Time Keeping

Segments of Time

Watch

~4 Hours, 6 in a day.

Watches are an in-game, and default, way of measuring time. They're split into Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night, Midnight, and Early Morning.

Hour

~1 Hour

Hours are familiar to us but, without some method or skill in tracking time, are not used in-world for things.

Turn

~10 minutes

The "Turn" doesn't exist in-world: it is too precise for NPCs and Characters, however, it is a good way of keeping track of the passage of time, making sure that the focus of play falls on each player.

Default to a single out-of-combat Check = 1 Turn.

Everything set up and ready to go

Tracking

For this method, you'll need 18 chips: 6 green, 4 blue, 6 white. Stack them in color sorted piles in that order. Draw a line behind them.

The green tokens represent Turns, the blue hours, and white watches. When a Turn passes, take a green chip from the stack and place it behind the line.

When you got to move a green chip and there are none left, an hour has passed: reset the stack and then move a blue chip behind the line.

Repeat until all blue chips are behind the line: a watch has passed. Reset the blue chips, and move 1 white chip behind the line. When all watches have been moved, a day has passed.

~40 minutes until the next Watch

Alternative Watch Chip Colors

Something that you can do for Watches is that, instead of all white, you can make them different colors to represent the global light level. For me, I use White for full daylight, Red for twilight hours, and Black for the night, like so:

Morning - White
Afternoon - White
Evening - Red
Night - Black
Midnight - Black
Early Morning - Red