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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3052419" data-attributes="member: 30001">B can't be involved in both.   The way I keep track of who is doing what where is to keep an adventure log.  Not only does this help with multiple players, multiple groups, and multiple characters (which often all overlap IMC), but it also lends some realism to the situation.  Was the BBEG killed last week or last year?  This certainly helps with roleplaying, because an NPC would reference the season, or the date, or even just relative order of events.  If a DM is not keeping track of time, I'm not really sure how he's managing all of this.  My campaign world has run for about 60 years of fantasy time.  In that time NPCs and PCs have aged and died.  Is this "old school" now?  Without time management, it would stretch believablility to think that a given PC has walked around the world 7800 times and not aged a day.  Or have no idea when BBEG2 was killed relative to BBEG1.Adventure logs take hardly any time to set up compared to the hours spent gaming.  Session #, characters participating, starting date, and then entries.Entries in my log look something like:Time:  2 weeks - walking to Breemet StriderTime:  1 week to Weather Topfought wraiths - Frodo wounded - morgul knifeI use the "Time:" notation on the left so that my eye can pick out the time entries.  I go down the list of entries and total up the time that has passed, then figure out the current date.  So if another character (say Arwen) wants to join the campaign, I compare the current dates of the two campaigns - whatever kinds of time needs to pass in order to synchronize the two campaigns is then assumed to have passed unless it would make no sense (ie. Arwen is in the middle of a fight with wraiths at the time we stopped that campaign thread)  When things make no sense, the player then either sits out the session or we find another character that can be played.I tend to be lazy about totalling up the time if there's no interaction between different groups.  If player C misses a few sessions, and he wants to know how much time character C has to make magic items, it's easy enough to take a few minutes to compute the current date and let him know.  Otherwise, I tend to let it go until I feel the season has changed.Really frequent and important interaction between different groups is probably not feasible, not because of keeping track of what/when but because of play issues.  If group A and group B are both exploring different parts of the same BBEG's castle, and group A wants to go off and buy some magic items for two weeks, you can't just progress B's timeline for two weeks with no explanation while they're standing in the dungeon.  And you can't let A return and kill the BBEG with their new magic items before group B has had a chance (because otherwise what was B doing for two weeks?)Again, it's not really hard to log events so that you know when this is going to happen.  The tough thing is to figure out what to do about it.  It's hard to avoid stopping the game, saying "We have to stop playing here now because group B has been in the dungeon potentially for the last two weeks while you guys were buying magic items, and they could have killed BBEG by now.  I need to play that out with group B before you guys (group A) continue." or doing things like that.  But there are some common sense rules that my different gaming groups follow.  I also avoid the "two groups vs. one BBEG" type situations for this reason though, groups tend to be seperated by enough distance that they rarely affect each other.What I find extremely difficult to do is log round-by-round, minute-by-minute time passing in a dungeon.  That's obnoxious because there's so much stuff going on.  I tend to just handwave the time (oh, you've been in the dungeon 2 hours).  I don't know if I could do better with a table top RPG without really slowing the game down.</blockquote>

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