Durations, part 2

In my recent game my players are exploring a dungeon. They have a large number of magical effects that they use. These effects are either 1 round, 1 minute, 10 minutes, or 1 hour per level. Fourth edition, like I mentioned before just has 1 round, until you save, while concentrating, or entire encounter durations.

So here are questions answered by durations. My players put on several magical effects that lasted 10 minutes per level, such as Resist Fire and Freedom of Movement. For a 15th level caster this is 2.5 hours. So you could assume that the entire adventure lasts under 2.5 hours, but when numerous battles are fought and many large rooms are searched it questions this assumption. The same question applies to spells that last 15 minutes. Is it on in the encounter after it is cast? What about the encounter after that? Another timing question is how long does it take to scan every room we have been in with some detect spell. At this can get very granular, for example my players have a Wand of Detect Secret Doors. Each charge lasts a minute so many charges are used to scan an entire complex...

I said before that in combat durations are easy to track. They also become meaningless to track after a certain level. Most combats go anywhere from 3 to 10 rounds. Most round per level spells will simply be on for the entire combat and not on for the next.

So how do we handle those questions I mentioned earlier. Well, what I am doing is just making guesses and imposing those on the players. After 8 or 9 encounters I said that there 10 minute per level spells were gone. But could you track time? Tracking time tends to be something very easy to do in computer games, but a pain in the butt for pen and paper games. So if you tracked time how would you do it?

Each battle and the after combat activities of picking up weapons, letting effects wear off, some healing spells can be roughly estimated to be 2 minutes. In some cases letting effects wear off will take longer such as a 10 minute paralysis. Searching a 50'x50' room takes 10 minutes. Travelling super cautiously (searching while moving) means 50' per minute. Just walking means about 200' per minute assuming a 20' movement rate. Stealthy travelling would be half normal speed. So you could track rough estimates in time by marking minutes. But that is one more thing to track for a likely already overtaxed DM.

Another solution is to turn those durations into 'number of encounter' durations. For instance a round per level spell turns into a 1 encounter spell. A minute per level spells would last 2 encounters. Ten minute per level spells would last 10 encounters. Hour per levels spells would just last the entire day. This is an easy way to handle things, but it reeks of inaccuracy. It completely ignores time in between which could be spent carefully exploring a dungeon or even travelling since the encounters might be during a wilderness trek. So I really don't like handling things this way.

I think, in general, if you track time using rough values using some easy to use method it is probably the the way to go. It may have benefits beyond spell durations such as tracking time related to some plot event. For example, the kidnapped king will be executed at high noon, the players have 2 hours to recuse him.

So for tracking I think a little javascript application with buttons like "Fight", "Search Small (20'x20') room", "Search Large (50'x50') room", "Travel 100'", and so on with a counter at the top. You would have a control to enter a spell and it's duration. You could then have then duration display whether it was still active. Also maybe a hidable log of all the events.