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Message: <blockquote data-quote="gizmo33" data-source="post: 3052671" data-attributes="member: 30001">No need to be humble about it <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> I guess I haven't played anything new school.  I've run plenty of 3E adventures, but I guess modules don't really assume a certain campaign management style, so I wouldn't have been aware of this.I would think that story-based games would increase the need for campaign time management.  Since rather than just sit in a room and stare at a wall, a monster would actually remember having seen and done things, and the DM would have to place that within the time-context of the various PCs that interact with the monster.  Maybe story-based here means "railroady"/scripted.  In that case, I can see that knowing what's going to happen before hand would alleviate the need to calculate the passing of time and determine the order of events during/after the fact.  The more interest I took in the story of my campaign world, the more I had to keep accurate time records IME.This is true IMC as well.  PCs tend to pool their resources, so they'd be likely to choose one quest or the other, but not both.  However, during downtime it's not unusual for a subset of my players to follow a side-quest.  Typically the non-adventuring players just rest or whatever.  Two groups simultaneously adventuring in the same milieu is amost impossible to manage at some point.  When I DM two groups of characters, they're usually in different regions, or their rest-schedules accomodate each other's activity.  Plus there is plenty of out-of-game meta-gaming negotiation to make it all work.  Still - knowing the time frame helps manage even an individual group - knowing the season, knowing how long it's been since PCs have last been to town, etc.  I think I'd feel lost without it.Imagine that somebody's character causes a huge explosion that's visible across the world at 4pm on Wednesday.  Now you have a situation where every other timeline that's advanced beyond that one is anachronistic because on 4pm Wednesday on the other time-lines, no one observed the explosion.  Old-school or not, there IMO are simply limits to the versimilitude of the game that you can accomplish.And what sense does it make for a character to spend seeming years adventuring and never age?  If the game is story-based, don't the characters have children?  Don't they grow up?  Even in rather hack-n-slash game, a demon-lord takes so many years to reform himself in the Abyss after having his material form destroyed.  You don't know when that happens if you don't know what day it is.  I'm really surprised (although I don't dispute, cause I wouldn't know) that most people aren't tracking time in their games.  New school PCs don't have offspring?  They don't own castles and pay taxes?I certainly could describe my campaign management in more detail if he had questions.  But as another poster pointed out, there are actually many aspects to the OP besides time management.  Above, I gave an outline of what my campaign log looked like.  My basic advice would be to keep track of the time in all campaigns and see how it works out.  I could give more details if I knew more about the characters involved and the expectations.  If a certain level of accuracy is desired, then the OP might want to consider using software to track things - that's what I actually do but there are paper-based analogs to what I do too.</blockquote>

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