How many 5 year olds could you defeat?

[A Black Falcon]

Yeah, I love that. I guess it applies to PC RPGs as well.

As a general rule, you ONLY need to worry about time if an actual timer appears in the corner of the screen, or to a lesser extent, if they say you only have a specifically stated amount of time which can actually reasonably occur in-game.

I don't know about the latter (unless you just mean the former without an onscreen timer all the time)... generally, unless they specifically tell you there's a time limit (like in OoT where "you have X time to get this to place Y" and when time runs out it tells you so), you're free to do whatever you want and take as long as you wish.