Tracking "Strict Time Records" in a campaign

tl;dr: reviewing time records from an urban/wilderness campaigns highlight how time is the key resource in cities

Nudged into action by Vladars blog on Strict Time Records I dug out the data for my home campaign. My feeling was it was a less meaningful thing since we started as an urban campaign where the resource is not torches or food but time - and because every half hour was precious we progressed relatively slowly down the calendar. The party was happy to split up to get things done *in space* but not in time - reconvening regularly to compare notes and plan next steps every couple of hours.

I took a look at how we progressed down the calendar over the course of the campaign - each in-world month is 30 days.

If you are thinking - that looks pretty noisy - like there is no relation between how long a game session is and how much time passes in world - then you would be right! Though as might be expected, time moved more briskly when it was out of the big city and involved travelling around in the hinterlands of the realm more - time in transit ate the calendar. This was a nice proof point of the urban-time/wilderness-supply resource focus.

It has taken us 4 years to work through two calendar months. Now that we have returned to the city, time has once again slowed down and this has actually lead to a thing where our sorceror has a homunculus frame sitting in a box ready to go - but to take the time (~week) to cast the ritual would effectively knock them out of the game for a period of time. Classic old-school says the player should stand up another PC to play while their first one is 'out of action' but this has not been a well-received option so far. The opportunity cost of 'take a week to do a ritual' feels enormous in this campaign.

We have been working towards aligning activities that all the party can do to burn off a week of time but so far crisis keeps rearing its ugly head and no rest has been available for our heroes.

Looking at XP accrued - progress has been classic 3.5e XP for risks faced - monsters slain, etc. - plus a lower amount for 'problems solved' through politicking and the likes that amounts to a lower baseline of XP-per-session. The first couple of levels were strongly driven by just the creep of getting things done until they left the city and set out into the wilderness at level 6 and started getting into more frequent fights from there.

Levels 7-9 were rapid progress as they fought their way through a buried city and a forgotten temple - lots of trolls and giants with a seasoning of gelatinous cubes in the night. At this point more of their XP has been earned from combat than questing.

The neat thing that dropped out of this was the time-space split between touring the realm and urban adventuring. Even with something as fast as their flying boat reaching the further ends of their domain is a multi-day journey with plenty of room for interesting stuff along the way.

A second feature is that though the clock progresses slowly, it does progress and things do come back around - often long forgotten by the time it pops back up. Good notes are helpful for me the DM and things eventually coming to pass are great fodder for sessions when they do pop up.