How can I track time in non-combat situations? I'm currently running Tomb of Annihilation (ToA) and I know later in the adventure I'll need a way to keep track of how long the party has been exploring (this is for in the tomb itself).
Last time I played this as a player our DM didn't have much of a way of keeping time which led to us (admittedly more me than the other player) constantly asking if it had been long enough for the party to take another long rest. This became even worse when my Warlock opted to not rest with the rest of the party before what she suspected was a big fight for the sake of not losing her 17 temp HP.
I'm hoping to avoid situations like the party asking when they can take another long rest by having some standardized way of keeping track of time when not in combat in a way the players can also keep track of. I thought about simply keeping initiative the whole time but that would be a highly impractical option considering that would be 14,400 rounds by which time they could explore the entire dungeon most likely.
Best Answer
The two most important things I've found are: 1. the current time needs to be known to everyone, and 2. it should require minimum effort. A clock does that for me.
When I track time I've found the easiest way is to use a clock (I have an alarm clock, but I've just used a phone before too). I set it to midnight to start, just so it's easiest to know how long has passed. I tell the party "Every 15 minutes in real time is 1 hour in game", pause the clock when combat starts (combats are typically so short ingame that they don't affect time, but they can take a lot of real world time), and skip the timer forward when something like travel or long rests happen.
With an average 4 hour session, that means there's around 16 hours of gameplay. If you include the long rest, that's 24 hours. This always worked out nicely for me. You may have to adjust the exact rate at which time flows in your game, I would suggest it's best to use 10/15/20/30 minutes per hour to make it easily divisible.
In the past I've also used a manually incrementing timer, and tokens. As the DM I wait an appropriate amount of time, then increment the timer/add a token to indicate that an hour has passed. In the back end I'm using a clock anyway, so I eventually scrapped that method.
I also wrote a python program to display the game time (just a clock that ticks up 4 times per second, starts at an arbitrary time, and has a pause function), but I found that people are happy to use a normal clock, 1 hour per 15 minutes is simple math.