Getting Relaxed About Time Passing

My home campaign has been outstanding upholders of 'accurate time records must be kept' for most of the campaigns duration. The perception of a plethora of problems and noone to solve them but the PCs meant that every hour of the day was juiced for its use. For the most part not a problem - except when one of the party heads off for a social event leaving the others to their own devices and a 'spare' couple of hours.

The bard drew the cartoon below about what happens when the cleric and the sorcerer are left unsupervised.

Given that the 'dungeon' in question were the unsecured lower reaches of the palace they all lived in, this made sense more of less. Though it was a pretty 'light' party of two facing down some of the things down there.

More recently the players have been moving towards trying to get the clock to tick faster - relaxing their grip on every hour of the day and allowing time to pass a little faster. The sense that they still have a great deal of problems that only they can resolve remains but they have gathered to them a crew of hirelings that they can delegate things to. Stuff like research, minor recon and handling the social web have been offloaded. A key aspect is that the ability to delegate and be relatively sure that things will be handled competently reduces the sense of 'lost opportunity' around just taking a nap and letting a split group resynchronise at a later time rather than trying to micromanage everything.

All of this has more or less organically happened as the party cruised past 10th level - they had a few potential hirelings cross their path before but they dispersed them to the service of others. The more recent shift has come in collecting a minor entourage, not dedicated to bringing more force to a fight, but to handling their to-do lists. This edges towards classic domain play but we have not quite landed there yet.

A symptom of not being willing to relax grip was the sorcerer getting a homonculus 'shell' completed for them in session 82 - around March 2023 - and only finally carving out the time to enchant it and bring it to life in session 121 - in October 2024.

For me as a DM it is helpful because the clock moving along helps pay off actions that either the party or other forces put into motion. I am trying to resist the urge to trawl up loose threads from earlier in the campaign whenever there is a spare moment and just have quiet days and nights sometimes happen.

All this stands in massive contrast to the Spelljammer Light of Xaryxis campaign where there would regularly be months of space voyages on a very small ship - prime role-playing territory - and it was all just skipped over. Different players, different approaches.

We are trying as a table to strike a balance between moving the clock along more rapidly without snuffing out the roleplaying angle that has been a core part of the game throughout its run. I think this is better, letting the clock move forward more swiftly. I wondered if I had been throwing too much nonsense at the party that got us here but I realise no, it was that the PCs all had active social lives that they leaned into - whatever festivals and shenanigans were going were indulged in and explored - which were were enjoyed and appreciated but were not 'handwave, it is morning' sessions.

I think this is closer to an optimal balance - that also required me as a DM to chill out a bit - sometimes nothing in particular happens in a given day. The players get their stuff done without much opposition, nothing new surfaces, and all there is for it is to eat, sleep and see how things turn out on the morrow. Too many adventure hooks with ticking clocks attached will make time crawl, leave more of them 'un-timed' and be more relaxed as a table about time passing.