Over the course of the game, time is presumed to pass as it would in the normal world - Tuesday follows Monday, month after month, and so on. However, there's no need to roleplay out every second ticking away. There's a huge difference between the speeds at which "game" time and real time pass. Over a four-hour game session, a week, month or even year might pass in the setting of the game - or the entire session might be spent detailing the events of an action-packed half-hour. You can play out a combat turn by turn, taking it in three-second increments, or you can let months pass away in a few minutes of real time. (The passage of time without players taking any real actions is called "downtime"; learning to use this little trick can help the pacing of your game immensely.)
To help maintain a sense of the passage of time without resorting to tedious charts and the like, Vampire uses six basic units to describe game time:
- Turn - The amount of time you need to take a fairly simple action; this can range anywhere from three seconds to three minutes, depending on the pace of the current scene.
- Scene - Like the basic division of plays and movies, a scene is a compact period of action and interaction that takes place in a single location. This could be the storming of a Tremere chantry, or a moonlit conversation on a park bench. There are exactly as many turns in a scene as the scene requires - there might not even be any turns if the scene consists of nothing but dialogue and character interaction.
- Chapter - An independent part of a story, virtually always played out in one game session. It consists of a number of scenes interconnected by downtime (see below); essentially, like a chapter in a novel or an act in a play.
- Story - A full tale, complete with introduction, rising action and climax. Some stories can take several chapters to complete; others can be finished in one.
- Chronicle - A series of stories connected by the characters themselves and their ongoing narrative, possibly even by a common theme or overarching plot.
- Downtime - Time that is "glossed over" with description rather than played out turn by turn or scene by scene. If the Storyteller says, "You wait in the foyer for four hours before the prince's ghoul summons you," rather than actually letting the characters play out their wait, the Storyteller is considered to be invoking downtime. Downtime allows trivial or tedious passages of time to be played through quickly.
