Does anyone worry about hours in a day?

[Jeff Wilder]

As a DM, I like for my players to have a watch order. As a player, my DMs also pay attention to watch order. As I was working on a watch order for one group, it struck me that it actually gets kinda involved: there are two elves in the group, who trance; there are three spellcasters, who need an extra hour of rest (per interruption) if their rest is interrupted. Juggling everything is an interesting exercise: if a spellcaster has a middle watch, he has to have 9 hours of rest; elves can be awake and assist with other watches, and so on.

It gets even stranger if a spellcaster recovers spells at an odd time, like my necrotheurge (3 AM).

Does anybody else pay this much attention to this? I suspect I overdo it.

Oh, and I also put together a typical travel day for the group, complete with rest times and foraging. (Our barbarian can forage while moving at the same speed as my dwarf.)

It brought to mind a use for that weird 24-sided die ... randomly determining exactly in which hour of the day a random encounter occurs. With my new Watch Order and Travel Chart, the DM could use the die and know exactly who's on watch and what we're doing during that hour.

 

[Jhulae]

There's no reason to warm up your d24. According to the DMG, the percentage chance to have a random encounter is per hour. So, technically, you should be making 24 random encounter checks. That would tell you exactly on which hours your party has an encounter.

Of course, that might be the time to break out a d6 and a d10...

 

[irdeggman]

Only arcane casters require the "sleep" thing. Divine ones ahve to pray at acertain time of the day.

From the SRD:

Rest: To prepare her daily spells, a wizard must first sleep for 8 hours. The wizard does not have to slumber for every minute of the time, but she must refrain from movement, combat, spellcasting, skill use, conversation, or any other fairly demanding physical or mental task during the rest period. If her rest is interrupted, each interruption adds 1 hour to the total amount of time she has to rest in order to clear her mind, and she must have at least 1 hour of uninterrupted rest immediately prior to preparing her spells. If the character does not need to sleep for some reason, she still must have 8 hours of restful calm before preparing any spells.


Daily Readying of Spells: Each day, sorcerers and bards must focus their minds on the task of casting their spells. A sorcerer or bard needs 8 hours of rest (just like a wizard), after which he spends 15 minutes concentrating. (A bard must sing, recite, or play an instrument of some kind while concentrating.) During this period, the sorcerer or bard readies his mind to cast his daily allotment of spells. Without such a period to refresh himself, the character does not regain the spell slots he used up the day before.

Time of Day: A divine spellcaster chooses and prepares spells ahead of time, just as a wizard does. However, a divine spellcaster does not require a period of rest to prepare spells. Instead, the character chooses a particular part of the day to pray and receive spells. The time is usually associated with some daily event. If some event prevents a character from praying at the proper time, he must do so as soon as possible. If the character does not stop to pray for spells at the first opportunity, he must wait until the next day to prepare spells.

Which is why we usually don't include arcane casters in the watch bill, except at the ends - depending on how long the party is "resting".

 

[Thanee]

As for watches, we usually do not bother with making up a specific order or anything.

When an encounter happens during the night, we simply roll randomly, who is on watch (usually two characters). When the first one is rolled, we will only roll among the other characters, that would likely be on watch together with the first (i.e. having a little mix in ability, distributing better perceptions (Spot, darkvision, etc) and not merging them together, and so on.

Takes almost no time to do and works perfectly well.

Bye
Thanee

 

[Thanee]

Also don't forget for the arcane casters, that they need only to rest, not sleep, to be able to regain spells.

In an average travel day (8h of travel), you will have *at least* 12h of rest, possibly more, in the evening and during the night (24h day, some campaigns have different days).

It's not really a problem to have a spellcaster take one guard shift and still rest the 9h (8h + 1h for the interruption). There is still enough time to prepare camp, eat, talk, and prepare for the night.

Bye
Thanee

 

[sfedi]

We only detail our night shifts (with as much detail as you) when needed.

 

[werk]

We set it up, usually in blocks, so we know who is 'on watch' when. I pay attention to time, and have had players that come from campaigns where time was never a factor who say they like the benefits and problems that come from accounting for time.

I got into this habit because I tend to rely on die rolls to protect my DM neutrality. Players set it up, I'll roll to see what happens to who, when. I especially like when a party tries to rest near a recent battle that they had, or otherwise near a large corpse...like they think they aren't going to have every scavenger in range wander into their camp.

When I play, we usually try to rest during the day, like 4am til noon. Seems to cut down on disruptions but you need to be able to travel at night, which is more rare than I'd thought.

It also becomes important because I pay attention to time in the planes, which is often not on a 24hour cycle, and adds a lot of problems and flavor.

We don't use a table or anything, we just hash it out every time we go to rest (battlemat makes a great whiteboard). There is a general protocol, but people switch around depending on circumstances.

Answer to your question: yes.

 

[Arnwyn]

Does anybody else pay this much attention to this? I suspect I overdo it.

We do - works for us.

It brought to mind a use for that weird 24-sided die ... randomly determining exactly in which hour of the day a random encounter occurs. With my new Watch Order and Travel Chart, the DM could use the die and know exactly who's on watch and what we're doing during that hour.

That's kind of what I use my d12 for...

 

[the Jester]

There was one night when omrob was running his game a couple of years ago when we spent so much time trying to set up watches ("I only need four hours of trance"- "I need to make sure I get enough to regain my spells" - ad infinitum) that we threw up our hands and, ever since, we go from one side of the room to the other, excepting people who for whatever reason aren't watching that night.

Works for us.