My Life As A Gamer: Putting A Proper Campaign Together (Part Three)

(This is part of a series. The first post is here, the second here.)

You've launched. Good.

Now let's see how a key practice shows its worth.

Strict Timekeeping

This practice is the core of creating and sustaining the illusion of verisimilitude. The reason is that it is the enforcement mechanism for making Opportunity Cost a thing; no character in the game can be in two places at one time. It does not matter if that character is a powerful Patron or a fresh-off-the-boat 1st level adventurer that doesn't have a copper to his name.

On March 1st of that year, both characters are in this place at this time and nowhere else. What they do today automatically excludes all other options; you are locking in that choice, and there's no undoing it. Far too often this is not taken seriously; opportunities not taken can and do resolve differently than if the Patron or PC attended to it- for good or ill.

In short, strict timekeeping is for temporal clarity as using maps are for spatial clarity; it keeps things in order and prevents mischevious actors from scamming ("No, I was totally not in range of Lich Queen Madonna's Wail of the Banshee spell." and "I can totally be at both dungeons in the same week despite being across the continent." are the same scam on different axis.)

Strict timekeeping is what allows for adversarial play to create and exploit window of opportunity; if Evil Patron knows where Good Patron is at this time, he can set up Good Patron through deploying a strategic feint (and, likely, cull some internal threats at the same time) so he can ready a dolorous stroke when Good Patron is out of position and thus can't stop it.

This is also what makes logistics and economics matter. Your adventurers need to feed and water themselves and their men, your Patrons have incentives to erect and maintain transit networks (roads, waterways, etc.), characters have reasons to have subordinates handle farms or other vital resources- and your enemies have reasons to seek out, disrupt, destroy, or take over those things for their own benefit. Magic-Users need spell components, smiths need iron ore, and everyone needs food.

This is also why 1:1 Timekeeping is part of Strict Timekeeping; it is part-and-parcel of making the strategic level of play matter at all. Knowing that your enemy will take three weeks to respond to your attack on his ally's stronghold means that you have three weeks to come up with a plan on how to deal with that and get orders to the Referee. (Also, this is why you have and maintain a top-tier intelligence network no matter your Patron's morality; Sun Tzu 101, folks.)

Finally, timekeeping means that outside influences such as celestial events or festivals and so on can happen and mean something. Feudal lords can only rely on their levies for so much time in a year, priests want to time things for best effect with regard to their gods, and wives left with child give birth sooner or later while the elders die in their sleep just as inevitably.

And that's on the big picture level. On the tactical level you have spell durations, people bleeding out, torches and lanterns only being lit for so long, distance over ground (matters for pursuits), the ability to recover after a skirmish (you may not have time to bind wounds or loot), time of day (more important when doing things like vampire or werewolf hunts), and other high-paced time-sensitive issues (e.g. reloading a musket).

By insiting on this and the order that it brings, administering both events at the table and events in the campaign get a lot easier for all concerned. Keeping proper notes will allow for the players to use temporal advantage to do things that otherwise would require Narrative Fuckery to accomplish, and because that is uncertain it is all the richer when it goes down that way. Big moments are EARNED through superior play. They are never assumed due to Muh Story.