I had a character who wanted to find out what the precise day and time every day was..... I thought "Ah! I could offer a large gold prize to any individual who can come up with a way tell the precise date and time on a selected spot on the surface".

It then occured to me we kind of already know the date and time..... though aren't we using some drow calender-does it match up with the surface? The drow calender is kind of arbitrary and has huge mistakes in it which are just never fixed because they have no stars or sun or moon to compare it to.....

*HOW* are we actually telling the date and time IG? What is the mechanism for this?

Should I just stray away from this issue IC, since it has some OOC issues involved?

Since the perception of time is relative anyways to the immediate surroundings and environment I suppose it's a rough estimate at best, but one that keeps everyone in Sanctuary more or less coordinated. Other than that I doubt the exact time is known, but that's just my opinion on it.

Sanctuary isn't using a drow calender, and nobody in the city knows what the precise time on the surface is.

Given Sanctuary's circumstances, dates are naturally approximate. You can go to the Town Hall in-game and look at the posting that the Herald puts up: that's how you're telling the date in-game. As for how the Herald determines the date? Well, water clocks, tides, candle timepieces, pendula, hourglasses, or magical divination could be involved (or some combination of the above) -- I'll let the mechanical engineers in the audience figure out other methods. There are ways to keep roughly accurate time even underground.

What is the method used to tell the actual time though? ARE we using hour glasses, pedula, time pieces, or divinination heh?

If it is say, hour glasses or pedula or even poor time pieces.... any inaccuracies, add up quickly. We might keep a day with "roughly" 24 hours, but the date compared to the date on the surface will shift enormously.

A waterclock would work very well.

http://physics.nist.gov/GenInt/Time/early.html

Check this URL out. The best is the chinese emperor's one. tell the time, day, date, month, etc. And keep track of who you're going to sleep with!

The drow society's calander would not go by the sun unless they kept it when they were cast out from the elves. They would measure their years by what's important to them, what affects their lives.

The egyptians measured their years by the seasonal flood of the nile, others measured their time by the moon.

The drow calender(at least according to salvatore) consists of casting a spell which gradually shows less and less light once a day...... the fact that it is re-cast by a mage every day, means there is a gap in time between the days which is different every day.... the drow calender has proboably lost a couple dozen decades in relation to the surface calender by now.

I thought the drow calendar was based on the Narbonell or whatever it's called? So I read in Daughter of the Drow.

That's what Vesa was talking about. It's a pillar in the middle of Menzo that has as spell cast on it every morning. It gives off heat which fades at a given rate to show the time of day to those with the appropriate sight.

Can you tell I just read Homeland? :)

Cast endure elements on yourself. As soon as it wears off, 24 hours have passed. Voila!

Do you think you can accuratley re-cast it the same time every day? How old is a drow city? A millenia? Those couple of minutes difference in the casting time daily add up, fast. Say your only off by a minute each day.... 365 minutes a year, that is 6 hours a year they mess up by, assuming the WORST it ever is, is a minute-it is proboably alot more.

After a century you loose an entire month..... so after a millenia you do actually loose almost a year. And this is assuming no strife ever occurs where the spell is not missed at all for a day, or a week or more, which seems likley in such a turbulent society.

Unless you're say a truly gifted genius of a drow wizard, and using your incredible genius-you actually cast the spell to renew the pillar when the light reaches an exact spot you marked on the pillar. So you don't lose anything, at all, ever or even if you do. You just adjust the mark slightly for the next morning.

If only we had the genius of these drow, we too could figure out how to keep time underground without losing entire decades by forgetting to wind our pillar magically.

There is always the Calculating Locking Octal-rotory Counterweighted Kinetics System used in all gnomish houses to tell the time.

There are a large variety of time telling devices, both mechanical and magical.

I thought long and hard about how my character deals with time and I've come to the conclusion to totally do away with it.

as far as he is concerend it is always night. regardless of the exact time for e.g he will always greet people with a "good evening"

Any other times are relative from the current point in time, ie i will meet you in two hours from NOW. not at 6pm or whatever the faerun equivalent is

well that is how i find it works best for me