I just need a general idea of what people do with this. Mostly for fantasy worlds in the more mystical and fae worlds.
Do you just use real world dates and months ? Do you somehow big brain it and make your own dates and months systems? Or do you go 10XX of the past type of deal.
I'm contemplating this mostly for minor ass stuff like birthdates and general events and timelines in my stories.
I'm dying rn I hope you understand what I'm trying to get at.
Hmmm for fantasy stories I think maybe you could have a year they were born (eg year of the tiger) and maybe like for their day... it depends on how far in the past it is, what their calendar looks like etc etc.. for example, a harvest season or like, the type of moon is in the sky etc etc
I think for convenience sake you could just do real world dates but it's also fun to make up your own LOL
When trying to make months, days, and years for my world I tend to do a few things. First off, a year with an even amount of days is a lot better to plan than a year with an odd amount of days. Like Earth's calendar can be very complicated. I determine how many seasons I want, and then make it divisible by that number. I have found the best number of days in a week is 10 days, and then decide how long living I want my characters to be. If they have a lot of time, they tend to become proficient in years if they have short amount of time, they tend to value it a lot more. I personally like to do 50-60 days in a month, 10 months in a year, so a single year would have 600 days in a year. If you want to make a better world, I say look at it like a Homebrew setting in a TTRPG, you will need festivals, they don't have to be religious, but if you look at Earth's festivals, they tend to reflect what time of year, such as hunting festival or one to prepare for winter, for example, Halloween/Samhain/Dia de la Muatre/etc take place near the end of the year, they often reflect on those who've passed and protects from bad spirits or pleasing spirits/ancestors in some way. This makes sense because it is darker and often cooler/colder in the season and cold is often associated with death or spirituality (ghosts have cold spots, etc). So defining the culture of the world will help you define its calendar.
If I'm gonna be honest, if it's not a 'modern' setting then I take the video game route & make the year 20XX or something.
I do it because I'm lazy & don't want to overthink when people are born & when things happened
It REALLY depends on the type of story I'm writing, for me. I have one story that's a fantasy world that's Earth-like but still its own world; for that one I did big brain it and come up with a whole calendar...the years were more a total stab in the dark, but I have an actual conversion rate from Earth time into the story's calendar! The time scales themselves are based on the number 10 since that number has special importance in the setting (and also it was just easy to work with, being a nice round number 10 and all, lmao).
But then I have a story that takes place on a world that's REALLY not Earth-like at all. They have their own time system, but all of it is arbitrary and more just story fluff.
...Third and finally, I have a space opera story, and since there are multiple planets and all, I just threw up my hands and said there was a "galactic standard calendar" that's basically a slightly revised Earth calendar since humans colonized space in this setting, so the "common" calendar would be biased toward them. I haven't even thought about the date systems of the other planets because that just seems like such a headache ahahah