Keeping in game time/date?

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If anyone uses the in game calendar to keep the in-game date/time, can you please give me a little guidance how you keep track? Do you manually adjust the time every few minutes minutes/hours/once a session/etc?

[Nickademus]

I did it for my last home-brew game. I would update it every hour of in-game time, but the game was largely wilderness exploration so the party was literally doing things that broke down into hours.

Some players really dislike games that are overly managed when the adventure type and flow doesn't need it. I would recommend looking at what you are trying to achieve with the adventure and use that as a gauge to how much attention you pay to the time of day. The plot and events such dictate a minimum amount of times you need to update the in-game date/time. More than that should serve a purpose that increases the fun of the game for the players otherwise it is a bad idea.

(Of course, giving us more details could result in a better answer.)

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(Of course, giving us more details could result in a better answer.)

One concern right now is to discourage asking for a long rest after every encounter that brings the low in health or spell slots. Another issue is realism as far as how long they spend (days) in a particular dungeon.

[damned]

One concern right now is to discourage asking for a long rest after every encounter that brings the low in health or spell slots. Another issue is realism as far as how long they spend (days) in a particular dungeon.

In older versions of D&D at least this was discouraged by the use of rolling once/hour on the wandering monsters table. If every time they take a long rest less than 8 hours after the previous one make it unpalatable by throwing one or more encounters at them. These encounters should not be enough to kill them (unless they are really annoying you) but should hammer home to them that spending longer than necessary underground is dangerous.

[Nickademus]

One concern right now is to discourage asking for a long rest after every encounter that brings the low in health or spell slots. Another issue is realism as far as how long they spend (days) in a particular dungeon.

Not an elegant solution, but definitely a deterrent to the frequent long rest requests. The PHB on p. 186 says at the end of the Long Rest section:

A character can't benefit from more than one long rest in a 24-hour period...
So with one long rest a day, it becomes a matter of how many days of rations did the party bring. Their gear becomes the gauge for how long they can delve a dungeon.

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Not an elegant solution, but definitely a deterrent to the frequent long rest requests. The PHB on p. 186 says at the end of the Long Rest section:

So with one long rest a day, it becomes a matter of how many days of rations did the party bring. Their gear becomes the gauge for how long they can delve a dungeon.

The 1 long rest per 24 hours is the basis of my question about keeping time in game.

[Nickademus]

I see. Not sure exactly what the question is then. If you keep the day broken down into vague times (morning, around noon, evening, twilight, night, early morning) then you don't need to worry about the time and the players will still know around when they can take their long rest.

[Zacchaeus]

You are the DM (I assume) so it is up to you whether the party can rest and more importantly where they can rest. A dungeon should not be a static thing; beasties shouldn't be sitting around waiting for the party to come and deal with them, so it doesn't make sense (to me anyway) that they should rest in the dungeon. So they should leave and fine somewhere safe to set up camp. And that means a journey which could lead to some encounters with possibly returning patrols or local fauna. And, of corse, once they've had their rest who's to say that the dungeon hasn't filled up again, only this time the inhabitants are alert and prepared for the party.

Given all of this and as Nickademus says one rest per 24 hours you shouldn't really need to sweat details like time unless it has some other particular significance.

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I see. Not sure exactly what the question is then. If you keep the day broken down into vague times (morning, around noon, evening, twilight, night, early morning) then you don't need to worry about the time and the players will still know around when they can take their long rest.

Thanks, this sort of "granularity" of time keeping is what I was looking for. Not worried about minutes or even hours, just general periods of the day.

[Nickademus]

Glad I could help.