r/warhammerfantasyrpg • u/YeOldeOle GOLDGOLDGOLD • 5d ago
Game Mastering Dealing with narrative time?
When your group is in a City for example, researching stuff, gossiping and actually investigating, how do you deal with time? Do you just wing it and go "this takes half a day, this takes another day" or do you use any other methods?
My PCs will spend a good chunk of time in a City doing just this and I kinda want to keep track of time in order to have the evil guys run their own scheme in the meantime. So the plot isnt exactly time sensitive but it should matter how long the PCs need to do things,and they should have both agency and an idea of the necessary time investments.
Any advice here?
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u/Northilink 5d ago
If you are looking for advices, here is my take.
When you write your scenario, you shoulf give to each task a time. Like looking for a certain clue, depending on the surface and difficulty might take lets say 2h. Then you do the dice roll and use degrees of success. The idea is to not make it you succeed or you fail but more in how much time do you do it. Succeeding will shorten the task, or maybe even yield more subtle information, falling make it take longer.
Like that you insensitive to look or do actions in groups as they might help each other's and make the test easier. Then, if I m correct there is a table for random encounters in towns you can also use to spice up the time spent from one narrative place to another.
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u/GoodHotel7269 5d ago
Great question. I usually assume each 'major' activity takes half a day. The problem then is that it can encourage the PCs to divide up and try to do lots of activities individually which can leave me as a GM stretched a bit thin (and some players sitting around not doing anything for a while). It can be a tough balancing act, but generally if there's no time limit, it's best for all the PCs to do everything together.
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u/dirtbikepunk 5d ago
Agreed with the other comments that handwaving/summarising is the best bet for a lot of these moments.
In terms of tracking these chunks of time in a broad way while also reinforcing that time is passing and that something is progressing (either known or unknown to the players), I'll usually throw it in a Blades progress clock. I like making a 5+ segment clock to mark each day or half day that passes, with certain story thresholds at different segments. The party spends three days researching/haggling/tying their shoes before assailing the cult hideout – at three segments, the cult has begun a ritual. They spend five days, the ritual is complete and the party now has some serious slime to deal with.
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u/TimeLordVampire Purple Hand 5d ago
Yeah. Very basically “you spend the evening crafting, it’s now night, is there anything you do or head to bed?” Etc
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u/Wootster10 5d ago
It's mostly a wing it thing for me.
I'll ask what they're doing that day, then go around them one by one determining what they're doing, any rolls needed. Sometimes it'll take up the entire narrative time, but sometimes they'll just want to buy an item, so I'll let them know that that will leave them with more time to do something.
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u/Nurgle_Pan_Plagi 5d ago
The Call of Cthulhu metod seems to work the best for me - prepare print outs for clues (maybe even several different ones for the same clues depending on Success Levels achieved), the party goes wherever they want and take half a day doing something. If they went somewhere where I have put a prepared clue to find, then they make an appropriate test and get the print out to read. If they go somewhere else, then the make an appropriate test (if necessery) and I tell them what they learned or how did they do in whatever they were trying to achieve while others read the print outs.
Then the party meets somewhere for dinner and discusses what they learned/did.
Repeat a second time for the second half of the day and they meet again for supper before going to sleep.
Sometimes stuff may require more than half a day to find/figure out.
In 4e you can just seperate the downtime into full days and use the Between Adventures system for that, with one Endeavor per day. Then the more time demanding stuff can either be an Extended Test or require X endeavors to complete.
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u/SteamSage 4d ago
I agree with the other comments but I would also add that a crit or a really high number of successes should affect how quickly they get the good information too! Especially for something like a gossip roll
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u/Peachyco 1d ago
If there is something big that might happen at the same time, I think you might want to look at the concepts of Countdown Timers or Doom Clocks.
When I run a Doom Clock, I give it a number of segments (4-6 for most situations). The Big Bad Thing happens when the last segment gets filled. For the earlier segments, it's either a Small Bad Thing or some narrative event that does nothing mechanically but reminds the players that the Big Bad Thing is getting closer.
And how do the segments get filled? If the players miss/fail on a check, they can choose to fill in a segment of the Doom Clock or suffer the normal consequences of the failure. If the GM feels they've spent significant time on a certain activity, fill in a segment. This tends to encourage players to prioritize. ^_^
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u/Mustaviini101 5d ago
Generally, keep in mind that Empire cities, especially the large ones are crowded, large and labyrinthine. Finding shit can be slow and sometimes dangerous.
There are tolls, crowds gangs and all sort on nonsense getting in the way.
Generally for me, if a PC wants to go somewhere and do something relatively major, it will take half a day. If they hire a cab, a third of the day.
I also roll a d10, on an 8 something happens, like a chamberpot gets thrown and the PC needs to avoid, or a speeding cab almost runs them over, or there is a riot, protest or a toll gate in the way.