THINK rather than the way I see it played today, where it is like a video game with endless lives. Just my thoughts.

[@sidford8419]

Back in the 70's we knew this rule, but, we would stay up for 24 hours just to complete a dungeon. We would then "rest" until the next day or weekend. Getting deep into a dungeon just to "quit" for a few days was not role-playing. Where would one sleep? what would you eat? the original game was super immersive! I miss those days...

[@googiegress]

It's always a real ego boost for the DM when the players are at the end of the session demanding that we keep going!! No better vote of confidence than that.

[@bud389]

"You didn't have sprawling adventures" - *AHEM* Temple of Elemental Evil Queen of the Spiders Egg of the Phoenix The Secret of Bone Hill Dwellers of the Forbidden City Pharoah Conan Unchained Return to the Keep on the Borderlands Tales of the Outer Planes Swords of the Iron Legion Ravenloft - Circle of Darkness The Shattered Statue To Find a King

[@perplexedmoth]

Here's some of the Gygaxian rules off the top of my head: - Realtime = Gametime - Pummeling/Grappling/Subduing: this is fairly complicated and a must for capturing enemies without killing them. - Morale & Reaction rules: also fairly complicated with 3-4 pages, and 5-10 tables. - Outdoor Castle and NPC party/adventurer encounters. - Mapping in the dungeon, slanted doors, map catching fire, chance of getting lost, unable to map when chasing/running - Torch/oil lamp & food tracking - Save or death traps - Volume, mass and location based equipment tracking (how many coins fit into a small pouch? Better carry gems than coins). - Exchange rate and medieval banking rules - Praying for gods (this has nothing to do with clerics, any PC can do this, it is a very obscure/forgotten one) - Weather & astronomic/astrologic events - Cleric initiation and progression rules (after level 3 cleric can talk to his/her god, acquires the spells directly from the god) - Hirelings, henchman/followers, expert Hirelings: their cost to hire, accommodation and equipment, and morale. - Building a castle/tower raising an army - Retiring from adventuring, reaching godhood There's plenty of weird/obscure rules hiding in AD&D 1e DMG that very few people seem to be employing.

[@googiegress]

Episodic "return to town" style games, like West Marches, can work really well in Spelljammer. Because you're returning to the ship every session. It feels a lot like Star Trek and other TV shows.

[@kevinsmith9899]

I dabbled in RPGs many years ago. But my relevant context is with early computer RPGs, and with the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game. Both of those are very much episodic. Each session begins and ends in town (give or take). So it was interesting to me to hear this other approach, of ending sessions on cliffhangers, and not having each session follow the beginning-middle-end structure. Good thought-provoking stuff.

[@whiskeyvictor5703]

"Downtime" activities were once called "outside interests" in Arneson's Blackmoor campaign (see The First Fantasy Campaign, pulb. by Judges Guild).

[@Immolate62]

The idea that the general public were all playing shared-world games back in the late 70's or 80's is novel. My group which still plays weekly 45 years from our beginning weren't privy to every campaign out there, but due to things like military service, we got plenty of exposure to others. That along with regular attendance to GenCon and one of our number owning multiple comics and games stores lent some perspective. I have never heard of much of what you're talking about. I think the key here is that there were countless campaigns going on, and likewise countless processes. The only real unifying force was the published material from TSR, but while the Player's Handbook and Monster Manual were commonly treated as hard rules, the stuff in the DMG were viewed as soft suggestions. Even in the annual AD&D Open in GenCon each year, the DMG was often carried but seldom opened. Of course exposure to a game store environment will broaden your experience, but such games tend to be more episodic and therefore biased toward modularity. This was necessary because people would come and go with greater regularity. Things are different now. When D&D went its own way, we went ours and started playing Pathfinder. Our (now two) game store-owning members are well-versed in the D&D game as they must be to stock appropriately, but each subsequent edition has fallen short in some major way to win us back. Even the new Pathfinder edition was tried and discarded mid-campaign. Our method is to allow time to pass between sessions when appropriate, which it often is not. Each campaign is about a year long and we pass the DM's mantle between six of our eight members, but many campaigns are running against the clock, and that allows for little down-time. Not my favorite thing, but we always allow for some pretty elaborate side stories and character development (not improvement) offline. It just has to make sense with the story line. There was not internet back in those days, though I did get plugged in to arpanet when I went to work for a defense contractor in '88. There was a lot of good source material on the WSMR site, which was a FTP repository more vast than anything else available at the time. Once the internet became a thing, socialization of D&D was a result, and good ideas became much more popular, but even then there was, and still is, infinite variety.

[@antondovydaitis2261]

Having played D&D in the 70's, I can confirm at least one literal shared world that spanned at least a dozen DMs in several countries. Students at CalTech and M.I.T. created their own variant of D&D called Warlock that was distributed through the ARPANET. There was a literal shared world, an entire wilderness divided into hexes, maintained on a server. This was used to generate random encounter tables for each hex. DMs all over the world, primarily at Universities and Military Bases, would run D&D sessions with those random encounter tables, and the results of the encounters were uploaded to the server, which updated the hexes. So if you killed a dragon, or slew of goblins, not only would those monsters be removed from the encounter tables, but other monsters would migrate from nearby hexes to take advantage of the deceased monsters' absence. Similarly, NPCs, often GM characters, could also be encountered, and would level up over time. The earliest MMO world.

[@highertype]

Yeah, my mind is buzzing, too, but for an opposite reason. I am an old schooler. Not only have I never played 5e, I've never even played any version after AD&D. So I've been wondering what everyone is talking about when they cite a different style. We never stuck to that real time rule--sometimes we picked up where we left off, sometimes we let months pass--but we did play episodically, and you did change out players any given week according to who could make the game. And yes, it was very motivating to be earning XP according to your individual exploits and play time. But as we played the bigger stories became the most important element. And the stories were driven by the players' interests and motivations. So your job as DM was to be nimble and let the players help to create. And that required us to respond with a wider world for them to play in.

[@justsomeperson5110]

I've been playing since 1996, everything from basic D&D box set to, well, modern. (Though a lot less so modern as it's gotten ... bad IMHO.) I've played with numerous groups (obviously) and DMed all sorts of eras of D&D and ... I have never seen a single DM actually use this time rule, even when it is in the DMG for the version of rules they're running. Because it's a rule that only works in rare scenarios. There's a reason why as early as 2nd Ed this rule was dropped entirely. It didn't work. Heck, I have rarely seen a campaign that was short enough to even try to apply it to. In an era of VCRs and video games, we understood the pause button, even in those olden days. And as you said, life happens. You can't kill everyone because a pipe broke, the game was delayed, and two weeks later everyone died from lack of rations. LOL Game time pauses. It just always has. Be it a whole world or just a finely crafted single dungeon, I've yet to see adults have the free time in their lives between work, family, and friends to devote to playing against a constantly matching real-world time mechanic. I've seen it applied loosely to when players can't make a session, but I have never once seen it blanketly applied to all, because it wouldn't work. People have to go home sometime and it'd make no sense for every character to just up and leave a dungeon in the middle to go back to town because the players need to sleep. Even in the long-weekend marathon sessions from Friday night to Monday, it'd still be weird for the party to just run away like chickens every night so players could sleep. Not to mention, you know, food and lodging take coinage and I've yet to meet a player that even brings enough food to survive the fake time of a dungeon, let alone have the means to survive a real-time downtime. LOL DMs just kind of have to overlook a thing or two when fantasy meets reality. While it might be interesting to DM a world where such a mechanic might apply, I've yet to meet anyone who makes money professionally DMing for a living and can devote enough hours every day to making it work, let alone enough players in an area existing to even fill such a world. Most of the time it's hard enough just finding enough interested players to even get a single party adventuring.

[@huzzindaable]

Well one fact that REQUIRES this "slow" downtime filled play is based on the idea that healing took a long time I remember spending days and weeks of downtime so the fighter can get his hp back, so in 5e every one gets full health in one long rest, the only thing nf that takes more than 8 hours to get back hit dice and exhaustion, but even worst case scenario you need like 3 days if downtime to get back everything... so most downtime activities require more time, Discouraging people to even try to use those activities and DMs have compensated for the players not using downtime by just offering them more magic items or even magic items shops to make up for it. Downtime filled games ARE fun but 5e is not required for people to play like they sooo most don't

[@danielgehring7437]

We played with this rule very briefly when I was just starting out. I remember, very specifically, never getting my full compliment of spells back during the session because it took (iirc) 1 hour per spell level to memorize a spell and you only made camp for 8 hours at a time. But then for like the last session of the night, I could unleash everything, it was awesome. We even started having what we called 'nightly giant,' a big beast that would just come out of the woods for us to fight, so we could unload all our stuff on it and get hurt as much as we wanted since we knew we'd start the next session next week fully healed, rested, and loaded up with our full compliment of spells. But that only lasted a couple of months before we realized it was pretty untenable and just ignored it from then on. Nightly Giant lives on, though.

[@jimjolly4560]

Now I'm wondering if this same notion was the root of Traveller's Hyperspace jumps- however far you jump, it takes a week. If your campaign takes you to one new world each session, and you play once a week...

[@debreczeniarpad9956]

I've been telling a modified Mad Mage for two groups in in the last 2 and 2,5 years. Lot of downtime, personal quest, Waterdeep schenanigans, sometimes month delays :) I just love it

[@jaybea365]

I've always worked in time passage at level up. Leveling takes 1 month of game time in my campaign(and that is all you are doing, unless I feel particularly bastardish and interrupt them), and you can't do it mid-adventure.

[@shanewinter7251]

Check out Pendragon RPG for an interesting take on the passage of time. Each session begins in the spring with what’s going on in court, the adventure you run at the table takes place in the summer, and then there is the winter phase at the end of the session (or between) where you handled experience and downtime. As time passes so quickly, you eventually stay playing sons and grandchildren. It takes place over generations.

[@wdheideman]

I'm pretty sure most everyone I knew who played was aware of the rule, but generally chose to ignore it as it was massively inconvenient most of the time. I think it might be a difference between City based players and Rural based players -- we did not have the "shared world" paradyme as we did not have access to those City based groups.

[@abeartheycallFozzy]

No idea how this got in my reccomended videos, but it was fascinating to hear how d&d has evolved since i last had the old books. Mid 80s when it was still run by Gygax.

[@arcadiaberger9204]

I'm reminded of an idea I had of a LARP like Vampire: the Masquerade which would be played out in real time any time two or more players met, recognized one another's badges, and agreed to step into character for a scene. They might, for instance, stop off for a cuppa at a cafe on their way to work and plot an assassination, or have a side conversation before a Board meeting (there's a memorable scene in Alfred Bester's *_The Stars My Destination_* in which two men at a business meeting discover they're from clans which have an ancient feud, so they politely exchange insults [something like, "I kick your ugly French butt." "Thank you, Sir. I dump a bucket of water on your stupid German head."] before carrying on with business).

[@Fdragon1337]

Yooooo this would explain why all crafting is so hard to actually accomplish during a regular campaign. Same thing with older resting rates where regaining hp and recovering from battle took days to weeks.

[@sonic-bb]

this is why i hate how weak the thief was without a bit of homebrew. Since like, dungeons were basically the main focus. yet they seemed useless in the dungeon by the book

[@jasondolph2785]

This makes 1st edition spell memorization rules far less insane.

[@googiegress]

All the restrictions on Magic-Users in 1e (memorization time, number of spells known per level, chance to learn spells, no bonus spells from INT, spell is disrupted if you're hit during the casting time, enemy save chance overall tends to get higher as you rise in level) really helped to keep them from dominating the game compared to other classes. When 3e stripped all these restrictions, it was inevitable that people would complain that Wizards (and other full casters to a lesser extent) were overpowered. In 1e, you have to sleep for a certain base amount of time which goes up depending on the highest level of spell you need to memorize. Lv 1-2: 4 hours. Lv 3-4: 6 hrs. 5-6: 8 hrs. And then after that, you memorize for 15 mins per spell level. So a 3rd level M-U with (2) 1st and (1) 2nd spell slots would sleep 4 hours, then memorize for 1 hour. 5 hours total. It does get a lot higher if you cast yourself dry and have to re-memorize everything and you're like 12th level. Maybe don't do that every combat? The game is definitely not built so every character gets to do whatever they want all the time without considering anything. Not really that sort of game at all.

[@bonnsyvue]

This video makes me think about all the one-shots I've participated in. One-Shot campaigns seems to have incorporated this and it's always fun to play one-shot D&D.

[@gobsvensen]

I think this also ties into TV, where it feels like a week happens between broadcast episodes including annual holidays occurring and modern streaming tv where a season feels like time only passes in episode

[@QueenAleenaFan]

I think this could work with some modifications, for one the time Passage is not equated in real life days but in a certain amount of time between each session. For two, there would have to be times where you say okay this session is part of an episode or whatever, and time isn't going to pass between this session and the next because we're not done

[@Kafaldsbylur]

Fascinating. I'm planning on Running Kingmaker once the Foundry module comes out (hopefully early next year) and I'll probably end up using some kind of variation on that (Maybe even scaled up to more than 1:1 time, depending on how often the characters end back up in towns)

[@Nerthos]

To me it's extremely weird that people watch others play at all nowadays. One of the weirdest changes of the century.

[@JackalMJ]

I've taken to running milestone leveling and each level represents a year. This has allowed me a longer event spanning multiple years.

[@patrickharrington9806]

❤strixhaven was the perfect setting for this style. Classes in real time over the week with rolls for the players on how the classes went. Game was 1-2 days in our 6-8 hours on the weekends

[@davidfeldman4067]

Uh, no. Well, maybe. Sometimes. It depends. Basically, if someone tells you "old-school gaming culture worked like..." or "was like..." or "operated like...." then they aren't telling you the whole story because there really isn't any such thing. The one thing he gets right here is that in the very early days of D&D, the only way to play well was to have a DM that was taught by, or played with, another DM that had already learned. The White Book rules, taken on their own, are nearly incomprehensible - or at least turning them into a functioning game needed experience that you could only get from another functioning game. I'm about as old school as you're likely to find - I started playing with the White Books about 9 months after they were published with a DM that had learned from a guy who used to play in Lake Geneva regularly. That's why initially D&D grew slowly - it was pretty much mouth-to-mouth. It wasn't until the Player's Handbook and DM book of AD&D were published that a novice could put a campaign together without having played in one. Because I was in the Chicago area, I was able to get up to Lake Geneva and play with the TSR guys at least three times a year at the mini-Revels. Some campaigns, typically the larger ones with lots of people that rotated in and out, played as he describes. Others, like the first long one I was in (3 1/2 years) didn't. Some were centered on a dungeon, and some only started up around one so the play group could gain a few levels. One I played in was almost all outdoors adventures. Why? Because that DM liked outdoors adventures and, since he was a good DM and creative, they were fun. Some ran real time and others didn't. It all depended on the DM, what he had learned from his DM, and what he preferred. So any statement that "old-school worked like..." is a vast generalization.

[@argonwheatbelly637]

Excellent comment, and true. I was from back in the before time, too. The "rules" were always guidelines, and gaming was dictated by life. We didn't live to game, and yes, you learned from someone else. We used to joke that we could trace our "lineage" of who taught whom. Different groups, but we frequently ran in the same world, and yes, you could cross paths. It was fun. Time was subjective. It's a game.

[@hDansRandomCrud]

When I was a kid back in the 80's, we would "play D&D" while riding around on our bikes. (No, I'm not making this up - there's a reason it's a stereotype.) Most of our RP-heavy gaming happened that way, and its where we handled "down time" activities. And for things like building strongholds, we'd do that on our own time, and get the DM to sign off on whatever we were doing. Of course once we decided to "do a dungeon", we'd go home and break out the dice and miniatures and actually play the game using rules. Your "text them to roll perception" is a modern, less middle-school version of that same idea, and that level of immersion makes the game come alive. Having said that, you might need a group that has a teenager's levels of obsession for the game to really get the most out of this technique.

[@SupergeekMike]

I love it!

[@canolathra6865]

The time rule seems very limiting on the kind of stories you could tell in a campaign. You couldn't run a dungeon crawler where the party is constantly trying to escape and struggling to find a place to complete a long rest in peace. You can't run a time-constrained campaign against some doomsday event, because it would be unfun for your players to fail because of scheduling conflicts. I feel like it would make a great optional rule for campaigns that are very episodic, where the party ends each session back in town, but for anything else I don't feel it would fit.

[@SupergeekMike]

Oh definitely, it absolutely plays a HUGE role in what sorts of campaigns you could or couldn’t play.

[@cobaltclass.]

Why not run things with semi-real time? Run some games as cliffhangers or where the action keeps going. Run others with a set duration of down time between events to keep the story timeline accurate like 4 days will pass, no matter the IRL time. And last, when you are running your campaigns, and you come to an endpoint where you don't need to leave a cliffhanger and nothing is pressing in the timeline, then leave things open. Let the players know that this will be a real time down-time break when they get back to town. Knowing this, the players will be able to consider where they'd like their downtime to start and can consider what they might start doing during their down time. Then during the break they can discuss with the DM privately their down time activities for the next session start. When the new session starts, any players that coordinated down time will have some idea of what's happened, while those that went lone wolf during down time could have a surprise for the others on what they've been up to, or even keep it a mystery for a while. The down time can then be incorporated into the start of the new session with a big event, an occourance, or maybe even just an itch for adventure that pulls their characters from their down time lives and back into great unknown.

[@SupergeekMike]

That sounds fun, too!