OK. I have to start a new post about this one. It is kinda, sorta related to Day/Night Cycles and posts about Long Rests and Time Sensitive Events and Dialogue at Camps and all that jazz.
I played straight through, no Long Rests, all the way up through the entire Druid's Grove, Harpies battle and all and the Druid Tunnels and all. Spoke to Nettie and Kahga and Zevlor and did all the things. After the Harpies, I decided my party had had enough. They were out of spells and short rests and the Harpies had left them in pretty bad shape. I no longer could put off the Long Rest.
Finding the camp dialogue was triggered. Then Raphael. Then I spoke to my companions and did all the aftermath of Raphael's meeting dialogues. I had done some tadpole things, so after all this, the first tadpole moment was triggered. "Where are you?"
I woke up and checked my Dialogue Log. Day 1 had ended at some point when I had been in the Druid's Grove main headquarters after confronting Kahga for the first time. After speaking with Rath and Kahga where Kahga says, "Admit it. You think I'm a monster" Day 1 ended according to the Log. I did not Long Rest at all, but Day 1, according to the Log, ended anyway. Day 2 started with some random convo with one of the guys in the main headquarters who said something about having too many outsiders and I should leave asap.
I also left Lae'zel behind at the cage, not letting her out. Next day, she was gone. I encountered Ed and his siblings, but I didn't trigger their dialogue immediately but ran about doing other things. By the time I got back to them, they were gone. No dialogue occurred and they were simply altogether gone. The parasite scene still occurred when I searched Ed, but not the siblings.
So my theories:
1. Larian is going to implement some semblance of time via the Dialogue Log and via Long Rests. So there may be time sensitive events that they just haven't developed all the way through yet. Looks like they might be developing something, though, already.
2. The Dialogue Log does not sync up with your Long Rests, but they may fix that later.
3. The Dialogue Log is not minute for minute between RL and Faerun. I pulled up the Day 1 log and found that at 8:40, Myrnath, Psionic Presence, Vexir, Narrator dialogue occurred on the nautiloid. 9:02, met Lae'zel. 9:48, encountered Shadowheart trapped in her pod. Skip down, crashed on the beach at 11:01. From the time I landed on the beach to the time I met Astarion, over an hour and 17 minutes of time in Faerun transpired. So what took me maybe 10 minutes to play supposedly took an hour and 17 minutes in the game world.
So, Larian, you already have a clock system in place. All you need to do is fix it. Every minute I'm running around on the world map should be 1 minutes in Faerun. When in combat, time should virtually stop. 10 rounds should roughly be a minute of time. Short rest should push the clock forward 1 hour. End Day just fast forwards you to camp that night, say 20:00.
Also, if you are going to make it so that the crash on the beach scene is just at the break of dawn, the Dialogue Log should not say 11:01. It should be more like 6:01 or something like that so that as I'm crashing on the beach the sun is just rising.
If you don't want to implement Nighttime play, you can't have your clock moving as fast as it does now. I was in the Dank Crypt by 15:33 of Day 1 and at the Druid's Grove by 20:00. Just after speaking with Kahga, I was at 24:00. So if the clock on the Dialogue Log is correct, then it should have been nighttime the entire time I was roaming through the Grove talking to people. I also didn't spend 4 hours in the Grove talking to people.
This said, these are REALLY minor details that few will notice. Still, all the elements of there, and that gives me hope that Larian has something planned to give players like me what we're asking for: A Real Time Clock and maybe some semblance of time and time sensitive events.
