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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dykstrav" data-source="post: 5747879" data-attributes="member: 40522">In D&D/Pathfinder, yes, I do. The big reason is that time is the thing that you can use to put the pressure on the group to actually get stuff done. The evil druid will enact his ritual to spread a new plague on the night of the dark moon, so you'd best find him before then. The last ship to the Lendore Isles departs in six days, and if you miss it, you don't know when the next one will come along. The ancient white dragon demands tribute from the lowland tribes on the winter solstice, so his lair will be unguarded at that time. The gnoll horde will decimate the kingdom if they make it through the mountains, so you've got to bottle-neck them in the pass until winter sets in.Without a strong sense of time passing, it's more difficult to put the screws to the characters and make them feel a sense of urgency about what's going on. I track the exact date using a calendar, and I start each "day" in the game with a brief description of the weather and what's going on around them. "You wake up on the sixth of Planting. It's warm within an hour of sunrise, and downright hot once you broken camp and gotten a move-on. The sun blazes through the trees and the grass is about waist-high. Mosquitos and cicadas buzz in the forest around you."In my 20th Anniversary Edition Vampire: the Masquerade game... I'm a bit more loose about time. Part of it is because the rules are a bit more freeform and abstract, but a big part of it is also to help encourage players to get into the persona of vampires a bit more: as they get older, the nights tend to blur together. As they become less human, it's more difficult to relate to normal concepts of time passing. They feed when hungry and may not even realize what year it is after a while. About the only time that's really worth worrying about is the time of sunrise.</blockquote>

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