Time in my OD&D Campaign

I was running an OD&D game world when the first three AD&D books were published, and I resisted for a while, but of course made the purchases.

I read the new Dungeon Masters Guide cover to cover more than once while planning my new campaign world.  The section on Time, found on pages 37 and 38, struck me as especially important.

The subsequent seven paragraphs elaborate upon the subject, including examples and advice on calendars.  When I finally scrapped my OD&D game and started a new campaign world using AD&D, I started the game calendar on the 1st day of the year 1000.  I'm sure it was NOT a coincidence that this mirrrored exactly the example given in the DMG!   I used 30 day months, but kept real world month and day names.  That campaign was played throughout high school and on visits home from college, but it ended when I went on active duty in the Air Force.

During my first AF assignment, I convinced my wife and some friends to play, and I started a new campaign world using mostly 1e but with the 2e PHB and DMG.  This time around, I created a calendar from scratch.  I've been searching for the notes I put together when I devised this calendar, but have been unable to find them.  All I've got right now are two excerpts from the Primer I wrote for my players at the time:

and

The campaign calendar started early in 1989, and most of the events in this list were triggered in one way or another by the PCs.

Between the two, I have all the month names:  Elonar, Ornvar, Tovar, Vannar, Dinvar, Kervar, Lattar, Otvar, and Nassar.  Sadly, I don't have enough of the days to reconstruct the rest, but I still hope to find my old notes someday.



When I decided to run a new OD&D Campaign for my son and his friends, I knew I had to track time, and I even started doing session reports on Exploring the Outside Inn.  I dropped the ball on the session reports but have kept notes and a spreadsheet from every session.  I've run between 63 and 73 sessions in my OD&D campaign world so far, between two active groups of players, but clearly I haven't done as well as I should have with timekeeping.  I start each session telling my players the season, the current weather, and how long it's been since they last adventured, but I really need to go back through my notes for each session and put together a clean timeline, and a new calendar!

What I Like

Thanks to Nick, at Carto Cacography, I came across Greg Tito's articles about the Past, Present and Future of D&D at The Escapist.  I posted a very short, blunt agreement with the articles, and was replied to by a couple of guys who had a little heartburn with my comment.

I didn't mean to disparage today's players, and after losing a reply I tried to post the other day, tried again with this:

"My earlier comment was a bit offbase, maybe because I read too much into Mearls' comments:

Mearls admits 4th edition might have gone too far in creating a perfectly balanced game. 'We've lost faith of what makes an RPG an RPG,' he said, admitting that in trying to please gamers with a limited imagination, 4th edition might have punished those with an active one.

My exposure to 4e is admittedly limited, I only started playing recently in my son's campaign.  In reacting to Mearls comments, I brought along the baggage of a 33 year gamer... I started with TSR's original White Box in '76 or '77.  Every edition after AD&D 1e has, in my mind, tried for higher production values in the books (lots of color, pretty pictures), less useful information for any but their campaign worlds, and more tightly defined rules (to make it easier to write software for).

To me, the game is about having fun with friends, not about maxing a character, or listening to a story or running a combat like a board game or a computer game.  I don't want my players to say, "I search the room... I made my perception check.  What do I find?" or anything remotely as out-of-game as that.  I want my players to experience the world as their characters, not think about the number they have to roll to succeed.  I want them to experience the terror of not knowing what's coming next, or whether they'll live.  (You might guess that I HATE the idea of balancing encounters against the party, so it's "fair.")  "Building an encounter is a matter of choosing threats appropriate to the characters and combining them in interesting and challenging ways."  (4e DMG, pg 56)  Yes, I actually threw up a little just now.  I didn't enjoy my forays into story (per 2e) all that much either.  I see myself more as a concierge than as a 4e rules judge or a 2e storyteller... 'Welcome to my world... there's lots to do and see, maybe I can suggest something to interest you?'

Uh oh, I'm on my soapbox again... let me step down off this thing and put it away."