Time

Roleplay games are, at their hearts, stories. And in stories, things happen. That means they happen sequentially, in time. So in every game, time goes by — and it must be tracked.

Battle Time

In combat, six seconds makes a round, and ten rounds make a minute. The combat round is the essential unit here. A round limits what you can do: a standard action and a move action, or alternately, a full-round action. Add in a five-foot step, a swift action. amd a number of free actions. Read more in the combat rules.

The Action Economy: In combat, to be as effective as you can, you want to make as good use of your actions as possible. So at higher levels, you take full-round attacks when you can, because that way you get iterative attacks (the ones based on having a high BAB). So if you cast a summons, in subsequent rounds both you and it use actions, and you have doubled the number of actions "you" can take.

Having a companion is like playing a second character, giving you two sets of actions each round. That's one reason DMs may choose to disallow them from the game.

Down Time

In many campaigns, returning to town after an adventure is a lull in your character's activity. You sell loot, stock up on potions, and perhaps wait around for the wizard to scribe some scrolls. However, there is much more you can do in town in between adventures — your character might want to practice with a military school, start a guild, build a temple, train a new pet, and so on.

There are campaign and roleplaying benefits for using your down time. For example, if you build or buy a house, you have a comfortable, private place to rest between adventures. Add a workshop for crafting. Add a few more rooms to convert a house into a base of operations for your adventuring party. It would count as "very familiar" for the purpose of your teleport spells. If it includes an altar to your deity, you can use it as the destination for a word of recall.

If you have taken the aristocat secondary class or the Demense feat, you can use down time to manage your fiefdom. And recall that your demense could be a business or a restaurant or a tavern — all handy plot hook potentials when your business earns its first 1,000 gp or the king hears about your famous soup or certain young adventurers visit your pub. Game masters, remember to use these options to enrich the campaign, not just exploit as a way to attack PCs or strong-arm them into adventures.

Down time activites can make a campaign more fully grounded in the world-building of the setting. Some game masters prefer to run down time activites between sessions, if running them in game might leave some players sitting around with nothing to do. In these cases, a small recap of these activities might start the next session, just so everybody knows what is going on. Or, game masters might schedule time just before or after the official session hours to use for down time stuff — as well as to do Universal System activities such as levelling up.

Campaign Time

On a larger scale, how do the players and game master track days, weeks, months, and years? There are two main approaches, each with pros and cons.

The most common (because it is way easier) is hand waving. Time at these scales is just not tracked. It is assumed that time passes, but it's not really that important to the stories being told. Perhaps there is some mention of time passing: the game master declares that a month goes by between quests, or that it is getting colder for winter, but no strict accounting takes place. And that's fine.

Alternatively, you can keep a careful tally of days. Here is a remarkable example of this, from a campaign I played in many many years ago. With this kind of granularity, a game master can plan events for certain times, track weather and seasons, and add verisimilitude, for example with holidays and happenings.

Calendars: It may be useful, and add interest to the campaign, to include a calendar with days, months, and years. A game master can be as creative as desired, although the option least likely to confuse players is one with seven-day weeks, four-week months, and 12- or 13-month years. That's even easier if you sync your moon(s) to the calendar strictly, so you get a complete cycle each month. And as you develop your world's history, add in special days, related to local milestones or noble birthdays or religious feasts.

To put a thumb on the scale, this game designer urges world-builders to use every tool at hand to add detail and depth to the game world.