D&D 5E The Mutliverse and Time

[MG.0]

Our campaigns hop about from prime to prime occasionally and rather than saying that time is fixed between them we assume that its more like a river, in that it flows at different rates and creates eddies where time slows. So sometimes 1 year in Greyhawk might be equal to 1 year in Faerun, but at others times it might be a 5:1 or even 10:1 ratio.

That would work pretty well in most cases. The only problem I see with that is if you have a multiplanar campaign that bounces between worlds very rapidly, e.g. Spelljammer. Then the discrepancies would become difficult to manage...almost impossibly so if you have characters on different worlds simultaneously. I prefer to assume the passage of time is 1:1. (I also wouldn't use the forced year length idea I posted earlier). Calendars are messy everywhere, even in the real world. The planes are perhaps my favorite part of D&D and despite a few quirks, I find the 1st edition Manual of the Planes invaluable (other editions not so much).

 

[Jester David]

One thing to remember was the it's been long established that time flows differently on different worlds. The "real world" exists in the D&D multiverse, and one week there is equal to years in most other D&D worlds. That's D&D canon.

 

[MG.0]

One thing to remember was the it's been long established that time flows differently on different worlds. The "real world" exists in the D&D multiverse, and one week there is equal to years in most other D&D worlds. That's D&D canon.

Is that from 3rd or 4th edition? Never heard of it. I won't be using that in my games. 3rd and 4th edition got the planes really, really wrong as far as I am concerned.

 

[Jester David]

Is that from 3rd or 4th edition? Never heard of it. I won't be using that in my games. 3rd and 4th edition got the planes really, really wrong as far as I am concerned.

I read it repeatedly during the 2nd Edition era, but it might predate this and come from as far back as 1e.

The reasoning is obvious: one week in our world being a year in game allows generations of adventurers to come and go and still visit the modern world and find it roughly unchanged.

 

[MG.0]

I read it repeatedly during the 2nd Edition era, but it might predate this and come from as far back as 1e. The reasoning is obvious: one week in our world being a year in game allows generations of adventurers to come and go and still visit the modern world and find it roughly unchanged.

I'd love to know where you read such a thing. I'm very familiar with planes / alternate worlds of first and second edition and I recall nothing of the sort except perhaps an offhand statement to the effect that among all the alternate primes our Earth might exist. Certainly nothing as concrete as you have described. Even the mere existence of alternate primes is listed as a "maybe" in most official material.

 

[Jester David]

I'd love to know where you read such a thing. I'm very familiar with planes / alternate worlds of first and second edition and I recall nothing of the sort except perhaps an offhand statement to the effect that among all the alternate primes our Earth might exist. Certainly nothing as concrete as you have described. Even the mere existence of alternate primes is listed as a "maybe" in most official material.

Oh man... homework.

Okay, my first experience with it was in The Twilight Empire: Robinson's War, the serialized comic in Dragon Magazine during 2e, where it was a plot point. I then saw it mentioned in a couple places, including a Dungeon adventure that took place in the modern world (or was it something in Dragon...) But it stood out because I had seen it in the aforementioned comic and though "hey, this comic guy did their homework. Nice!" so it stuck with me.
And I recall seeing it elsewhere, but I'll have to look.

 

[MG.0]

Okay, my first experience with it was in The Twilight Empire: Robinson's War, the serialized comic in Dragon Magazine during 2e, where it was a plot point. I then saw it mentioned in a couple places, including a Dungeon adventure that took place in the modern world (or was it something in Dragon...) But it stood out because I had seen it in the aforementioned comic and though "hey, this comic guy did their homework. Nice!" so it stuck with me. And I recall seeing it elsewhere, but I'll have to look.

Thanks, I was thinking more along the lines of rulebooks and such, but that's cool too. I pull a lot of my stuff from old issues of Dragon and Dungeon magazines. I've spent a lot of time hammering out a cosmology (still a work in progress) for my 5th edition game that combines what I feel are the best aspects of 1st/2nd/5th edition and stuff from Dragon. I was actually privileged to have a conversation with Gary Gygax regarding the planes once.

I'm probably very much in the minority in that I preferred the atmosphere of the planes pre-Planescape. It wasn't the mechanics that bothered me as much as the hideous font everything was written in, the over-the-top super-obnoxious lingo used to set the atmosphere, and the highly stylized artwork. I just couldn't get into it. The 1st edition Manual of the Planes is perhaps one of my favorite resources for AD&D, but Planescape was kind of the beginning of the end for me...until 5th edition came along. Don't even get me started on 3rd and 4th edition planes, I hated them. I never played those editions, but I've combed through all the planar material I could find. Even now, I'm considering booting Feywild, Shadowfell, and the Elemental Chaos out of the cosmology entirely.

 

[aramis erak]

Is that from 3rd or 4th edition? Never heard of it. I won't be using that in my games. 3rd and 4th edition got the planes really, really wrong as far as I am concerned.

second and third editions, and hinted at in 1st ed materials.

Check the campaign option books, too. There's an entire section on time differences in one of them. Mine are buried, so I can't get more specific.

 

[MG.0]

second and third editions, and hinted at in 1st ed materials.

Check the campaign option books, too. There's an entire section on time differences in one of them. Mine are buried, so I can't get more specific.

Hmm, not sure which book that would be, unless it was from a 2nd edition book at the very end of the 90's, in which case I may have missed it. Unless you're counting something from Dragon magazine or the like, I can 't imagine where in 1st edition something like that would be hiding.

 

[aramis erak]

Hmm, not sure which book that would be, unless it was from a 2nd edition book at the very end of the 90's, in which case I may have missed it. Unless you're counting something from Dragon magazine or the like, I can 't imagine where in 1st edition something like that would be hiding.

Would be a late 90's. After the core rules CD. My 2E stuff is buried in a box.

But looking at the 1E Manual of the Planes, perceived time varies by plane explicitly - See pages 6 and 7.