Calculating the passage of time

[Caleb P.]

In my campaign(realistic-steampunk zombie-invasion survival) the amount of adventuring and combat that the party can do before having to stop to eat or sleep is very important but I don`t have anything except for plain common sense to estimate how long that is.

That being said I did devise a method for some activities that the party would definitely be able to do but would require multiple attempts --to take an example from my campaign so far breaking down a door with manhole cover(dang my players' ingenuity):

The gm picks a time value 'x', the player rolls against the skill/attribute and the margin of success multiplied by 'x' is the period of time that the task took. (still need to figure dealing with a failure on the roll)

I`m a new gm (that took a kinda hard route to that position, but more on that another time) so there might be something in the basic set I missed.

[Dragondog]

Some skills list how long it usually takes to attempt using it so if there's something that's close enough, you might have a starting point.

In GURPS, the larger the margin of success is, the better you did. So another way might be to establish how long it would normally take to do something and shorten that time based on margin of success.

[vicky_molokh]

For a GM:
1. Decide how long ONE ATTEMPT takes, and what the TDMs are. Decide whether to tell the players what the TDMs are.
2. Player decides how long to spend per attempt, i.e. whether the character rushes the task or takes her time - this modifies the roll as per Time Spent rules. Character spends the chosen time, player rolls. Success is successful.
3. On a failure, GM decides if repeated attempts are possible, and whether they get any extra TDMs.