Doing your own calendar: is it worth it?

[Manic Typist]

I'm trying to decide if I want to institute my own calendar for my game, or more accurately.... a calendar imposed by a certain empire. On the one hand, it can be a great flavor text.... on the other hand, it might just end up confusing players, especially if the seasons and the calendar don't line up. I'm trying to decide if I should make the climate/ecology of the world different enough that this calendar could legitametly be used.... but if it is... well, you'll see the differences.

100 seconds- 1 minute.
10 minutes- 1 deca.
10 decas- 1 hour.
10 hours- 1 day.
10 days- 1 week.
10 weeks- 1 month.
10 months- 1 year.

Thoughts? I'm still digesting the fullness of the math myself. Part of what confused me, until I realized it, is that I kept thinking about it from my perspective (365 days to a year, 60 seconds to a minute, etc).

If my math was right (I've changed the numbers several times, so I'm a little dizzy) then 1 of these "Imperial" years equals roughly 3 normal years.

[Fitz]

I'd say the crucial thing to consider is whether or not your characters are supposed to know the calendar or not.

If they're foreigners, dealing with an unfamiliar calendar, then maybe the effort is justified for the purposes if local colour. If they're supposed to have grown up with this calendar, then the players' lack of familiarity with it will just create a dissonance that would make it that much harder to achieve character immersion.

Personally, I always just use the standard calendar we've all grown up with. It just makes life easier to be able to say "May 15th" and have everyone know what that means, rather than having to constantly explain that "Second-day of Floon-Tide" basically means May 15th.

[Captain Obvious]

Your math's about right. Your days are about 20% shorter than Earth days, too, for what it's worth. All this assuming a second is the same as a standard Earth second.

Speaking personally, though, I don't think I'd go so far changing things up just to have a metric calendar. Whenever I've rearranged things, I always assume a day and a year are about the same as in real life, and just tinker with weeks and months, and sometimes hours. It keeps things close enough to normal that the players don't get confused.

Although, there is some comedy potential there...

"The barmaid looks to be about 16 and..."
"Is she hot? I feel her up."
"Okay, her grandson is coming over to kick your ass."

[steamteck]

I did a new calender for my fantasy game when I started it some 30 years ago. It revolves around the cycles of the 8 moons of my world. It added a lot of flavor which everyone liked especially for magic rituals but no one cares about the little details much just the general feel. I didn't give names for every day of the week. I just named the months for campaign gods and then said 6 moons rising or 3 moons descending etc. I vary magic effects on the moon(goddess) which is ascendant. It probably ultimately depends on you players if its worth it. One of my guys actually can write in tolkien elvish so my group is very into it.

[Killer Shrike]

Depends on the group. Most groups, it just confuses and the effort wont be appreciated anyway. Some groups will really get in to it and even call you out on discrepancies.

Total judgment call on your part, but the fact that youre even asking would tempt me to say "No"....kind of a "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" thing.

[AliceTheOwl]

As a couple others have said, it depends on your group. In my current game, I'm the only one who brings up anything having to do with the calendar, and the players just trust that as much time has passed as I say. If they're the type to mark every single day down and carry a tally of days to keep track of everything, the calendar is well worth it.

[Maccabe]

It can be, I built a calendar of my own for a setting. I made up names for; each day of the week, each month of the year, and each holiday.

[Blue Jogger]

I specifically didn't make my own calendar for my fantasy world and then realized due to the way I did World Travel, it caused all worlds to not only have the same length of years, but have equinoxes and solstices line up on the same day.

[Markdoc]

I do make up my own calendars, but they are all variations on the 365 day year (partly because my game world is an alternate Earth, but mostly because I want to keep things simple). Players in general, don't care that much. The calendars in general serve merely as something to dot festivals at different times of the year.

cheers, Mark

[Manic Typist]

Yeah, I think I'll just rename things but keep the 365 day a year. I don't know if I will bother with leap year.... seems kind of fishy to me.

Thanks!

[StGrimblefig]

100 seconds- 1 minute.
10 minutes- 1 deca.
10 decas- 1 hour.
10 hours- 1 day.
10 days- 1 week.
10 weeks- 1 month.
10 months- 1 year.

Thoughts? I'm still digesting the fullness of the math myself. Part of what confused me, until I realized it, is that I kept thinking about it from my perspective (365 days to a year, 60 seconds to a minute, etc).
Is this based in any way on the so-called "French Revolutionary Metric Time" described here (http://zapatopi.net/metrictime/)? Or is it made up from scratch?

Yeah, I think I'll just rename things but keep the 365 day a year. I don't know if I will bother with leap year.... seems kind of fishy to me.
The reason we have leap years is that the time it takes the planet to orbit the sun (the length of a year) is not an exact multiple of the length of time it takes the planet to rotate about its axis (the length of a year). So, occasionally we have to make corrections to prevent New Year's day from slowly rotating through the seasons ("You kids have it easy. When I was a boy, New Years was in the dead of winter!"). There are other "official" corrections, as well, because the defined natural time units (hours, minutes, seconds, etc) do not quite line up perfectly with the period of rotation of the planet. The average Joe doesn't worry about leap seconds, however.

Now, in your own fantasy world, you can define it however you want. You could say that the local deity liked to have things nice and orderly, so he/she/it made things line up just so. Or the deity of chaos (or the hubris of a legendary magician) could interject an error factor into that, if you so desire.

Discovering why it is done that way it is could even be the subject of an adventure.

[Cancer]

As a guide for why cultures create calendars and what features calendars have had historically, I offer this (http://astro.nmsu.edu/~lhuber/leaphist.html) as suggested reading, in particular Part 1. (Unfortunately, it leaves out a discussion of the week.) After part 1 it gets into specifics of real-Earth calendars which are less relevant for you.

[Lucius]

I do make up my own calendars, but they are all variations on the 365 day year (partly because my game world is an alternate Earth, but mostly because I want to keep things simple). Players in general, don't care that much. The calendars in general serve merely as something to dot festivals at different times of the year.

cheers, Mark

Um, a 365 day year is simple?

What kind of mathematical base do you think in, that you find that "simple?"

Manic Typist:

What is your PURPOSE in creating a calender?

Lucius Alexander

The palindromedary wants to use a calender to drain pasta, but I don't think that would work...

[Nolgroth]

As a GM, I think doing a calendar is cool. Even if the players never really care, it makes me feel more in touch with the world I'm creating. Now "creating" a calendar could be as simple as renaming the months or what-not.

As a player, the calendar would be one of those nice reference pieces to have available, even if I didn't always use it.

Now if the cosmos played a part in the setting (sort of like the three moons in Dragonlance) then the calendar becomes even more important that just a piece of local color. Your character (and NPCs if you are GM) would probably need to know the date and what cosmic affects would have an impact for that date.

[Manic Typist]

Grimble- from scratch.

Cancer- thank you. Rep if it will let me.

Lucius- to make the game more fun and enjoyable, ultimately.

[Vondy]

I've found most players won't keep track of it, and that it doesn't enhance play. It works well for fiction - insofar is its not terribly different from our sidereal realities and isn't a major plot-point - but by and large we live in this world and forget the minutiae of fictional worlds unless we become total setting fan-boys. Even if you have a great setting and a great game, most players won't remember the subtle differences, just the ham-fisted ones. As a result, if you are going to have a "different calender" its probably best to have one with the same sidereal realities, but different names, or one that's very similar, but is even more regular than ours (i.e., a lunar calendar with 13 28 day months that jive exactly with a 364 day solar year, etc). Even changing the names without a little table they can reference (or dull names like "firstmonth") can be problematic for some players, and even then, half of them will lose the table.

Summary: Not Worth it.

[phookz]

100 seconds- 1 minute.
10 minutes- 1 deca.
10 decas- 1 hour.
10 hours- 1 day.
10 days- 1 week.
10 weeks- 1 month.
10 months- 1 year.

Thoughts? I'm still digesting the fullness of the math myself. Part of what confused me, until I realized it, is that I kept thinking about it from my perspective (365 days to a year, 60 seconds to a minute, etc).


Personally, it just doesn't feel very fantasy to me. Now, if the fantasy you're going for is a sci-fi inspired fantasy, maybe the metric system will work for it. When I think of the theme of fantasy, one thing that gives it that authentic flavor, IMO, is the wacky units and strange bases they use for measurements. A league for travel, which can be anywhere from 2-5 miles. Hell, the mile is a strange one itself, what with 5280 feet making it up, but too every day (at least, if you're still stuck in bas-ackwards USA anyways). 16 drams to the ounce, 16 ounces to the pound, 14 pounds to the stone. You get the idea. Where the hell they came up with the numbers is anyones guess, but the important thing, at least to me, is that it doesn't feel all nicely organized like a physics text. Days, weeks, months are no different in my opinion. I have no idea why we have the months we do, with strange numbers of days that don't seem to relate to any other numbers. But that is part of the feel of the whole thing.

That being said, YMMV. It's your game, so whatever feel you're going for is what matters. For me, I would not want everything to match up so perfectly.

[Markdoc]

Um, a 365 day year is simple?

What kind of mathematical base do you think in, that you find that "simple?"

It's simple, because all the people I play with find the concept easy to grasp, for some reason. :D

Also, if I use that as a base, and map standard earth-like seasons on a 365 day year, they're almost exactly like the ones I'm familiar with ... oooh! Eerie!

cheers, Mark

[Markdoc]

Hell, the mile is a strange one itself, what with 5280 feet making it up, but too every day (at least, if you're still stuck in bas-ackwards USA anyways).

Yep. I recently read Montaigne's diary of his tourist trip through medieval/renaissance Italy (a must-read for any medieval simulationist GM) and it's complicated because he gives all distances in miles - but it's not always clear when he's using French, German, or Swiss miles. And they were all different, by quite substantial margins.

cheers, Mark

[Cancer]

miles (http://www.herogames.com/forums/showthread.php?p=861998#post861998) and other historical data

[McCoy]

Sudden inspiration, I'm brainstorming here.

What about a calander of 7 days a week, 4 weeks a month, 13 months a year, each month named after a different diety.

Now if the planet is an alternate Earth, the Spring equinox, etc, is going to come 5 days earlier every four years. But rather than correcting for this, the mythos is that the gods have no fixed duties, but change jobs roughly every thirty years. So each god takes turns being the planting diety, the harvest diety, the rain god, the ice god, the summer/heat fire god.

"You kids today! You think you know what winter is? You're lucky Zurll is Lord of Winter now! Back when I was your age, Yaar was Lord of Winter, and he sent real bilzzards, not just snow flurries!"

[phookz]

"You kids today! You think you know what winter is? You're lucky Zurll is Lord of Winter now! Back when I was your age, Yaar was Lord of Winter, and he sent real bilzzards, not just snow flurries!"

Cool idea. Rep'd. :thumbup:

[Captain Obvious]

Sudden inspiration, I'm brainstorming here.

What about a calander of 7 days a week, 4 weeks a month, 13 months a year, each month named after a different diety.

Now if the planet is an alternate Earth, the Spring equinox, etc, is going to come 5 days earlier every four years. But rather than correcting for this, the mythos is that the gods have no fixed duties, but change jobs roughly every thirty years. So each god takes turns being the planting diety, the harvest diety, the rain god, the ice god, the summer/heat fire god.

"You kids today! You think you know what winter is? You're lucky Zurll is Lord of Winter now! Back when I was your age, Yaar was Lord of Winter, and he sent real bilzzards, not just snow flurries!"

That could make for some interesting astrological systems too.

"Zurll the Kind in Planting foretells a prosperous reign" or "Yaar the Angry will be in Rain this year, Your Highness. Time to fortify the dikes."

[Cancer]

Some of the associations with the Mayan calendar work along these lines.

[Shaddakim]

For a campaign I'm putting together, I've put together three calendars. The oldest one is the Mayan calendar straight up and was used by the ancient evil empire from way back in the day. They were overthrown and the druids put together a different calendar, attempting to eliminate the influence of the evil empire.

This second calendar named the years by matching up a series of 12 animal names and 5 element names, which was similar to the Mayan, but different (actually borrowed from the Chinese calendar if I remember correctly). They named the months after the holy trees of their religion and the days after the order things came into being (Godsday, Sunday, Moonday, etc.).

Later (after an invasion and occupancy), a third calendar was adopted. This third calendar kept the month and day names, but numbered the years instead of naming them. This is the calendar the PCs will be familiar with and generally corresponds to the real year with festival weeks marking the end of each season.

With this, I can introduce the older calendars as the PCs investigate old ruins and such. I can create things for the players to puzzle out and learn about the world as they go along without constantly working out the current season.

While it is easier to just use the Gregorian Calendar, it always seems jarring to me and breaks the suspension of disbelief. Admittedly, I did sit down and work out the orbital periods of the two moons (and their mass and distance from the planet) so when an NPC told the PCs they had to get reagents for a ritual quick or it would be hundreds of years before it could be done again, he was telling the actual facts. I like it when the actual numbers back up what I as the GM am telling the players.

Plus I had some down time at work and access to the internet to get the formulas. I hate being bored.

So yeah, I think it's worth it when you start the campaign. I wouldn't recommend doing it mid-stream, but it is worth doing.

[Mr_Yuck]

Ive found that if you differ too drastically from real world systems, it becomes too cumbersome. Players will then not use it and it is dropped and forgotten.

Someone here said great for starting your own world, no so hot to integrate into an exisitng campaign. I would agree with that assessment.

I use a calendar that is similar to some plublished works by that *OTHER* fantasy gaming company.

I use a system of 12 months consisting of 3 weeks per month. Each week is 10 days long and each month and day has a unique name. So, this makes 360 days. Now for the remaining 5 days, I threw in 5 holidays throughout the year that do not fall under a month at all. (eg Midsummer falls between what we call June and July). And once every 4 years there is an additional day thrown in that again does not fall under a month to calculate for leap year. This gives us a 365 day year with a 'day' being 24 hours like Earth. Again, I feel this makes the players more comfortable as there is not a complicated conversion system just to figure out what today's date is!

On a side note... A friend of mine once saw in Germany (I think) a metric clock that told time in a scale similar to yours. I think that metrics are very very cool and would love to have seen this.

I just don't think most players are as 'nerdy' as I may be!

[Lucius]

If you want to stick to "alternate earth" style (i.e. same facts of rotation and revolution etc.) -

One interesting thing about the Maya calender is that as I understand it, they did not need a leap year.

Instead of celebrating New Year at midnight every year as we do, they would do it at midnight, next year it would be halfway from midnight to noon, third year it would be noon, then halfway to midnight, and finally midnight again - adding a quarter day every year instead of adding a day every four years.

Lucius Alexander

House of the Palindromedary

[Markdoc]

If you want to stick to "alternate earth" style (i.e. same facts of rotation and revolution etc.) -

One interesting thing about the Maya calender is that as I understand it, they did not need a leap year.

Instead of celebrating New Year at midnight every year as we do, they would do it at midnight, next year it would be halfway from midnight to noon, third year it would be noon, then halfway to midnight, and finally midnight again - adding a quarter day every year instead of adding a day every four years.

That's a nice idea. I use multiple calendars in my game (basically each culture has one) and some other approaches are:

1. The messed-up option. Various cultures have years which are sligthly longer or shorter than 365 days - one culture has a 360 day calendar (not deliberately, but in the absence of a more evolved technology that's their best guess). As a result, their calendar gets more and more out of step with the actual year/seasons. (Lest anyone think this is too funky, the same thing happened historically: that's why January 1 2000, in Ethiopia falls in this coming September).

2. The leap year option. Some cultures do it the way we do it - some cultures add all the leap years into a longer calendar correction: the Dymerians, for example, have a 5 day festival every 20 years to correct their calendar and count in 20-year cycles.

3. No calendar as we would recognise it: the Eochail calandar doesn't have specific weeks the way we do - they have a year of 4 seasons, and the seasons are marked by astrologically-calculated festivals: so you have "the 33rd night of winter" or "14 nights before the midwinter festival" (they count nights rather than days). Since the days don't have to fit a specific written calendar, the year fluctuates in length slightly, making leap years largely academic.

This sort of thing helps give a different feel without requiring the players to keep multiple calendars in their head.

cheers, Mark

[Rapier]

For the most part, I try and avoid creating calendars and times.

It's cool backstory to have purple skies, 37 hour days, 18 months, 10 days in a week etc. But I've found that it tends to make it difficult on the players. We have a hard enough time converting to commonly used measurements to Heroic (1/4 mile is HOW many hexes again?), it think it can add a level of complexity that tends to stretch the players ability to remain in character.

I would imagine that after enough time, this would stop to be an issue.

[Curufea]

I do think creating your own calendar is worth it if you can make a cool looking prop like the wall calendar in Rome.

[Shaddakim]

I do think creating your own calendar is worth it if you can make a cool looking prop like the wall calendar in Rome.

Cool idea! I thought to have a map of the area on the wall during games, but missed putting up the calendar. Good call. I need to put that together soon while I have access to a plotter. :eg: