If you’ve cut your teeth on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, grew up with OD&D, are revisiting old school gaming styles via a retroclone on Fantasy Grounds, or as part of an experiment in playing through the origins of the hobby, one of the things you pick up on real fast is that time is a major component of the game’s tension: it takes time to search for secret doors, discover hidden treasure, disable traps, and map dungeons…and all that time taken means more wandering monster rolls! Light source durations, spell durations, and all sorts of other mechanics impact this aspect of the game, so it’s no surprise there are a lot of “time trackers” out there.

Now there’s one for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition! More info below.

The best older-edition tracker in my opinion is Richard J. LeBlanc, Jr./New Big Dragon Games’ Exploration Time Tracker for 0E/BX/1E. With Richard’s permission I’ve created one for my Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition games that similarly notes important time-based mechanics while updating it to align with the Forgotten Realms’ system of time-keeping, organizing it into a tenday tracker (FR’s version of a week).

Click here to view and download the Time Tracker for Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition (PDF).

You’ll note that under the Light Sources (PHB Ch. 5) section, the light sources note their areas of light. B stands for bright light and D stands for dim light; most light sources have an area of bright light and then an extending area of dim light, which is always noted as +X’; thus, a torch has bright light out to 20 feet and dim light extending an additional 20 feet.

Useful abbreviations for making notes on the sheet:

  • E = random encounter roll
  • T = torch
  • L = lantern
  • B = bullseye lantern
  • S(abbrev.) = spell

You might write something like “S(enh abil)” for enhance ability or “S(light)” or even just LS for light spell if you find yourself tracking that more often than other spells. Whatever works for you.

Here’s an example of it in use:

D&D 5E Time Tracker example

D&D 5E Time Tracker example

You can see that the “10-slot” tracker on the side is used to track some rounds of either combat or quick interaction-based actions when necessary. Meanwhile, one whole pie and two slices are filled in, denoting 1 hour and 20 minutes. The “T” designation notes that a torch will expire when that pie is filled in. The “E” designation at the end of each 6-hour block shows when I would roll for random encounters; this frequency is set by the adventure we are currently playing.

Thanks again to New Big Dragon Games for their time tracker, which I’ve used in all of my recent AD&D and OD&D games!

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