I was having a conversation with a friend and realized that I am usually rather obsessed with time as I write my character's stories, but do they actually know what time it is? I think that in general, my characters do not know what time it is. Some of them don't even care.

I think some PC players can say "well I've got this mod that adds clocks" or whatever, so we can assume that the characters of these players have the possibility of knowing what hour, day, minute (etc.) it is. but I started on consoles, and do not have any clocks even in my PC games.

And so as I was having that conversation with my friend, it sort of forced me to think about this. It forced me to consider this.

I have one character who is doing Thieves Guild on Xbox. Occasionally, he will have to be somewhere 'some time around midnight', but other than this he doesn't really have much obsession with time. Come and think of it, a lot of mine will (let's say) go to a shop in the morning, get there, and realize they can't get in the shop because it's too early. They definitely don't bother to check if it's 8:00 AM or whatever.

And my elf archer spends lot of time in the wilderness. She could care less about the actual hour, but she otherwise relies on shadows to see approximately what time it is (if it's morning or noon or afternoon, evening or night) but she doesn't do any quests that require her to be exact with time. Most of her quests are 'fetch this item' or 'find the last two Ayleid statues', and these type of quests don't demand exactitude.

Come and think of it, only one of them (Dyan phor a'Cauz, my Knights of the Nine paladin) cared what day it was. This was mostly because she liked to go to chapel on Sundas. She was obsessed with going to the chapel on Sundas.

My friend likes to RP that if his character is carrying an hourglass, that this is a magical device which tells time. But none of mine carry magical time pieces. I really do believe they haven't got much clue about time.

My characters inherit my disregard for time. The passing of hours in the game world means almost nothing to me. I'm kind of, sort of, almost maybe, vaguely aware, in a way, whether it's daytime or nighttime. But that's about it. I never know whether it's noon or afternoon or late morning or early evening, or what. I'm also completely unaware of what day it is.

If you were to go full-on medieval, it could get even worse than that, Renee. Our 24-hour day, running from midnight to midnight with fixed-length hours, globally standardised, is pretty modern. Medieval hours only covered daylight usually and divided it into 12 parts. That, of course, meant that depending on the time of year, the length of an hour was variable. And then there's local time - in Britain it wasn't until the coming of the railways in the 19th century that different towns synchronised their clocks. So how come the time in Chorrol is the same as that in Cheydinhal? (Actually, looking at the map of Nirn, even by modern standards they should be in different time zones. But that's another matter...)

As for minutes, seconds... Ah well, for us there is at least one simple straightforward unit of time apparent to everyone - well, everyone whose sky isn't clouded over - the month. We can all see when the Moon is full or half (the time between the two gives you the basis for defining a week, though that's a more notional unit). Hence all those lunar calendars. But of course that lunar simplicity isn't available to Nirners...

So - it's got to be magick. (Terry Pratchett has his characters tell the time by carrying round little speaking clocks. But they're speaking clocks because they're inhabited by little put-upon time demons. Come to think of it he never explains how they know the time. Perhaps they have even smaller boxes and so on. Turtles all the way down...)

That's right, t-C. I guess I never thought of it that way, but as a medievally-inspired game (arguably) it would be true that most people wouldn't really be so accurate about time in the game, which is similar to the way things were on Earth. Clocks were around in the Middle Ages / Renaissance, but I imagine most folks (peasants and such) would not have access to these. They'd be owned by some nobility & clergy members, perhaps. Alchemists. Not very popular, though.

Yes indeed. Water clocks to start with - they go back to the Ancient Egyptians - but you do get actual medieval clockwork starting in the 14th century (just about the start of the Renaissance, admittedly) - you're right, both would be very rare. A cheaper way of telling time was with graduated candles, but they would have been more costly than usual candles because they had to be more uniform.

You know, after typing that bit about the months, I wondered why on Nirn their months are at all like ours. With two moons you could have a very sophisticated calendar, two kinds of months resonating with each other. That, of course, assumes that they move in regular ways. But there is a bunch of lore that says they are actually the Hearts of Lorkhan (not to speak of the thankfully non-canonical notion that the stars are holes in the sky and that no-one can actually see the true sky in Mundus because their minds cannot absorb the reality. I choose to regard just about all of this as complete tosh.) So maybe their motions and phases are completely chaotic.

On the other hand, there is the Orrery. It's a bit peculiar, but it does imply predictable periodic motion. And the necromancers have that repeating thing with the Necromancer's Moon. Now that's weekly, but weeks are related to months, our Moon's four quarters. But which moon are they going by?

I have one character who tells the time by his stomach. He thinks in terms of ‘before lunch’ and ‘between breakfasts.’ The others tend to look at the sky, so mid-day and sunset are the reference points.

Guard dialog gives us a number of a certain part of the day’s watch, such as “Nine of the evening watch and all is well.” I’ve always thought they meant nine bells referring to chapel bells ringing the hours rather than nine o’clock.

Hmm, now I can’t remember if chapel bells are from a mod or not. Does everyone hear the bells?

Very good points. But anyway, yes, there are vanilla bells that are scripted to ring the hours. Here's the script:

You can see why they are not too noticeable, you have to be in the same cell as the belltower to hear them. In cities like Cyrodiil's, you should be able to hear them all over town. I think a mod called Better Bell Sounds makes them more noticeable, that's likely what you're thinking of. I haven't looked at its scripting though. It's definitely louder.

But, yes, church bells are a significant way of making sure that everyone is, ahem, singing from the same hymn book with regard to time. In fact the same is true with regard to town hall clocks and suchlike, useful to people without their own timekeeping devices right into the 20th century. (Even more important to the post-Industrial Revolution world, synchronised timekeeping.)

tegeus-Cromis: The calendar system (the way months are set up) began with TES 1: Arena. In that game they weren't trying to get super-complex with anything, they just wanted some early success (ANY success), and so the similarity between Tamriel's months and ours was simply a way to make everything more convenient. Because some quests in that early game do depend on time. You'll have (let's say) 10 days to get from one town to another, for instance, to try to locate an (let's say) escaped prisoner. If you got there in 11 days instead of 10, guess what?

Arena only has one moon, instead of two. I wonder when the two-moon orbiting began?

One thing I find interesting though is the way http://uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Calendar. Morrowind hasn't even got a Morning Star according to that page!

GRITS: Yes we can hear chapel bells in the vanilla game, however, they do not count the number of hours by bonging (let's say) nine times in a row if it's nine o'clock. I know this because one day I sat there and listened. The info t-C just provided seems to contradict what I'm saying, but I have yet to hear these bells toll an exact number of times, corresponding with whatever the game-hour is.

Oh, interesting. I only go as far back as Morrowind, so wasn't aware that the planet had acquired an extra moon (but ... that's no moon!). Somehow I'd forgotten the calendar clash with Morrowind, though - oh, those Dunmer have their own funny little ways.

WRT bells, no, no contradiction, you're absolutely right. (I should have said: 'ring on the hours'). There is just one bell sound that repeats every hour - that PlaySound3d AMBBellTower command. That's it. You've actually got a mod idea there, having the chapel bells ring the hours, all you need is the sounds, the script changes are obvious. (Unless someone's done it already, there're so many forgotten mods out there, you never know.)

*cough* hourglass *cough*

But yes, there's the predictable sunrise and sunset times, and the chapel bells that sound every hour at least if you're in a city. If my characters are dungeon-diving then they're usually pretty clueless but if they're outdoors or in town then they're very aware of what time it is. And unless it's night time you can generally tell approximately what time it is by the sun and shadows, which is what people have done for hundreds of thousands of years. If you supplement that with an hourly marker like a bell or a town crier, it's not that complicated.

Well, Renee's OP was more about how precise the characters' reading of time is, not that they didn't have some idea. But I do agree the sun does serve very well - provided I don't have to set my alarm clock (all too rare at the moment), I try not to look at a timepiece first thing in the morning - I have a game of guessing at the time from the shadows and sun. I'm usually within 15 minutes, but then I know the view from my front window pretty well. In a strange place I can get by, but not with that level of precision.

Apart from cloudy weather, the big caveat is indeed night time - which is why hours were originally hours of daytime. You could, if well versed, get the night time from the position of the stars (well, in RL, not sure about Nirn). But you're right that if you have the town watch turning an hourglass and ringing a bell or calling the time out, you don't need that - provided you're not a country dweller.

Lothran carries an hourglass around in case he wants to know when stores will open, Otherwise I think I care more about that than he does

How on Nirn does his hourglass work when it's bouncing around in his pack with 47 potions, a big glob of troll fat, and an enchanted Colovian Fur Helm?

C′mon. That′s like asking how does the big, fat Santa Claus get down the narrow chimney with a big bag of presents?

Magic!!

I thought that was what the troll fat was for.

Not only do they move in irregular ways, but the phases seem to be all out of whak. I have seen the moons in full phase directly overhead at sunrise/sunset, which could not happen in the real world. A full moon would be on the opposite horizon at sunrise/sunset and any moon that was directly over head at sunrise/sunset would have to be first or last quarter.

Regarding keeping track of time, vendors have schedules, so my characters pay some attention to time, but like Pseron, both me and my characters loose track of time pretty easily. That's one reason I like mods like BPN, because it reminds my character it is time to eat/sleep/drink. If I have to rely on my own internal clock to remember those things, my characters end up going unbelievable amounts of time without doing thsoe things and it starts breaking immersion for me. But with that mod, my character can stay up all night because they are immersed in an adventure, but, just like me, at some point they will be forced to sleep.

This friend of yours is a weird one, how can he be so dumb to imagine that hourglasses actually tell time?

Yeah, that's how I play. As long as my characters don't acquire an hourglass, they don't know exact time. I imagine that some public places like shops & inns have hourglasses where they can check time. Hourglasses also don't function deep underground or in certain areas like worlds of Oblivion. It's actually easy to roleplay this in Oblivion because hourglasses are an actual object but they don't exist in MW and SK. There I have to implement different methods.

Interesting thing about the regular months in spite of crazy moons (poincare's recurrence theorem notwithstanding): I think they actually tried to fix this in Redguard with the Constellation lore. Because they decided that there are twelve of them, and that their seasons are decided by the sun in relation to the stars, nothing to do with the moons. This is explained in the Morrowind-onwards version of http://uesp.net/wiki/Lore:The_Firmament. Sure, they do say that the seasons are "approximately" one month, but I interpret that as meaning "we have standarized the length of a month, but what it originally comes from is the seasons of the constellations". Khajiit lore disputes this, I think, but then Khajiit are generally hard to agree with anyway.

Yes, the TES constellations (including the fact that there are 12 of them roughly a month each season) are very earthly in inspiration, but it makes more sense than getting 12 totally regular phases out of the lunar system, in my view (not that I'm a physicist).

Also, for short length timekeeping: it may be a little metagamey, but mages can definitely tell time accurately in the third era, given that you can manufacture a spell that lasts exactly x seconds. Oddly, you can even tell time by mixing plants together. I love the idea of every establishment having a locked-up imp or something that has a "light one point and make slightly angry for 1 hour on self" potion dispensed regularly onto it.

My characters play on default time, so the sun (Magnus) comes up, and then around midday the light gets too bright and harsh, then the sun goes back down - don’t know how long that takes, probably an hour. Then it gets dark and out come the lanterns until the sun starts up again. That’s how my characters tell time - more or less by the day-night cycle, not by hours. So time is never of much importance to them. Rainy days are like night and all track of time is lost. If they go to town and the stores are closed they press the wait button to make them open - after all, most of them are Arch Mage so why not put some of that magical power to use. They also do that to change the position of the sun in order to change the lighting for a screenshot. My main character, Baa, has waited 13,371 hours during her five, real world, years of life.

Agreed. You know, all that used to irritate me so much I was contemplating how to fix it (I might also even have ended up with distances and approximate masses too), but a lot of people go with the Lorkhan's Heart flim-flam and all that, so it might not be welcome. Plus, I now doubt it is fixable. (A lot of lore is just an excuse for game design sloppiness IMO.)

I think they'd have to be orbiting rather fast for a Poincaré recurrence state to dictate months of our length (maybe Phobos and Deimos might manage it WRT Mars). I think you would have three different words for month, actually - month[moon 1], month[moon 2] and a 'grand month', the period between resets, a precise alignment relative to (say) the Sun. No doubt all kinds of magickal stuff would happen then...

I didn't know the constellation stuff went back to Redguard, sadly I've never played it. Interestingly, Renee upthread says that Arena had only one moon, so they must also have created the whole problem with Redguard/Battlespire. But they could also have solved the problem by giving Masser the same period as our Moon - dictating the months - and creating a minor Secundus month like I just said. This would be an awful lot more fun, actually, in terms of scripting strange recurrent events.

Nice one, those are fine Terry Pratchett solutions to short-period timing you've got there. I'm not sure the 'drinkme and see how long it takes to wear off' is necessarily magickal though, I suspect I fetch myself coffee at clockwork intervals, but I've never timed it.

EDIT: Yay! I'm not sure, but I kindof think there is actually a way of doing convincing moon phases, thanks to OBSE, won't work in vanilla. Didn't know much about that before, will have to run some tests. If it could be done, it wouldn't just be cosmetic, it has some roleplaying value - for example characters could ignore the stated calendar and rely on their own lunar reckonings.

Don't mess with the moon phases! You'll change all the Khajiit to Ohmes, and we won't be able to tell them apart from Bosmers!