5e micro-bug? Spell duration "1 HR" not applied but "60 MIN" or "600 RND" works

[BronzeDodger]

Messing around with the Light cantrip. I was adding a couple of light effects on the PC sheet (alongside the default save for attempting to anchor the light on a creature).

Using hex codes to make novel colors (FFAA00 looks very flicker-y/soft light if you're experimenting...) when I realized that the duration was not being tracked on the combat tracker. When I poked around to other spells and tried them they all worked (showed the [D:X] in the effect on the CT).

Since I could not remember running into this ever in-game I got the idea to mess with the duration math. Lo and behold found a pattern:

Light cantrip has a 1 hour duration so:
Duration set as: 600 RND - works
Duration set as: 60 MIN - works
Duration set as: 1 HR - does not work

I went hunting and found that Charm Person is also a 1 hr duration - and when I added that to the PC sheet, set a target, and applied the effect, it did the same thing (as it was coded as "1 HR"). Changing it to 60 MIN again fixed it. Changing it to 8 HR has the same issue. Perchance is the "HR" entry no longer triggering a calc that adds itself to the CT? Or just me?

[Zacchaeus]

This is expected behaviour. The CT only deprecates rounds.

[BronzeDodger]

That's what strikes me as odd though.
60 MIN gets translated to 600 rounds when dropped onto the C.T.
1 HR gets ignored

So it recognizes that "MIN" is a reference it can translate to rounds, it doesn't for the same designation using "HR".

If "RND" worked, and the other two did not, that makes sense in a way (if C.T. only 'speaks' in rounds).
But the fact it can translate "MIN" into rounds but not hours is the odd part.

[bmos]

That was an intentional decision on the part of the ruleset creator.
It actually does check for HOUR and such in the code but intentionally doesn't use it.
If you don't like it, perhaps you should try out ClockAdjuster: https://www.fantasygrounds.com/forums/showthread.php?57561-Utility-Clock-Adjuster&p=608785&viewfull=1#post608785
It enables tracking of long-duration effects much more smoothly. This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb_W5wNN_6g) is out of date, but not too terribly so. It should at least get you started with the basics.

I think since the round counter does not decrement outside of combat the ruleset dev was trying to avoid really long durations of rounds like 600+.

[Moon Wizard]

Ignoring anything that has units in hours or days was a conscious decision, since the combat tracker only uses rounds. If they did convert, the numbers would generally end up too big for the fields as well as not being that relevant to the round-by-round tracking. It was assumed that the players and the GM would manage any effects longer than an hour between themselves, since tracking at that scale becomes very fluid in many games.

As @bmos noted, there is a community mod that goes for more long-term tracking behaviors.

Regards,
JPG

[BronzeDodger]

This all makes sense - the CT not being used beyond combat could see them just linger with six digit durations. It's rare enough that it's easy to recode it to recode a spell to MIN/RND if we decide we need a tracker visible to estimate duration - no extension needed :)