Having trouble changing particle material dynamically

I have a fog particle that spawns a mesh around the player and has a material that uses scene depth to make it look foggy. I want to edit the material so that the fog strength starts from 0 and works up to 15 or something.

I tried creating a dynamic material instance but that didn’t seem to work so I created a dynamic parameter which seems to work except it seems to use its own time rather than my timeline.

I think the issue has to do with the spawn time and use emitter time. Spawn time does nothing or gets the value at time of spawning and then stays at that value while use particle time just makes everything happen under a second.

How do I get this to work with the timeline? Anyone have a suggestion on how to do this better?

82601-fog1.jpg

82602-fog2.jpg