Playing through a campaign takes time. You may spent weeks, months and years of playing without seeing the end of it. I recently finished playing in a 'The Rise of Tiamat' campaign for about a year. We defeated multiple dragons, beat dungeons, leveled up multiple times and stopped the cult from summoning Tiamat. Many evenings were spent to live through this epic adventure. During that time, I separated from my partner, moved cities and even met my current partner. My life was completely altered. But when I took a look back at that campaign, I realized that within the game world, only a couple of weeks had passed.

To be honest, it always feels a little bizarre to me how characters go from level 1-10 in the span of a few months. The difference in power and applicability feels like it would warrant a much larger timespan. Sometimes it feels like you save the world two or three times in the same month. While it is not noticeable at first, after 10 or so sessions you start to look back and realize that you whole journey, played over the span of month, were just one week of game time. I call this phenomenon the Slow Motion Campaign. There are multiple reasons for this type of game, as well as possible solutions.

The Adventuring Day

Dungeons & Dragons and similar games usually operate on a concept often referred to as the 'Adventuring Day'. In this concept, many abilities and powers have a limited use that replenishes after a rest, which in turn can be taken once per day. If gamemasters want to create tension my diminishing the resources of the players before a final fight, they are therefore encouraged to pack a lot of scenes within the span of a single day.

Some systems, like ICRPG or Daggerheart, elegantly circumvent this issue by dealing in flexible timeframes. In ICRPG, the game is played in rounds, but a round does not have a specific time associated with it. This means that resting for an hour or resting for a month can have the same mechanical effect, while still allowing for a flexible application of time. In Daggerheart, the duration of many effects is not measured in gametime, but for example the duration of a scene, which could last a flexible amount of gametime.

Even within Dungeons & Dragons, it is possible to circumvent the trappings of the adventuring day, though it does take more effort. Narrative resources are not bound to the rules and can thus be strained at your leisure. Putting an emphasis on the groups friends, hometown our the state of the country can free you from worrying about their hit points or spell slots. If you do specifically seek mechanical resources, you might implement enemies and conditions that mechanically target or circumvent the adventuring day.

The long rest in 'Dungeons & Dragons' is widely regarded as a potential pace-breaker. If the gamemaster wants do challenge the players with combat, they will have to prevent it for as long as possible, making a day in-game potentially multiple sessions long.

Player Driven Meandering

While the gamemaster certainly has a lot of influence over the timespan of a given campaign, the players can influence this passage of time in the same way. A famous example of this is the often dismissed 'You meet in a tavern' start of the campaign. One of it's many criticisms is the meandering, boring roleplay that might ensue over the next couple of hours. While they could go out of the tavern and explore the world at any point, they often lack the tools to decide and communicate to fast forward to a more interesting part of they journey. This leads to a lot of time spent on long and detailed scenes, slowing the game time down.

As players and gamemasters, it is possible to minimize meandering by recognizing its existence and moving to the next scene using leading questions. These could be akin to "Is there anything you want to do here before we move to the next scene?", giving the other players the opportunity to end the scene at their own pace, but signaling that you would like to move on.

In the anime 'Frieren: Beyond Journey's end', the concept of varying timespans is taken to a beautiful extreme. The episodes seamlessly transition between moment-to-moment slice of life moments to storytelling spanning centuries.

Slow Motion Fights

Many systems incorporate detailed procedures to resolve violent conflict. A famous example is the six second combat round of Dungeons & Dragons. With all players taking their turns separate from each other, and the gamemaster steering all NPCs individually, 6 seconds of gametime might last between 10 and 30 minutes of real time. In a campaign with many fights this will slow down the passage of game time quite significantly.

Depending on the game system, there is not much to be done to resolve the slow motion fights in principle. By adjusting the frequency of the fights and only using the official resolution mechanics in important moments, you can prevent the potential feeling of drag. It is not strictly necessary to play out each small confrontation within initiative order and 6 second turns. Instead, skill checks and challenges can be used to skip over the more redundant conflicts and "time-wasters".

Concrete Ticking Clocks

A lot of online tips emphasize how ticking clocks can prompt your players into action. Having the bad guy finishing the evil ritual in exactly 7 days is supposed to push the players to act swiftly. While this is certainly true in-game, it can also lead to a player driven slow motion phenomenon. The players might try to make the most out of every minute the characters have, grinding the effective usage of playtime and narrative momentum to a screeching halt.

On the flipside, not using ticking clocks might create a similar effect, though for different reasons, with players meandering aimlessly. Though it might seem like it, this is by no means an unsolvable situation. In fact, in this case, you can have your cake and eat it, too. By deploying a more flexible and vague time-pressure, you create the forward momentum of a ticking clock without the players going into a pace-breaking decision paralysis. Instead of having the evil ritual taking place in exactly 7 days, you could show the bad guys hunting for ingredients and preparing for an ominous, impending ritual, without giving out exact data. This way you can tighten and ease the bad guys grip over the adventurers schedule at your leisure.

Downsides of the Slow Motion Campaign

After describing the terminology and causes of the Slow Motion Campaign, let me get into why I think this phenomenon has a few downsides.

1. Sense of progress: The passage of time is a major indicator of progress. Just experiencing a change of seasons can have an impact on the perceived progress of the campaign.
2. Visibility of long-term consequences: After freeing the village from the grasp of the bandit king, the group will often want to press on to resolve the main conflict of the campaign. This will prevent them from seeing the long-term effects of their good influence and may cheapen a potentially great narrative resolution.
3. Suspension of disbelief: In a way, we all have to buy into the narrative in the table and overlook all of the little or larger inconsistencies for the sake of a collaborative experience. But seeing the characters developing from mere mercenaries into interdimensional heroes in the span of a couple of months does strain the goodwill that we are putting into the narrative.

The Benefits of Long Timespans

If you are able to display long timespans in your campaigns, there are a few narrative goals you might be able to reach:

1. Character development: Major changes within a character often take a lot more time then the average campaign covers. Having the campaign span over multiple decades will allow for a more natural feeling change in a characters behavior and goals.
2. Narrative Weight: Letting the players experience the consequences of their actions, without needing to rush to the next narrative beat, can give some space to reflect and reminisce about the events of the campaign. This way you can give more weights to the events of your sessions after the fact.
3. Worldbuilding: Long passages of time can warrant changes to the worldbuilding. Empires may rise or fall, technology might develop and magic might change. This creates a lot more wiggle-room for rule- or worldbuilding-related changes during a campaign and increases the feeling of a living world.

In 'Little Witch Academy', progress in the anime's story is displayed with changing seasons, giving the sensation of forward momentum and passage of time.

Types of time

We have talked a lot about my desire for campaigns to cover longer in-game timespans, but are yet to define what types of timespans are at our disposable in the first place. Allow me to present my definition of different timeframes in TTRPGs and how they can be used.

Table Time

The time spent playing the game is referred to as Table Time.

• Session: A Session refers to one continuous gathering of players to play the game. A Session usually lasts for 3 hours, but could be shorter or longer depending on your group's preferences.
• Scene: A Scene refers to a timeframe within a session that usually lasts for 30 minutes, but can be shorter or longer. It usually starts with the gamemaster setting the scene, the players making choices and the gamemaster narrating the consequences of these choices. It usually ends with a change of scenery or a shift in the status quo. This can be imagined like a scene in a movie, starting with the characters fleeing a monster and ending once they reach relative safety.

Game Time

Game Time defines the time that progresses inside of the fiction. For example, during 3 hours of Table Time, 3 weeks of Game Time might occur.

• Second by Second: This detailed account of events spans often only a few dozens seconds of Game Time, while lasting much longer in Table Time. This Timeframe is helpful in extremely important and quick sequences, like a shonan-style showdown between the group and a main antagonist. The main benefit of this method is to bathe in the glory of the moment, savoring every sweet detail. This is also its main drawback, as it can overstay its welcome quite quickly, essentially freezing time for everyone currently not acting.
• Realtime: This Timeframe is most commonly used in conversations between characters. The Game Time and Table Time are exactly equivalent. The main benefit is how natural and involved everyone can feel, since anybody can participate or jump in at their leisure. This is also the most natural way to roleplay, since Realtime is how we experience time in the real world as well. This has the danger of players overusing this Timeframe, since it is the most easy to master. Only having conversations can make the gameplay stale and unexciting quickly.
• Minute by Minute: This Timeframe is often used in conjunction with Realtime and Second by Second, and most commonly used for time sensitive, small scale action sequences. This might be a couple skirmishes with enemies before fighting their leader, stealthing through a castle or a chase sequence through the city. Its main benefit lies in the ability to gloss over boring details that would start to drag in a Second by Second portrayal of a scene. The players and gamemaster are may switch over to Real Time to have conversations.
• Hour by Hour: This Timeframe is a little more obscure and less often used. It is most useful in scenes which have urgency, but cover a lot of time as well, like searching for a missing child in a forest. Large scale battles, where there is a lot of action, but also a lot of time passing, are another example of an Hour by Hour approach. It is quite common to switch to Realtime for brief conversations.
• Day by Day: While traveling or spending a couple of days in the village to recover, it is not uncommon to tell the Day by Day account of what happened. This Timeframe is usually a bit more leisurely and employed when not a lot of resistance to the player character's plans is expected. Players might spend a day shopping, repairing their armor or studying spells.
• Week by Week: This Timeframe mostly works like Day by Day, just over a longer period of time. The main difference is the scale of what player characters might accomplish in a week, like building improvised fortifications or training a townsfolk militia.
• Month by Month: Similar to the Week by Week Timeframe, this one is just even longer. In this Timeframe, characters might travel to other countries, get into relationships, find a job or learn a new skill. They might observe crops growing and seasons changing.
• Year by Year: This Timeframe would most commonly be used to let time pass between adventures or enable travels of epic proportions around the whole world. In this time, characters might start families, master a craft and start observing change in the world.
• Decade by Decade. Like the Year by Year approach, this Timeframe would most commonly be used to let time pass between adventures. Wars might come and go, famines might occur and people might die of old age. The player character's village might transform into a bustling city or cease to exist. Families might be raised and new generations trained. Here, paying attention to a character's age becomes crucial.

Creating a Time-flexible Campaign

If you are convinced to make more use of longer and differing timespans, here are some tips and best practices I have found to be effective:

• Circumvent the Adventuring Day: Develop a toolbox to create tension and resource management without an overreliance on the adventuring day. Games like ICRPG or Daggerheart already assist you in this department, but even in Dungeons and Dragons it is possible to use the mechanics of the game with a time-flexible mindset.
• Time-flexible Ticking Clock: Focus on looming narrative threats with an implied, but not overstated element of a time sensitivity. Do not overuse the ticking clock, especially when giving an exact timespan.
• Fast Forward: Create impactful and relevant scenes and try to skip the filler. Whenever you get the feeling that a scene is meandering, try to move things along. by asking leading questions.
• Carefully choose your timespans: Ponder the most effective timespan for a given scene. An epic showdown with the main bad guy might warrant a second by second depiction, like a Dungeons and Dragons fight, while a travel montage might easily go with a day by day or even week by week accounting of time. Create additional variation in the gameplay by switching between different timespans.

In 'Daggerheart', many mechanics and abilities do not directly correlate with the passage of in-game time. Some features instead refer to a scene as a unit of time, interacting with the table time instead of the game time.

Conclusion

The Slow Motion Campaign is a phenomenon caused by a mixture meandering players, overreliance on ticking clocks and the Dungeons and Dragons adjacent concept of the adventuring day. This can lead to gameplay feeling slow and unfocused, while simultaneously not giving the campaign enough room to breathe.

To combat this, techniques from the Time-flexible Campaign can be used. By thoughtfully considering the usage of timespans and flexible ticking clocks, skipping filler through fast forwarding with leading questions and circumventing the adventuring day concept, you can master the concept of time to create campaigns that simultaneously feel faster in table time and last longer in game time.