If you’re walking in on the middle of the Advanced Fantasy Dungeon series, there’s an index here.

Timekeeping basics in second edition are quite straightforward and iconic, although it’s obscured in intent compared to earlier editions.

Combat rounds of 1 minute, and dungeon turns of 10 minutes, with encounters every hour. Days measure overland travel, with encounters over six watches varying by terrain.

Rules for wilderness encounters are very detailed, but average at 3.5 rolls per day, and at 10-40% chance of an encounter depending on terrain. For dungeon encounters, one every hour, or if it’s particularly dangerous, one every turn. Interesting dungeons and wilderness are not dissimilar in terms of their dangerousness.

Time between adventures is measured in real time, and assume a multi-party, multi-character campaign, but offer variations towards the more common formats we see in published adventures. Downtime occurs in real time too between adventures and at a real time rate.

Now my thoughts: As everywhere, unnecessary complexity and clear intentions. Keep turns and rounds, three watches to a day (one to travel, two to rest, eat and sleep) based on the average. Matching up encounters more closely with time period will makes things neater and easier for a GM to manage.

For the wilderness, one roll per watch. A watch is a unit of travel, and to force march you sacrifice a watch of rest. Rest watches can be tired to both rewards (healing, spells) and risks (fatigue). Rolls are consistent timing, so if you choose to vary encounter chance, change the size of the dice always keeping encounters on a 1, but the default is a d10.

For dungeons, it’s more challenging. Turns are how long it takes to do anything in a dungeon – search, bandage, pick a lock, whatever. So one option is every six actions, a roll. I could recommend a dice to increment, or even better, make it every 10 actions so that we can roll the same dice when it hits 1 — 1 on a d10. Countdowns build tension, and you could increment that count down for specific attention-gaining actions for more tension again. Or, we can make a roll every turn at a lower chance, which honestly is my preference. 1-2 on a d100 is a slightly higher chance than the original dungeon encounter chance, so we can roll that every turn. Very low chances but very regular ones build tension, which I like for a dungeon. I’m very interested in opinions regarding the stronger of the two options, because I’m honestly not sure the easier of the two.

Real time play presents a challenge with regards to cliffhangers – when a party remains in danger at the end of a session. A common solution is the “roll to return”, for which no support is found in the text. An ability or relevant proficiency check of choice, with a penalty of days and turns to travel, is a simple solution. The scale of failure would indicate treasure or hit points lost. Let’s say I rolled my Wilderness Survival proficiency of 15, and had to travel 14 days. I roll a 12, but I have to add 14 for a total of 26. I choose either to lose 11 hit points or 110gp. If i’d rolled a 2 my total is 16 and i suffer only 1 hp or 10gp. I don’t know another solution, in the context of this challenge of real time play. Again, I’d love any opinions here.

The other challenge is abstracting downtime in a pleasing way, but I think I need much more time to develop my thoughts on this topic.

This has been a part of the Advanced Fantasy Dungeon Series! Let me know your thoughts on timekeeping or random encounters, if there are glaring questions left unanswered, whether I’ve overlooked anything important, or anything of the sort!

Idle Cartulary

15th April 2022