One of the first things I was confronted with when I was starting to DM was how important it is to control time in the game. The rules are explicit about certain values of time, like for spells, crafting, combat rounds and resting, but there are also all of these other areas that depend more on the DM than on the Player’s Handbook or the Dungeon Master’s Guide. Things like accomplishing skills/tasks, when do quest lines “expire”, and how much free time your characters have. If we use time as a tool to improve skill checks, to motivate pacing, and to allow for creativity and growth of our player’s characters, time will become an important element to the game giving a closer sense of reality to the problems at hand.
Accomplishing Skills and Tasks
I referred to this in my post about improving skill checks in general, so I will go a little deeper into it here. The idea is that when our players are making skill checks, many of them on face value seem to happen instantly. The barbarian forces open a door, the rogue picks the lock, and the wizard reads the spell scroll. And if you use skill checks to only determine pass/fail, then those tasks either happen or they don’t and the party might then stack other attempts with less skilled characters, or need to find another route entirely. I am more inclined to dead end an attempt like this on a Natural 1 roll than I would for any roll that misses the mark.
However, if we use time as a tool here, those rolls that miss the mark no longer have to dead-end our players or create the awkward scenario where the halfling ranger with less strength is able to ram the door open when our barbarian friend could not. We can then instead describe the barbarian working hard to slam the door open and trail off to say he works on this for the next 4-6 minutes, what is everyone else doing during this time? The same works really well for lock picking, translate scrolls and runes, and investigating a room.
It still gives the player’s role a level of importance and success, allows for some time for other players to interact with the situation they are in, and helps the group multi-task while one of their players are working on something. Better yet, we also get more time to think of how we are going to describe the success of their task once it is complete!
Quest Lines
Another problem we can run into is when our players are given a task (or collect a long list of tasks) and then are unsure which to do when, or even if they are going to do one. There is a lack of urgency and importance because all they know to do is go to x place whenever they want and try to do x thing. And if they have multiple options of tasks without much need for prioritizing any of them. It can even lead to analysis paralysis since there are so many options and reasons to do any of them, that finding the “right” choice can take up a lot of table discussion.
To work against those issues, implementing certain timelines (and trying to work out story-wise why they exist instead of arbitrarily picking them) can help layer out your story with structure and planning that allows the party to plan out their days better. Some small examples of this in The Half Doesn’t campaign you may have seen are:
I gave them 5 days at the Ilisa Regional paid for so that after that time passed, they knew they had to have money to pay for their own beds.
Misery had specific times and days for band practice and performances.
The contract they signed with Rikoldar had reduced value if they did not sign it on the first day.
These events and situations need to be planned around, expected, and they see the consequences if they do not do them or take mind of them. So when you plan out different elements of your story and quests and tasks you are going to prompt them with, try to find ways to narrate a deadline, why, and what happens if it is not completed in ways that develops the problem or task at hand.
Free Time
This is by far my favorite way to use time in D&D. Have you ever had the opportunity to think through and describe a character having a week of free time? Or two? Some of the most creative and character developing moments I have ever seen come out of the space where the players are told that over the next 7 days nothing urgent comes up and their characters can work on things that they want to do in the city for that time. The options here are so vast and when we work with our players to help elevate them in this space, you will get to see a new level of ownership and development of these characters in the time they spend in a space like this.
What I have allowed happen during these times are characters getting trained in a new proficiency or a feat, ones that study up and read on local lore and history or religion, others that do some shopping, attempts to make money doing odd jobs in town, gambling, fighting pits, and also, free space to roleplay conversations between the characters.
As DMs, we have control over how time passes in our campaigns. Intentionally using time to slow down moments of progress rather than stopping it, layering out the tasks and urgency of given plot points, and as a means of letting our players be creative and intentional with how their character would rest, engage, and prepare for future tasks as well.