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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 7568218" data-attributes="member: 42582">My point is that it's all just colour plus GM-fiat. For instance (and using 1st ed AD&D rules, as they're the ones I know best): I'm walking through the town, and cast my fly spell so that I can fly to the barn of a farm outside a neighbouring village in time to intercept the cultists who are going to hold a ritual there. Let's suppose I'm a 5th level MU, so my Fly lasts 1 hour plus 0 to 50 minutes (in 10 minute blocks).The speed of my flight is 12", and according to the DMG (p 30) every 3" is 1 mph, so I am flying at 4 mph, and can potentially cover 7+ miles with my spell.What time is it when I cast my spell? How far away, exactly, is the barn from the farmhouse from the village from that part of the town I'm in when I cast? What time are the cultists holding their ritual? Will it all work out, will I be early, will I be late, will I crash? There's no mechanic for answering these questions, in the absence of a very atypically detailed map drawn up by the GM in advance.This is what I mean when I say that time is not a mechanic. It's just something for the GM to think about. Of course, we can use the spell duration rule to inform a new mechanic: eg roll 4+ on 1d6 to make it there within the hour, meaning that we treat the die roll as settling questions like exactly how far is the barn from where I cast the spell in town? But D&D doesn't come with any such mechanics baked in. (Contrast Classic Traveller, which does - so it's not like the idea was completely alien in the early days of RPG design.)Perhaps the same way you do it during "downtime" - an intuitive synthesis of convenience and dramatic necessity.Or perhaps using the rule in Cortex+ Heroic which allows the GM to spend a die from the Doom Pool to split or to rejoin the PCs.Or maybe the players make a check to rejoin the party, with appropriate modifiers applying eg for having access to Locate Object-type magic.There are many possibilities that don't rely on a wargame-style combination of detailed maps, movement rate rules and tracking time, which is what one would use for this situation in classic D&D.</blockquote>

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