Gary Gygax was always awesome about responding to fans. I looked up his email address in the mid 90's when i was in highschool to ask him how to find more of his gord the rogue series. He explained where it went after TSR and even followed up with me when I asked him about a scene that did not take place in the first book that he mentioned in the second and he directed me to an issue of Dragon Magazine to find the short story that connected the two. Having one of my favorite authors take the time to respond to me as a teenager really meant a lot.
I created a calendar using Donjon, 13 months of 28 days, 7 day weeks, with a 28 and 56 day moon. I also pregenned 2 years of weather, and it was hilarious when one player jokingly asked what the weather was and I dead faced said "slightly drizzling, about 60 degrees, it's a bit chilly for Septen, the 7th month, it's the 3rd, year 394. It's 2pm and last night was a Half moon and a New moon." His reaction was priceless. My setting is relatively high magic and borderline fantasy steampunk, but the year is only 394 because that's when the mortals' enslavement by demons had finally ended. The year probably would have been around 5,500 otherwise, starting from when history was first recorded, something like ancient Greece or Rome.
For my group's ongoing Skull & Shackles campaign, I generated weather (temperature, precipitation, and wind speed/direction), sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, and tides for over 400 days. I modified the Golarion calendar presented in the campaign setting so the year has 367 days. I used real times from a latitude on Earth close to that of the Shackles on Golarion, to establish times for celestial bodies' rising and setting, tides, etc. My players also shook their heads when I showed them what' I'd done...
*DM (me):* "It's 7 pm and the sun stars to set-" *Player:* "Wait, the archipelago is near the north pole so shouldn't days be shorter at this time of year?" On one hand, I appreciate them for immersing themselves so much into my world, but on the other hand...
I personally love that my players sometime immerse so much that we have a discussion about things like constellations and climate changes through the year... in the other hand I really hate it when the same players don’t remember the name of the NPC who they met about 20 times in 30 sessions...
Plot twist: you're hinting to your players that your world isn't actually a sphere it's just a disk that the sun orbits around! Actually though feel free to go crazy with your cosmology
yeah, one of the worst things in a campaign is realizing that you became a 20th level wizard in 3 months. So much for all those novels that don't all feature 16 year old Arch wizards.
This is one reason that original D&D and 2nd Edition required TRAINING to gain level. Spend character money and take time to practice the new skills before you could go on anther adventure and make use of them. One week of down time times the level you are training to acquire, if you could find someone 2 levels above the level you were going for, double the time to self-train. The gold = EXP made sense when you had to spend roughly 1/2 your EXP in gold to gain level. Fighters tore up armored dummies. Wizards expended material components Clerics made sacrifices to their deities Thieves had to bribe people to gain access to knowledge. (among other explanations of where the money went)
@@fhuber7507 I have a mechanic I haven't made much use of that says you have to spend a per level, up to 7 days. It's not very restrictive, but at least makes you pay something. I figured I'd use it as a story guide to know when the party is ready for the next adventure, more than as a penalty. Maybe once in a long campaign make them choose between leveling time and chasing bad guys early.
@@fhuber7507 A DM we used to play with had a similar system. Basically if you were relatively actively using your skills (e.g. being on an adventure or training) you would gain a level every "current level x weeks". E.g. if you are Level 3 and you adventured and trained for a combined three weeks in-game time you would get to level 4 after roughly that time. So in theory, if you had no downtime where you did nothing at all (like meaningless traveling around for weeks) you would get to 20th level after roughly over 4 years of in-game time. Of course you would need longer because you rarely are actively adventuring or training constantly for 4 years straight but the system felt quite natural since it was not raining XP and Levels left and right and after a week of adventuring you were alread 5th level. He also never awarded numerical XP but kept track of the progress of any player behind the screen and simply told you when you got a level, which did not always happend for all players at once (but usually relatively close, like within 1-2 sessions), so you never knew when you would gain a level. It also made downtime interesting since it encouraged the players to seek out ways to keep getting better. You could train for yourself but you could also go on adventures to e.g. seek out a master that could train you for a week or so, which of course cost you some gold, and that could get you more experience than training alone, depending on how high the masters level was.
@@metagames.errata7777 my current campaign to make time actually pass I’ve had my players have to take a 7 days of off time and training time to level up. Levels 2-7 have in world taken 7 weeks.
Brother: have you seen the new Mathew Colville video? Me: yeah it's about time. Brother: the video was about time. Me: no, it's about time he made a new video.
There was a point in our campaign where our rogue got pregnant (wild story, one of the campaign's highlights), and the player suddenly had to start tracking how many ingame weeks she was into the pregnancy so the DM could point out when she first started feeling signs.
@@joshdaymusiced Basically, the setting my DM made has heaps of homebrew. So much homebrew that we consider it a different system from 5e altogether. One homebrew class uses rune magic, and has a class ability called "Force of Nature". When a player uses Force of Nature, the DM opens up a word generator, strings together three random words, and interprets them to create an effect that can be beneficial or detrimental, so long as it's not immediately harmful to the caster. For example, a runemage falling off the back of a dragon used Force of Nature on himself, then the DM's generated words were "grow, adapt, survive", and that character grew a permanent set of wings. This is not a balanced ability and we don't pretend it is. One of these times, our lizardman runemage used it on a female Spellscarred (think Tieflings, but made by magical fallout instead of demonic blood). Nothing happened that the characters could know, but the DM informed us all that she was magically impregnated with twins that were each half lizardman, half spellscarred. The funniest part was that while we all knew this OOC, none of the characters knew until like the day before the campaign officially ended.
@@morganfreeman-sheehy842 I think he mainly started doing it because of the Tal'dorei campaign guide. If it weren't for that book, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't track the calendar.
afaultytoaster Well, yes. And no. Yes everyone can have fun in their own way. But people need to start realizing that everything Matt does is achievable though very much so unlikely, and so it’s okay to aspire to be that. But don’t expect to be that and especially not immediately.
I'm now going to run a campaign in a world where the years count down because one of the major gods supposedly told the people to do it that way. No one alive knows what happens when we hit 0. Thank you for this inspiration.
Maybe I can toss some ideas about naming. I'm from Belarus, and can say, that unlike Gregorian calendar, months in our language are named mostly be nature things. For example names of winter months describe how cold winter becomes. They can be roughly translated as "Snow"uary, "Frost"uary, "Fierce"uary. July named by Tilia tree, due to blossom. August is harvest month. And about days outside months. Egyptian calendar had those. Because all 12 months was the same length (30 days), and year contains 365, they had 5 extra days for holidays.
Some inspiration from other cultures - in Slavic languages months are named from nature and farming. For example in Polish, starting from January: - styczeń (connecting one) - luty (strong freeze one) - marzec (cold suffering one) - kwiecień (flowery one) - maj (from latin) - czerwiec (red bug one) - the red bug was a major export in medieval times - it was source of the best red pigment - lipiec (linden trees one) - sierpień (sickle one) - wrzesień (heather one) - październik (hurds one) - listopad (falling leaves one) - grudzień (frozen/clomped ground one)
It took me a long time, but I did buy both of Matt's books and read them. They are quite good. Not like genre defining or anything, but I certainly had a hard time putting them down, and recommend them to anyone who wishes Matt would run ads. I don't even read a whole lot.
Because I'm a giant nerd and a neurotic DM, I legit print out a calendar (ideally with moon phases) and write in game names of the days of the week and months. I write in each day significant events the PCs know about and in a different color, the events the PCs don't know about and it makes it so easy to tell them how much time has passed.
I once ran a vampire campaign parallel to a Werewolf campaign, they didn't use the same calendar so it wasn't obvious it was happening at the same time. The players only figured out it was by recognizing astronomical occurrences. Worked out very well!
I really like the naming system from the Dishonored games, where the months are named on significant events or common themes. For instance, the Month of Harvest, Month of Rain, etc. But now I'm 100% using floating days in my calendar! That sounds so cool!
That actually appears in the Dishonored calendar - the Fugue Feast is a day that falls outside of the calendar when the Abbey of the everyman reset the primary clocks of the Empire of the Isles
I keep track of the days. About 10 sessions in (12-ish weeks into the campaign) I sat down and figured up all of the days. We were only about 16 days in at that point- months of IRL time was less than 3 weeks in-game. Now when I upload recaps they always start with what day it is, and I always indicate in a recap when the days change. Now we’re on session 14 and it’s day 24. Also, the recaps really helped me be able to say the timeline authoritatively. “They rested before going here, so it’s Utkar 16, not the 15 anymore” for example. It also helps figure out downtime. They spent 2 days kicking around town to brew some potions and getting a hat made, and that actually had a tangible effect on the campaign.
I made a "Calendar of Harptos" in a spreadsheet to track time because I wanted to have an easier way to keep track of what was going on behind the scenes. When my players hired a spy to do some recon on an enemy for them while they went on another adventure, I wanted to make sure that I knew how much time it would take that spy to travel to the relevant city, do that recon, and get back. I've also since come up with an idea that the "big event" of the campaign will eventually take place during the solar eclipse of the winter solstice (darkest day a la Last Airbender) and so once they figure that out, it will be a race against time to stop the BBEG from achieving their goals. Having a calendar is incredibly useful for helping keep track of all this.
I usually offer my players a ton of down-time, which helps with the "going from zero to hero in a few days adventuring" problem. They don't mind spending days, weeks, or even a month or two just kickin' it at their keep, making magic items, training, researching, or interacting with their favorite NPCs. It makes it easy to throw hooks for the next adventure when I know where they're all going to be and what they'll be doing.
Yes. Yes it is. Sorry about that ;) If there is any excuse - we have a constitution day next week so my weekend is 3 days longer, so yeah one could get confused...
So we started doing this in our campaign. It is really cool to have accurate seasons, persistent and definite deadlines, etc. But the best part is that we all decided on birthdays for our characters, and the DM has started having NPCs give us gifts for them! It's overall quite fun. Edit: if you do this I recommend making a spreadsheet on Google Docs or whatever, so each player can reference it and add notes together about what happened on each day - it helps add to the collective history.
I'm certain someone has mentioned it by now, but the Dragon Age series has all of these wonderful things and their attention to detail is fantastic. Calendars (Latinized [Imperium] and Common names for months [everybody else), Eras or the Ages (Hence, dragon age), Constellations (once were elven then rebranded under the Imperium etc). It makes me happy to have that great example to fall back upon when writing my calendar, of which I really must fill with special dates and so forth
13:08 here in Finland, there's a somewhat consistent standard in naming the months - we have a word that somehow describes the time of the year during that month and the word "kuu" (moon) in every month's name. For example, July, August, September and October are heinäkuu, elokuu, syyskuu and lokakuu ("hay moon", "life moon", "fall moon" and "dirt moon") in Finnish. But that just proves the naming of months tells something about the local culture and I think there are probably more monnth name systems, some more and some less consistent
I just recently saw in an episode of Critical Role: "It's the equivalent of a Thursday." So at least until then he hadn't done it, but did say he might look into making one so it could've changed since.
So I was just watching some of your videos for the first time today, and I decided to subscribe (and I usually don't subscribe to anything). As I kept watching I saw afterwards the video where you mention how amazed you were at 10K subs, and then the one with 50K Q&A, and I decided to come here (to your most recent video) to tell you why I subscribed: You are just too good. I have been watching many videos similar to yours, but I didn't subscribe to any of them. They felt half-cooked, unprofessional and more often than not filled with too many personal opinions and too little facts. Here, not only shows the fact that you maxed your charisma, but its obvious that you know what you are talking about. You got experience, and it shows. On top of that you are really with words and exposition, if I didn't know any better, I would think you have been practicing it as a hobby for at least 30 years, wink wink. Also really appreciated how you use crystal clear examples (like the Skill Challenges) and exact situations that happened to you and your groups; that is exactly what many of us are looking for: clear examples and direct answers, not the constant "is up to you and your group" and ambiguous answers that others channels offer. Didn't come to your channel from anywhere in particular, you just showed there in the suggested videos in RUclips after I watched enough similar content, and you really stand out in quality. Listening to you and your stories is a constant pleasure and, unlike with many others, I didn't feel the need to skip and stop listening to you because you were getting repetitive, boring or useless. Keep the good work. 10 out of 10, would watch again.
I just finally got around to creating a calendar based on your recommendation - I've yet to play or run a game where time was even really considered outside of travel (and it didn't really matter, even in something like SKT, sadly). But I'm giving it a go. My players ended their last campaign reaching 18th level in Tomb of Annihilation -> Tomb of Horrors and I decided to build a campaign world from scratch, so I had their characters become gods and help run the new campaign. They all picked domains to care for, created their own portfolios, symbols and tenants. Then I incorporated them into my game. So, I'm using each god as a name of a month. I have 12 domains (picking up Order from the UA, though I guess it's now official in Ravenica) so I decided to go with earth standard 12 months, only I opted to have 30 day months, and then added 5 "feast days" named the Days of Yawea (the overgod of the crystal sphere, akin to AO in Forgotten Realms). Each of my players got a feast day, appearing just before the start of their own month. I just sent them notice of the calendar - and while they've been pretty happy with just having their own gods represent (it's been fun, one player is a cleric to a different player's god, and I text the god player for advice on how he'd like his god to react), their comments on Slack have been quite entertaining knowing they're even more deeply ingrained in the world. Thank you so much for this idea!
I tried running a puzzle once. It led to a 2 hour debate on "character knowledge" vs "player knowledge" and weather or not puzzles could be considered as medagaming. I haven't run a puzzle sense.
My current campaign is the first one that I've kept close track of time like this and after 6 months of doing, I really have enjoyed it. The seasons change, holidays happen. It gives a sense of the world 'happening'.
came back to this video specifically because i'm gearing up for a long campaign and one of my players wants to play a very young character (like an 8 yr old girl) so tracking time will probably be super important seeing as she's gonna grow and become older as the campaign goes along
This will probably get buried in the deluge of comments but thank you so much Matt Colville for making all of these videos. I started watching them before I had ever DMed a game and now I am watching this about 3 months into my first campaign. Your videos have been invaluable to me, including this one. My players have been enjoying our campaign so much that one of them has started running his own game in a world that he has been creating for years and now I'm a player in that! You don't only tell the what/how but the WHY and I think that is sometimes more important. You're like the Bill Nye/Alton Brown of D&D. Thanks for everything you do.
This makes me want to make an adventure where the players take on a task for their hometown, and if the Players take forever the Townsfolk will just have assumed that they died and they return to find their funeral rights being performed.
Hey Matt, just wanted to say thank you! I dont play D&D, but I am a game master in a german pen and paper RPG called DSA (das schwarze Auge/the black eye) and watching your videos is a great help to me. I think your advice is great and works for all kinds of rpgs. A lot of the topics you adress are things I have never even thought about but I just took your word for it in a lot of cases and it has payed off almost every time I did. Most noticably your LOTR video about Sandbox vs Railroad. When I started out creating my first adventure, I would sit down and write dialogue (actually both sides of it just hoping my group would respond somewhat like I anticipated) for hours and try to script out even the smallest of sidequests. Then our first session started and I realized that the group acted a lot smarter than I expected them to and pushed an npc that was working for the antagonists and they had done a job for into paying them an incredible ammount of money for it, because his life dependet on them keeping their mouth shut about recovering some valuable cargo that he lost. I thought the "heros" would pity the poor man and try to help him and I didn't bother giving him any leaverage to make them stick to the contract they had agreed on. as soon as they realized how much money the npc had and that his life depented on the cargo they had recovered they blackmailed him into making them rich beyond anything I accounted for. With so much money in their pockets they could pretty much skip their way past a large portion of the adventure I had prepared and buy their way past almost the entire first act of it. Even though they were very pleased with how the adventure was going so far, I considered it a huge failure on my part. That is where I started to look to your channel for help and oh man did I find it. I now handle npcs completely differently, rather than thinking about how I can use them in the plot I think about who they are and what they want. This way all I need are some notes about their personalities and maybe some good punchlines for the more clever npcs and the story writes itself and reacts way better to the way the players interact with it. If they chose to ignore an important character I am no longer frustrated that all the work I put into him goes to waste, I can simply accelerate his part of the story because he faces no resistance and can complete his work unhindered so he becomes an even bigger problem later. If they really like a character that I planned out as a really small role I can make him an important part of the story in no time and I think coming to this on my own would have taken me so much longer. I still have a lot to learn about running a game and keeping track of time is certainly one of the things I could do better but I'm really happy with where I am right now and that is in a large part thanks to your channel. Keep 'em coming and have a nice day!
My current campaign is on its 3rd session but it is set in a world I created a year ago for another group and because of the past group a war is going to break out soon. I didn't keep track of time very well for that group, but because of the coming war and this video I am creating a calender. once again ,Matt, you have inspired me.
The Forgotten Realms calendar is the French Revolution Metric Calendar with some small differences (five Festive days added to end of year, not sparsed in between) and new names for days and months.
The French revolutions idea of giving every day a unique name is horrible, no one can be expected to remember 365 different names, and remember exactly what order they happen in.
Coming back to this video four years later when my campaigns actually have a Calender... I feel the weight of it much greater. Makes it feel so much realer. And S&F and K&W seem to actively encourage taking extended rests, waiting for fortifications to conclude building and such... SO DAMN GOOD!
I love how you tell us what you do but you don’t take away the aspect of letting us know it’s alright to shift the rules but still give us recommendations.
I keep watching this channel because it's basically the only RPG channel I see that acknowledges 4e exists most people list it like "AD&D, second, third, pathfinder and 5e"
I like the calendar with 13 months, 28 days each and 1, sometimes 2 days of special holidays. It makes so much more sense than 12 months of different lengths.
I think your travel times depend on the scale of the map. I have from the 5e PHB that you can travel 24 miles/day at a "normal" pace for an 8 hour day. And, looking at the only map I have with me at the time (Sword Coast from Lost Mine of Phandelver) it says that each hex = 5 miles. I don't have it with me, but I'm certain it's in the DMG in one of the first chapters that describes the different scales of maps.. I'm gonna have to re-look at that, so be aware to look at the scale on the map first! Thanks, great video as always!
So yesterday I ran my first session and I wanna say one big BIG THANK YOU Matt. My friends LOVED it. Yeah one of them wasn't so hyped and excited because he is not a fan of board games but he had a great time. Although my other friend was AMAZED from how cool the game is. And at the end of the session the thing that made me feel good was to hear from both of them telling me "Bro you are a pretty good DM for someone who does it for the first time". Again, thanks Matt for making this vids and explaining all the stuff I ,and every other DM or future DM, watching your vids. Thank You.
Matthew Colville, so glad to see more videos will be coming out. I just wanted to thank you for making your channel and putting up truly sage advice. I am currently a player in a game with the best DM I have ever known and we have been playing every Saturday for some two years now. Your videos inspired me to DM for the group when ours is feeling tired or would like time to prep. I got their okay to do short campaigns in their homemade setting and didn't realize until afterwards how much that rejuvenates them. I can't be thankful enough for the time and work you put into your videos. I love being a DM and if it were not for the distance I would be happy to run a game for you.
So excited to see this! Cause of your videos I've started DMing with all new players and it's been going great. I feel I haven't always done my best but my players are so original and energetic we always have fun.
This video could not have come at a more relevant time! I'm running a fairly expansive home-brewed campaign, and my players literally just asked me after last session "hey, we'd like to start keeping a journal of our epics, what date is it? What year? What's the calendar like so we can date each entry?". Which, of course, was met with my blank stare filled with realization that I had a generic historical timeline but no calendar. The points you made though did make me think deeper about it, and I realized that I may actually understand the history of my own story even better after giving some thought to the "why" of the names. Good to have you back, Matt!
little known fact: the amount days in a year changes very slowly because of the tendency of planets to tidally lock, it takes a lot of time though, so it's not so relevant to teach.
I run a calendar in my 5e game where I know what day it is and roughly what time of day it is. I figure out what the NPC's will do and how long it takes if the characters do nothing. This also regulates how long it takes for the apothecary to get new stuff, or how long they have to wait for the shipment to get there. It also seems to influence how often they take long rests.
my all time favorite video. Hard to pick, I know, but there's so many things linked to the calendar that at least I never thought of that really help flesh out a world. Absolutely lovely.
Interestingly, Japan still culturally counts years by how long an emperor has been around. It's used in ceremonies and fancy documents mainly but also in some surprising everyday ways. One example is that it's pretty common to share your age via when you were born in this system. Something else neat is that they'll call people born in the current Heisei era "Heisei Babies" since they're so young (1989+).
I'm glad you have a video on this, as the homebrew game I started in December relies very heavily on the calendar. I have events laid out for a long time, where X will happen at Y, regardless of whether or not the party is ready or even present to deal with it (that is, of course, unless they do something that prevents those events from happening at all). Having a strict time table suddenly adds consequence to every aspect of play. You may no longer be able to afford to idle for the two weeks it takes the smith to craft your fighter's new armor. It's very interesting as the GM to see how my players handle the aspect of time, and knowing that their enemies are just as active and fluid as they are. It's also rewarding to see how much more involved it makes them.
Looking at another video of yours where you mentioned Microscope, and having your players figure out the history of the dead empire in your world; I think it would be great to build the calendar or the days of the week based off the names of some important historical figures or events your players come up with playing Microscope :) I think that would be a cool experience
I try and do this as much as possible. I'm new to DMing and the game in general, but one of the first things I made sure to do was make sure my players know that time is a thing and that the world around them is alive- so jobs on the notice board would vanish and change and be completed as time went on, even if they didn't personally complete things. Also, thank you! You're the reason I really got into the game as a DM and your videos have helped me so much in setting up my games and world
I've been keeping strict track of time in my games forever (well, the 2.5 years I've been DM'ing/GM'ing) and it helps so much! Being able to tell your players how long ago something was and how long it will take to do something accurately is extremely helpful, and satisfying. As you said, time matters so much in how a campaign feels.
Just found our calendar is mostly about what tree is blossoming at the time, when animals are ready to .. "have kids" and when fruit is ripe. Which is pretty consistent with other things I know about our History :D Thanks Matt. Also found out that July and June used by be one month in our country! neat!
our calendar bothers me a lot. 365 breaks down into 13 28 day months each of which would have exactly 4 7 day weeks with only a single day left over (or two on leap years) which would make a good new years day that isn't part of a month.
There was a strong push after WWII to create a new, standardized calendar but it fell apart because Christian religious leaders in the US objected to a calendar with intercalary days, as it would mean - over time - Easter would not fall on Sunday.
You are absolutely right. Just keep in mind that the Gregorian Calendar that we use was developed before we had an absolutely precise measure of how long it took us to complete one rotation. It also accounts for the 4 seasons pretty well, since 12 is divisible by 4. Also, we will never change, because our calendar works, even if it is inefficient.
I actually have a player in my game that keeps track of time for the group every time I announce how much time has passed. It’s super helpful to have someone that not only really enjoys documenting how much time has passed, but can remember it for me without me having to constantly write it down
I think I jumped about 5 feet in the air around 18 minutes into the video when I misheard the "random" year. My current campaign started in the year 3780...
Thanks! I can't believe I've never thought of making a calendar for my world. You inspired me to make one straight away. My players love it. I even added holy days, solstices and equinoxes, and holidays.
I'm just imagining Matt thinking he's alone in his house while someone's on the other side of that door with no clue what's going on except Matt shouting, "Time! Time!"
here's an interesting question i'll need to answer: how would an underdark calendar work? it doesn't make sense to separate it by seasons, movement around the sun, phases of the moon, or even days! depending on your lore it could be heavily based on the surface calendar, but i'm intrigued by what a completely separate system might be based on...
Hmmm if it was completely dark and no surface world interaction theyd have to measure by a recurring enough concept. For example...maybe the speed that which mishrooms grow or by way of physical changes. Like the season for when underdark beasts are in heat vs sheding or removing skin. The season for which the underground lake is surprisnbly frozen or boiling. The seasob in which spectral phenomena is stronger or weaker. The season when fiends appear more frequently vs noy Etc.
In the Dark Elf Trilogy it is explained that a giant crystal magically heats and cools as a timekeeper. This way when it is bright red it represents noon on the surface, and dark blue was midnight. The dark elves used this in Menzoberranzan to keep time.
Matt, I just want to say thank you for doing these videos! Your very first video gave me the confidence to try DMing with no experience and now I am running an original world every weekend and working on recruiting my second band of adventurers! I paused about halfway through this video to make a calendar and I ended up learning a lot about the farming economy in my world. By the time I had things figured out I knew how many bushels of grain an NPC needed to survive for a year, how much that cost and when it needed to be planted or harvested. Now my world has a complex agricultural cycle and the lives of my NPCs revolve around schedules for different crops. It's about time to harvest winter barley so the party is getting a lot of requests to track down missing sons!
Get tired of Matt Colville? NEVER :D You are my favorite thing to binge watch. I literally just started playing D&D a month ago and I've watched all of your videos on how to play better and all the videos about being a DM had me all excited to build my own world for my friends to play in. I've always been good at fictional writing so I figured I'd try my hand at making an awesome universe for people to get lost in :D So thanks Matt, you are SO COOL!
Jesus Christ you’re amazing. I’m literally about to DM for the first time since a year. And I’ve seen your first three videos which are also great! Then I looked up thinking no one would talk about this but I was curious about calendar time. And then here you are covering it! Thanks bro!
Hey Matt, Thanks for this video. Thanks to this I decided to draw up a calendar for the world I have been working on. In making the calendar I decided that there would be two moons, and the fact that there are two moons became a major plot device for the world (with two gods trying to come into being at odds with each other, and the wild magic storms that plague the world is caused by these bouncing off each other). I would never have thought of this without your helpful videos. Love your work, keep it up!
Another fantastic video Matt. In addition to tracking time during overland travel, I like to roll a die at the beginning of a new adventure and inform the players that that's how many months has passed since the last one. Typically I roll a d6, but I very it from time-to-time. I'm a game designer myself, and my game has rules for tracking what the characters are doing during down time, so my players really look forward to seeing what their characters were up to, and it creates a great sense of progression. Thanks for the discussion on calendars. Very useful stuff and well timed (no pun intended), as I'm in the middle of designing one right now for my campaign setting.
When I first started out I liked to name the days after week after the literal order of the days. Onesday Twosday (guess which this one is) Threesday Foursday Fivesday Sixday Sevensday
So it’s kinda like the Russian weekdays, where I think Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday are how many days after Sunday, and Wednesday is that it’s the middle of the week (I can’t remember exactly, but it’s something like that)
I have missed you so much! I get that your life is busy, and I appreciate any time you spend making these videos. You are one of my favorite people to watch on this little website known as RUclips . Keep up the good work Hoss!
I listened to this video just after session 1 of my campaign that started in Aug 2020. I just used a normal calendar. I didn't change the names of the months or days. In Nov 2021, the players (who previously ignored the calendar), started to ask "When is this deadline?" Redirecting them to the calendar with all their highlights labeled on it really left an impression that continues throughout since.
Gary Gygax was always awesome about responding to fans. I looked up his email address in the mid 90's when i was in highschool to ask him how to find more of his gord the rogue series. He explained where it went after TSR and even followed up with me when I asked him about a scene that did not take place in the first book that he mentioned in the second and he directed me to an issue of Dragon Magazine to find the short story that connected the two. Having one of my favorite authors take the time to respond to me as a teenager really meant a lot.
The fact Gary responded to fans and Jeff Grub famously hates fans and then is trying to say everyone liked Williams over Gary. Well I call bullsh*t.
I created a calendar using Donjon, 13 months of 28 days, 7 day weeks, with a 28 and 56 day moon. I also pregenned 2 years of weather, and it was hilarious when one player jokingly asked what the weather was and I dead faced said "slightly drizzling, about 60 degrees, it's a bit chilly for Septen, the 7th month, it's the 3rd, year 394. It's 2pm and last night was a Half moon and a New moon." His reaction was priceless.
My setting is relatively high magic and borderline fantasy steampunk, but the year is only 394 because that's when the mortals' enslavement by demons had finally ended. The year probably would have been around 5,500 otherwise, starting from when history was first recorded, something like ancient Greece or Rome.
My reaction would have either been slack jaw or applause.
Ryan McKenna that's pretty awesome.
For my group's ongoing Skull & Shackles campaign, I generated weather (temperature, precipitation, and wind speed/direction), sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset, and tides for over 400 days. I modified the Golarion calendar presented in the campaign setting so the year has 367 days. I used real times from a latitude on Earth close to that of the Shackles on Golarion, to establish times for celestial bodies' rising and setting, tides, etc. My players also shook their heads when I showed them what' I'd done...
what did you use to get that much weather?
The Donjon calendar generator is brilliant.
*DM (me):* "It's 7 pm and the sun stars to set-"
*Player:* "Wait, the archipelago is near the north pole so shouldn't days be shorter at this time of year?"
On one hand, I appreciate them for immersing themselves so much into my world, but on the other hand...
But its a quite common knowledge though.
You need to work out the tilt your world has it seems
wan't its winter tho?
I personally love that my players sometime immerse so much that we have a discussion about things like constellations and climate changes through the year... in the other hand I really hate it when the same players don’t remember the name of the NPC who they met about 20 times in 30 sessions...
Plot twist: you're hinting to your players that your world isn't actually a sphere it's just a disk that the sun orbits around! Actually though feel free to go crazy with your cosmology
yeah, one of the worst things in a campaign is realizing that you became a 20th level wizard in 3 months. So much for all those novels that don't all feature 16 year old Arch wizards.
This is one reason that original D&D and 2nd Edition required TRAINING to gain level. Spend character money and take time to practice the new skills before you could go on anther adventure and make use of them.
One week of down time times the level you are training to acquire, if you could find someone 2 levels above the level you were going for, double the time to self-train.
The gold = EXP made sense when you had to spend roughly 1/2 your EXP in gold to gain level.
Fighters tore up armored dummies.
Wizards expended material components
Clerics made sacrifices to their deities
Thieves had to bribe people to gain access to knowledge.
(among other explanations of where the money went)
@@fhuber7507 I have a mechanic I haven't made much use of that says you have to spend a per level, up to 7 days.
It's not very restrictive, but at least makes you pay something. I figured I'd use it as a story guide to know when the party is ready for the next adventure, more than as a penalty. Maybe once in a long campaign make them choose between leveling time and chasing bad guys early.
@@fhuber7507 A DM we used to play with had a similar system.
Basically if you were relatively actively using your skills (e.g. being on an adventure or training) you would gain a level every "current level x weeks". E.g. if you are Level 3 and you adventured and trained for a combined three weeks in-game time you would get to level 4 after roughly that time.
So in theory, if you had no downtime where you did nothing at all (like meaningless traveling around for weeks) you would get to 20th level after roughly over 4 years of in-game time.
Of course you would need longer because you rarely are actively adventuring or training constantly for 4 years straight but the system felt quite natural since it was not raining XP and Levels left and right and after a week of adventuring you were alread 5th level.
He also never awarded numerical XP but kept track of the progress of any player behind the screen and simply told you when you got a level, which did not always happend for all players at once (but usually relatively close, like within 1-2 sessions), so you never knew when you would gain a level.
It also made downtime interesting since it encouraged the players to seek out ways to keep getting better. You could train for yourself but you could also go on adventures to e.g. seek out a master that could train you for a week or so, which of course cost you some gold, and that could get you more experience than training alone, depending on how high the masters level was.
@@fhuber7507 bards have to pay off their jilted lovers
@@metagames.errata7777 my current campaign to make time actually pass I’ve had my players have to take a 7 days of off time and training time to level up. Levels 2-7 have in world taken 7 weeks.
1:20
i love how this implies that that sound effect was not added and is actually how it sounds when he says it-
Brother: have you seen the new Mathew Colville video?
Me: yeah it's about time.
Brother: the video was about time.
Me: no, it's about time he made a new video.
It seems fitting that a video about time appears suddenly at fuckin 3 in the morning
Didn't you hear... He doesn't really keep track of time.
There was a point in our campaign where our rogue got pregnant (wild story, one of the campaign's highlights), and the player suddenly had to start tracking how many ingame weeks she was into the pregnancy so the DM could point out when she first started feeling signs.
2 years and nobody has asked for clarification? Shame on this community!
I need to know this. Please elaborate.
@@joshdaymusiced Basically, the setting my DM made has heaps of homebrew. So much homebrew that we consider it a different system from 5e altogether.
One homebrew class uses rune magic, and has a class ability called "Force of Nature". When a player uses Force of Nature, the DM opens up a word generator, strings together three random words, and interprets them to create an effect that can be beneficial or detrimental, so long as it's not immediately harmful to the caster. For example, a runemage falling off the back of a dragon used Force of Nature on himself, then the DM's generated words were "grow, adapt, survive", and that character grew a permanent set of wings. This is not a balanced ability and we don't pretend it is.
One of these times, our lizardman runemage used it on a female Spellscarred (think Tieflings, but made by magical fallout instead of demonic blood). Nothing happened that the characters could know, but the DM informed us all that she was magically impregnated with twins that were each half lizardman, half spellscarred. The funniest part was that while we all knew this OOC, none of the characters knew until like the day before the campaign officially ended.
"I don't do it. I don't think Matt Mercer does it." I love how Mercer's used as a yard stick for justifiable GM actions.
more of a Mercemiter than a yard stick.
@@morganfreeman-sheehy842 I think he mainly started doing it because of the Tal'dorei campaign guide. If it weren't for that book, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't track the calendar.
A good chunk of his viewers came from Critical Role's audience
I don't love it, I think it's bad, you can have fun in your own way :(
afaultytoaster Well, yes. And no. Yes everyone can have fun in their own way. But people need to start realizing that everything Matt does is achievable though very much so unlikely, and so it’s okay to aspire to be that. But don’t expect to be that and especially not immediately.
Best example of arbitrary point in time is in the TV show Dinosaurs, the son asks why they are counting down.
+1 for the arcane reference.
The last episode is so sad!
I'm now going to run a campaign in a world where the years count down because one of the major gods supposedly told the people to do it that way. No one alive knows what happens when we hit 0. Thank you for this inspiration.
I think that was a Flintstones joke too. Or maybe Life Of Brian.
Maybe I can toss some ideas about naming. I'm from Belarus, and can say, that unlike Gregorian calendar, months in our language are named mostly be nature things. For example names of winter months describe how cold winter becomes. They can be roughly translated as "Snow"uary, "Frost"uary, "Fierce"uary.
July named by Tilia tree, due to blossom. August is harvest month.
And about days outside months. Egyptian calendar had those. Because all 12 months was the same length (30 days), and year contains 365, they had 5 extra days for holidays.
c7d5a6 I don’t want to make fun of your culture but is it ok that I find that real funny
media.giphy.com/media/ipmFvsbE26qJ2/giphy.gif
Holy shit! I had the exact idea of making 12 months with 30 days each, and 5 single holidays.
I'm 100% checking out the Egyptian calendar, thanks!
Some inspiration from other cultures - in Slavic languages months are named from nature and farming. For example in Polish, starting from January:
- styczeń (connecting one)
- luty (strong freeze one)
- marzec (cold suffering one)
- kwiecień (flowery one)
- maj (from latin)
- czerwiec (red bug one) - the red bug was a major export in medieval times - it was source of the best red pigment
- lipiec (linden trees one)
- sierpień (sickle one)
- wrzesień (heather one)
- październik (hurds one)
- listopad (falling leaves one)
- grudzień (frozen/clomped ground one)
Marzec comes from Latin, it is the month of the Mars. The old-polish name for marzec was brzezień, from brzoza, making it a birchwood month
It took me a long time, but I did buy both of Matt's books and read them. They are quite good. Not like genre defining or anything, but I certainly had a hard time putting them down, and recommend them to anyone who wishes Matt would run ads. I don't even read a whole lot.
Because I'm a giant nerd and a neurotic DM, I legit print out a calendar (ideally with moon phases) and write in game names of the days of the week and months. I write in each day significant events the PCs know about and in a different color, the events the PCs don't know about and it makes it so easy to tell them how much time has passed.
I once ran a vampire campaign parallel to a Werewolf campaign, they didn't use the same calendar so it wasn't obvious it was happening at the same time. The players only figured out it was by recognizing astronomical occurrences. Worked out very well!
I love this
I really like the naming system from the Dishonored games, where the months are named on significant events or common themes. For instance, the Month of Harvest, Month of Rain, etc. But now I'm 100% using floating days in my calendar! That sounds so cool!
Wow that's a really cool idea thanks!
That actually appears in the Dishonored calendar - the Fugue Feast is a day that falls outside of the calendar when the Abbey of the everyman reset the primary clocks of the Empire of the Isles
Finnish does that, by the way.
I keep track of the days.
About 10 sessions in (12-ish weeks into the campaign) I sat down and figured up all of the days.
We were only about 16 days in at that point- months of IRL time was less than 3 weeks in-game.
Now when I upload recaps they always start with what day it is, and I always indicate in a recap when the days change.
Now we’re on session 14 and it’s day 24.
Also, the recaps really helped me be able to say the timeline authoritatively.
“They rested before going here, so it’s Utkar 16, not the 15 anymore” for example.
It also helps figure out downtime.
They spent 2 days kicking around town to brew some potions and getting a hat made, and that actually had a tangible effect on the campaign.
I made a "Calendar of Harptos" in a spreadsheet to track time because I wanted to have an easier way to keep track of what was going on behind the scenes. When my players hired a spy to do some recon on an enemy for them while they went on another adventure, I wanted to make sure that I knew how much time it would take that spy to travel to the relevant city, do that recon, and get back.
I've also since come up with an idea that the "big event" of the campaign will eventually take place during the solar eclipse of the winter solstice (darkest day a la Last Airbender) and so once they figure that out, it will be a race against time to stop the BBEG from achieving their goals. Having a calendar is incredibly useful for helping keep track of all this.
I usually offer my players a ton of down-time, which helps with the "going from zero to hero in a few days adventuring" problem. They don't mind spending days, weeks, or even a month or two just kickin' it at their keep, making magic items, training, researching, or interacting with their favorite NPCs. It makes it easy to throw hooks for the next adventure when I know where they're all going to be and what they'll be doing.
I need an alarm on my phone of him yelling "time...Time TIME!"
Did you ever do this? I would love my workout alarm to be this.
I know that statistically it had to happen to someone, but my birthday is August 17th... Henceforth it shall be known as lamp.
Colville's alive! roll initiative!
natural one
9
FUCK YEAH 3 AM MATT COLVILLE VIDEO!
WHOOOOOOOOOOO!
OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ OONTZ!
Living in Poland is great. 9:00 AM, saturday morning, watching Matt to breakfast...
TheGameGuy It's Saturday :)
Yes. Yes it is. Sorry about that ;)
If there is any excuse - we have a constitution day next week so my weekend is 3 days longer, so yeah one could get confused...
So we started doing this in our campaign. It is really cool to have accurate seasons, persistent and definite deadlines, etc. But the best part is that we all decided on birthdays for our characters, and the DM has started having NPCs give us gifts for them! It's overall quite fun.
Edit: if you do this I recommend making a spreadsheet on Google Docs or whatever, so each player can reference it and add notes together about what happened on each day - it helps add to the collective history.
Hooray! I've been having "links in the doobly-doo" withdrawal these last few weeks!
Craig Boorman Me too, buddy. Me too.
Vlogbrothers, vsauce, and more use the word dooblydoo regularly; it's originally from wheezy waiter. (sorry no d&d pun here)
"Links in the dooblydoo" would actually make a good tshirt
I'm certain someone has mentioned it by now, but the Dragon Age series has all of these wonderful things and their attention to detail is fantastic. Calendars (Latinized [Imperium] and Common names for months [everybody else), Eras or the Ages (Hence, dragon age), Constellations (once were elven then rebranded under the Imperium etc). It makes me happy to have that great example to fall back upon when writing my calendar, of which I really must fill with special dates and so forth
HE'S BACK GUYS! THERE WAS MUCH REJOICING!
TheGameGuy Yaaaayyyy.......
13:08 here in Finland, there's a somewhat consistent standard in naming the months - we have a word that somehow describes the time of the year during that month and the word "kuu" (moon) in every month's name. For example, July, August, September and October are heinäkuu, elokuu, syyskuu and lokakuu ("hay moon", "life moon", "fall moon" and "dirt moon") in Finnish. But that just proves the naming of months tells something about the local culture and I think there are probably more monnth name systems, some more and some less consistent
Harvest month, not life.
Elonkorjuu, kato
im such a history nerd, and busted out laughing when he said the Babylonians would've been happy with an even number of days in a year
I just recently saw in an episode of Critical Role: "It's the equivalent of a Thursday."
So at least until then he hadn't done it, but did say he might look into making one so it could've changed since.
Having a Mathew Colville video makes being awake at 7am on a Saturday morning so much better :)
Ian Cannon or waking up at 3:30 am to go to work
Ian Moone It's 12:45 pm here
Ian Moone now that's a man.
So I was just watching some of your videos for the first time today, and I decided to subscribe (and I usually don't subscribe to anything).
As I kept watching I saw afterwards the video where you mention how amazed you were at 10K subs, and then the one with 50K Q&A, and I decided to come here (to your most recent video) to tell you why I subscribed: You are just too good.
I have been watching many videos similar to yours, but I didn't subscribe to any of them. They felt half-cooked, unprofessional and more often than not filled with too many personal opinions and too little facts.
Here, not only shows the fact that you maxed your charisma, but its obvious that you know what you are talking about. You got experience, and it shows. On top of that you are really with words and exposition, if I didn't know any better, I would think you have been practicing it as a hobby for at least 30 years, wink wink.
Also really appreciated how you use crystal clear examples (like the Skill Challenges) and exact situations that happened to you and your groups; that is exactly what many of us are looking for: clear examples and direct answers, not the constant "is up to you and your group" and ambiguous answers that others channels offer.
Didn't come to your channel from anywhere in particular, you just showed there in the suggested videos in RUclips after I watched enough similar content, and you really stand out in quality. Listening to you and your stories is a constant pleasure and, unlike with many others, I didn't feel the need to skip and stop listening to you because you were getting repetitive, boring or useless.
Keep the good work. 10 out of 10, would watch again.
I just finally got around to creating a calendar based on your recommendation - I've yet to play or run a game where time was even really considered outside of travel (and it didn't really matter, even in something like SKT, sadly). But I'm giving it a go.
My players ended their last campaign reaching 18th level in Tomb of Annihilation -> Tomb of Horrors and I decided to build a campaign world from scratch, so I had their characters become gods and help run the new campaign. They all picked domains to care for, created their own portfolios, symbols and tenants. Then I incorporated them into my game.
So, I'm using each god as a name of a month. I have 12 domains (picking up Order from the UA, though I guess it's now official in Ravenica) so I decided to go with earth standard 12 months, only I opted to have 30 day months, and then added 5 "feast days" named the Days of Yawea (the overgod of the crystal sphere, akin to AO in Forgotten Realms).
Each of my players got a feast day, appearing just before the start of their own month. I just sent them notice of the calendar - and while they've been pretty happy with just having their own gods represent (it's been fun, one player is a cleric to a different player's god, and I text the god player for advice on how he'd like his god to react), their comments on Slack have been quite entertaining knowing they're even more deeply ingrained in the world.
Thank you so much for this idea!
I tried running a puzzle once. It led to a 2 hour debate on "character knowledge" vs "player knowledge" and weather or not puzzles could be considered as medagaming. I haven't run a puzzle sense.
My current campaign is the first one that I've kept close track of time like this and after 6 months of doing, I really have enjoyed it. The seasons change, holidays happen. It gives a sense of the world 'happening'.
came back to this video specifically because i'm gearing up for a long campaign and one of my players wants to play a very young character (like an 8 yr old girl) so tracking time will probably be super important seeing as she's gonna grow and become older as the campaign goes along
How'd it go
HE LIVES! Great vid Matt, glad to see you back.
This will probably get buried in the deluge of comments but thank you so much Matt Colville for making all of these videos. I started watching them before I had ever DMed a game and now I am watching this about 3 months into my first campaign. Your videos have been invaluable to me, including this one. My players have been enjoying our campaign so much that one of them has started running his own game in a world that he has been creating for years and now I'm a player in that!
You don't only tell the what/how but the WHY and I think that is sometimes more important. You're like the Bill Nye/Alton Brown of D&D. Thanks for everything you do.
This makes me want to make an adventure where the players take on a task for their hometown, and if the Players take forever the Townsfolk will just have assumed that they died and they return to find their funeral rights being performed.
Hey Matt, just wanted to say thank you!
I dont play D&D, but I am a game master in a german pen and paper RPG called DSA (das schwarze Auge/the black eye) and watching your videos is a great help to me. I think your advice is great and works for all kinds of rpgs. A lot of the topics you adress are things I have never even thought about but I just took your word for it in a lot of cases and it has payed off almost every time I did. Most noticably your LOTR video about Sandbox vs Railroad.
When I started out creating my first adventure, I would sit down and write dialogue (actually both sides of it just hoping my group would respond somewhat like I anticipated) for hours and try to script out even the smallest of sidequests. Then our first session started and I realized that the group acted a lot smarter than I expected them to and pushed an npc that was working for the antagonists and they had done a job for into paying them an incredible ammount of money for it, because his life dependet on them keeping their mouth shut about recovering some valuable cargo that he lost. I thought the "heros" would pity the poor man and try to help him and I didn't bother giving him any leaverage to make them stick to the contract they had agreed on. as soon as they realized how much money the npc had and that his life depented on the cargo they had recovered they blackmailed him into making them rich beyond anything I accounted for.
With so much money in their pockets they could pretty much skip their way past a large portion of the adventure I had prepared and buy their way past almost the entire first act of it. Even though they were very pleased with how the adventure was going so far, I considered it a huge failure on my part. That is where I started to look to your channel for help and oh man did I find it. I now handle npcs completely differently, rather than thinking about how I can use them in the plot I think about who they are and what they want. This way all I need are some notes about their personalities and maybe some good punchlines for the more clever npcs and the story writes itself and reacts way better to the way the players interact with it. If they chose to ignore an important character I am no longer frustrated that all the work I put into him goes to waste, I can simply accelerate his part of the story because he faces no resistance and can complete his work unhindered so he becomes an even bigger problem later. If they really like a character that I planned out as a really small role I can make him an important part of the story in no time and I think coming to this on my own would have taken me so much longer. I still have a lot to learn about running a game and keeping track of time is certainly one of the things I could do better but I'm really happy with where I am right now and that is in a large part thanks to your channel.
Keep 'em coming and have a nice day!
The Common Era thing cracks me up.. it still starts on the same day!
My current campaign is on its 3rd session but it is set in a world I created a year ago for another group and because of the past group a war is going to break out soon. I didn't keep track of time very well for that group, but because of the coming war and this video I am creating a calender. once again ,Matt, you have inspired me.
The Forgotten Realms calendar is the French Revolution Metric Calendar with some small differences (five Festive days added to end of year, not sparsed in between) and new names for days and months.
The French revolutions idea of giving every day a unique name is horrible, no one can be expected to remember 365 different names, and remember exactly what order they happen in.
Coming back to this video four years later when my campaigns actually have a Calender... I feel the weight of it much greater. Makes it feel so much realer.
And S&F and K&W seem to actively encourage taking extended rests, waiting for fortifications to conclude building and such... SO DAMN GOOD!
Ah yes! A Matthew Colville video and Primitive Technology in the same day!
Haha this guy knows what's up
wow I understand this!
Dude we should be friends
Ikr?
FeeblePenguin I do not, what is primitive technology? Help me know what's up, I'm hungry over here.
I love how you tell us what you do but you don’t take away the aspect of letting us know it’s alright to shift the rules but still give us recommendations.
I was going to go to bed, but then a Matt Colville video appeared.
So many positive comments and it made me feel so good to read them, it's like the subscribers to this channel are filled to the brim with awesomeness.
Well of course, I agree!
Yay, new content! I've been Jonesing for some fast talking DM advice.
I keep watching this channel because it's basically the only RPG channel I see that acknowledges 4e exists
most people list it like "AD&D, second, third, pathfinder and 5e"
ProJared also talks about 4e quite a bit, but he doesn’t make many D&D videos
Love your videos Matt. They've helped me lead games for my wife and son. Keep up the good work.
I like the calendar with 13 months, 28 days each and 1, sometimes 2 days of special holidays. It makes so much more sense than 12 months of different lengths.
I think your travel times depend on the scale of the map. I have from the 5e PHB that you can travel 24 miles/day at a "normal" pace for an 8 hour day. And, looking at the only map I have with me at the time (Sword Coast from Lost Mine of Phandelver) it says that each hex = 5 miles. I don't have it with me, but I'm certain it's in the DMG in one of the first chapters that describes the different scales of maps.. I'm gonna have to re-look at that, so be aware to look at the scale on the map first! Thanks, great video as always!
So yesterday I ran my first session and I wanna say one big BIG THANK YOU Matt. My friends LOVED it. Yeah one of them wasn't so hyped and excited because he is not a fan of board games but he had a great time. Although my other friend was AMAZED from how cool the game is. And at the end of the session the thing that made me feel good was to hear from both of them telling me "Bro you are a pretty good DM for someone who does it for the first time". Again, thanks Matt for making this vids and explaining all the stuff I ,and every other DM or future DM, watching your vids. Thank You.
Audio software.
Somebody has been learning it...
Actually I gave up on the new mic and just went back to the old mic. This is the same audio setup and process I used for like the first 20 videos.
@@mcolville Time!
Matthew Colville, so glad to see more videos will be coming out. I just wanted to thank you for making your channel and putting up truly sage advice. I am currently a player in a game with the best DM I have ever known and we have been playing every Saturday for some two years now. Your videos inspired me to DM for the group when ours is feeling tired or would like time to prep. I got their okay to do short campaigns in their homemade setting and didn't realize until afterwards how much that rejuvenates them. I can't be thankful enough for the time and work you put into your videos. I love being a DM and if it were not for the distance I would be happy to run a game for you.
With 7 minutes left in the day, Matt squeaks in
So excited to see this! Cause of your videos I've started DMing with all new players and it's been going great. I feel I haven't always done my best but my players are so original and energetic we always have fun.
holy smokes finally! it's been too long matt. glad you're back.
This video could not have come at a more relevant time! I'm running a fairly expansive home-brewed campaign, and my players literally just asked me after last session "hey, we'd like to start keeping a journal of our epics, what date is it? What year? What's the calendar like so we can date each entry?". Which, of course, was met with my blank stare filled with realization that I had a generic historical timeline but no calendar. The points you made though did make me think deeper about it, and I realized that I may actually understand the history of my own story even better after giving some thought to the "why" of the names.
Good to have you back, Matt!
little known fact: the amount days in a year changes very slowly because of the tendency of planets to tidally lock, it takes a lot of time though, so it's not so relevant to teach.
Approximately 3600 years
I run a calendar in my 5e game where I know what day it is and roughly what time of day it is. I figure out what the NPC's will do and how long it takes if the characters do nothing. This also regulates how long it takes for the apothecary to get new stuff, or how long they have to wait for the shipment to get there. It also seems to influence how often they take long rests.
I'm good, thanks for asking Matt!
my all time favorite video. Hard to pick, I know, but there's so many things linked to the calendar that at least I never thought of that really help flesh out a world. Absolutely lovely.
Interestingly, Japan still culturally counts years by how long an emperor has been around. It's used in ceremonies and fancy documents mainly but also in some surprising everyday ways. One example is that it's pretty common to share your age via when you were born in this system. Something else neat is that they'll call people born in the current Heisei era "Heisei Babies" since they're so young (1989+).
I'm glad you have a video on this, as the homebrew game I started in December relies very heavily on the calendar. I have events laid out for a long time, where X will happen at Y, regardless of whether or not the party is ready or even present to deal with it (that is, of course, unless they do something that prevents those events from happening at all). Having a strict time table suddenly adds consequence to every aspect of play. You may no longer be able to afford to idle for the two weeks it takes the smith to craft your fighter's new armor.
It's very interesting as the GM to see how my players handle the aspect of time, and knowing that their enemies are just as active and fluid as they are. It's also rewarding to see how much more involved it makes them.
Looking at another video of yours where you mentioned Microscope, and having your players figure out the history of the dead empire in your world; I think it would be great to build the calendar or the days of the week based off the names of some important historical figures or events your players come up with playing Microscope :) I think that would be a cool experience
I try and do this as much as possible. I'm new to DMing and the game in general, but one of the first things I made sure to do was make sure my players know that time is a thing and that the world around them is alive- so jobs on the notice board would vanish and change and be completed as time went on, even if they didn't personally complete things. Also, thank you! You're the reason I really got into the game as a DM and your videos have helped me so much in setting up my games and world
I just cannot see myself getting tired of Colville's beautiful hair and awesome D&D insights
I've been keeping strict track of time in my games forever (well, the 2.5 years I've been DM'ing/GM'ing) and it helps so much! Being able to tell your players how long ago something was and how long it will take to do something accurately is extremely helpful, and satisfying. As you said, time matters so much in how a campaign feels.
Btw shouldn't this be Running the Game #34?
Hey Matt! Thanks (in advance) for another awesome video!
Just found our calendar is mostly about what tree is blossoming at the time, when animals are ready to .. "have kids" and when fruit is ripe. Which is pretty consistent with other things I know about our History :D Thanks Matt.
Also found out that July and June used by be one month in our country! neat!
I clicked this soooo fast!
We missed you Matt!
I introduced a time travel mechanic to my game so I have watched this video a million times.
Thank you so very very much :)
our calendar bothers me a lot. 365 breaks down into 13 28 day months each of which would have exactly 4 7 day weeks with only a single day left over (or two on leap years) which would make a good new years day that isn't part of a month.
yep!
one year from winter solstice to Winter solstice for our solar calendar is 365.25 days
our lunar calendar from new moon to new moon is 29.5 days
The sun is a masculine symbol and the moon is a feminine symbol. That's what male dominated societies use a solar calendar and not a lunar calandar.
Can I use this?
There was a strong push after WWII to create a new, standardized calendar but it fell apart because Christian religious leaders in the US objected to a calendar with intercalary days, as it would mean - over time - Easter would not fall on Sunday.
You are absolutely right.
Just keep in mind that the Gregorian Calendar that we use was developed before we had an absolutely precise measure of how long it took us to complete one rotation. It also accounts for the 4 seasons pretty well, since 12 is divisible by 4.
Also, we will never change, because our calendar works, even if it is inefficient.
I actually have a player in my game that keeps track of time for the group every time I announce how much time has passed. It’s super helpful to have someone that not only really enjoys documenting how much time has passed, but can remember it for me without me having to constantly write it down
I think I jumped about 5 feet in the air around 18 minutes into the video when I misheard the "random" year. My current campaign started in the year 3780...
@@dziooooo Matt mercer is stalking you 👀
Thanks! I can't believe I've never thought of making a calendar for my world. You inspired me to make one straight away. My players love it. I even added holy days, solstices and equinoxes, and holidays.
I'm just imagining Matt thinking he's alone in his house while someone's on the other side of that door with no clue what's going on except Matt shouting, "Time! Time!"
Fresh from the clubs to a Matt Colville video! It must me my lucky day!
here's an interesting question i'll need to answer: how would an underdark calendar work? it doesn't make sense to separate it by seasons, movement around the sun, phases of the moon, or even days! depending on your lore it could be heavily based on the surface calendar, but i'm intrigued by what a completely separate system might be based on...
Hmmm if it was completely dark and no surface world interaction theyd have to measure by a recurring enough concept. For example...maybe the speed that which mishrooms grow or by way of physical changes. Like the season for when underdark beasts are in heat vs sheding or removing skin. The season for which the underground lake is surprisnbly frozen or boiling. The seasob in which spectral phenomena is stronger or weaker. The season when fiends appear more frequently vs noy
Etc.
In the Dark Elf Trilogy it is explained that a giant crystal magically heats and cools as a timekeeper. This way when it is bright red it represents noon on the surface, and dark blue was midnight.
The dark elves used this in Menzoberranzan to keep time.
Matt, I just want to say thank you for doing these videos! Your very first video gave me the confidence to try DMing with no experience and now I am running an original world every weekend and working on recruiting my second band of adventurers!
I paused about halfway through this video to make a calendar and I ended up learning a lot about the farming economy in my world. By the time I had things figured out I knew how many bushels of grain an NPC needed to survive for a year, how much that cost and when it needed to be planted or harvested.
Now my world has a complex agricultural cycle and the lives of my NPCs revolve around schedules for different crops.
It's about time to harvest winter barley so the party is getting a lot of requests to track down missing sons!
Yay! We've missed you!
Get tired of Matt Colville? NEVER :D You are my favorite thing to binge watch. I literally just started playing D&D a month ago and I've watched all of your videos on how to play better and all the videos about being a DM had me all excited to build my own world for my friends to play in. I've always been good at fictional writing so I figured I'd try my hand at making an awesome universe for people to get lost in :D So thanks Matt, you are SO COOL!
COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLVIIIIIIILEEE!
I just realized that watching your videos is so precious to me !
They're inspiring, relaxing (that voice !) and seems so right.
The dude abides 💯 .... welcome back Matthew.
Jesus Christ you’re amazing. I’m literally about to DM for the first time since a year. And I’ve seen your first three videos which are also great! Then I looked up thinking no one would talk about this but I was curious about calendar time. And then here you are covering it! Thanks bro!
Out of all your video's, this one made me not only want to play D&D but also made want to be the DM the most.
Hey Matt, Thanks for this video. Thanks to this I decided to draw up a calendar for the world I have been working on. In making the calendar I decided that there would be two moons, and the fact that there are two moons became a major plot device for the world (with two gods trying to come into being at odds with each other, and the wild magic storms that plague the world is caused by these bouncing off each other).
I would never have thought of this without your helpful videos. Love your work, keep it up!
Yay! A new video!
This video is full of inspiration. Thank you for this, I will change my world's time line to reflect your advice
welcome back. :-)
Another fantastic video Matt.
In addition to tracking time during overland travel, I like to roll a die at the beginning of a new adventure and inform the players that that's how many months has passed since the last one. Typically I roll a d6, but I very it from time-to-time. I'm a game designer myself, and my game has rules for tracking what the characters are doing during down time, so my players really look forward to seeing what their characters were up to, and it creates a great sense of progression.
Thanks for the discussion on calendars. Very useful stuff and well timed (no pun intended), as I'm in the middle of designing one right now for my campaign setting.
When I first started out I liked to name the days after week after the literal order of the days.
Onesday
Twosday (guess which this one is)
Threesday
Foursday
Fivesday
Sixday
Sevensday
So it’s kinda like the Russian weekdays, where I think Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday are how many days after Sunday, and Wednesday is that it’s the middle of the week (I can’t remember exactly, but it’s something like that)
I have missed you so much! I get that your life is busy, and I appreciate any time you spend making these videos. You are one of my favorite people to watch on this little website known as RUclips .
Keep up the good work Hoss!
FINALLY. I missed you dad.
I listened to this video just after session 1 of my campaign that started in Aug 2020. I just used a normal calendar. I didn't change the names of the months or days.
In Nov 2021, the players (who previously ignored the calendar), started to ask "When is this deadline?" Redirecting them to the calendar with all their highlights labeled on it really left an impression that continues throughout since.
YAY!
No worries about the time between videos. Any videos you put up are always super helpful.