What mechanics or subsystems do you use regardless of the game you are running/playing?

hawkeyefan said:

I use Clocks a lot. Pretty much in any game I GM. They’re just an easy way to track things, simple to share, and unobtrusive to most systems. They also can easily turn a binary pass/fail situation into something more dynamic.

Click to expand...

I came here to post about this. Clocks are such a great mechanic; they're practical, functional, transparent; they allow for a push and pull dynamic and create a buildup of tension better than any game mechanic outside of Dread. Skill Challenges walked so that Clocks could run. I can't imagine GMing without them now.

sevenbastard said:

GO BACK TO TOWN CARD

Every player gets one card that they can play during the adventure to represent something they would have done in down time or would have remembered to bring with them on the adventure.

For example you might hand wave a week of down time and three weeks of travel by boat and then you get to the first room of the dungeon and everyone in the party realize they forgot to buy rope after you left it in the last dungeon. Spend a GBTT card and you have rope. Or maybe no one thought to ask in town about what that strange symbol was in the book you found. Use a GBTT card and you did.

Basically its a way to not punish players who forget to do important things that thier charachters would have remembered.

Click to expand...

I have never heard of this phrased in this way or simply but I really love this idea. Feels a lot like the way it's done in Blades in the Dark, and I love it. I often do this but I've never really thought to turn it into a game mechanic

JiffyPopTart said:

My games always equip the PCs with a SAP (Standard Adventuring Pack). It's contents are deliberately left unlisted, but instead it's considered to be "any mundane items a skilled adventurer would have on hand". It is automatically refilled and topped off at any settlement with goods available....and is part of the PCs living expenses.

It's been used for torches, rope, chalk, food, water, bedrolls, wedges and a hammer, paper and ink, and many many other items. Most recently some glue for a fake moustache.

Click to expand...

Yeah this is like the way Gear loads work in BitD and I've thought about ways to adapt that to streamline a lot of that minutia

Gradine said:

I came here to post about this. Clocks are such a great mechanic; they're practical, functional, transparent; they allow for a push and pull dynamic and create a buildup of tension better than any game mechanic outside of Dread. Skill Challenges walked so that Clocks could run. I can't imagine GMing without them now.

I have never heard of this phrased in this way or simply but I really love this idea. Feels a lot like the way it's done in Blades in the Dark, and I love it. I often do this but I've never really thought to turn it into a game mechanic

Click to expand...

I've seen the term Clocks used a bunch but never have played a game that used them for me to quite understand them.

Could you give me a couple sentence description of what a Clock might look like in a 5e session?

It sounds like a super useful tool!

Simple,

• All characters always have the same XP/Development/level.
• All characters use the same pool of attributes. Point buy if applicable. If it's rolled then you can use the results that any player rolled.

Everyone starts equal and stays equal.

JiffyPopTart said:

I've seen the term Clocks used a bunch but never have played a game that used them for me to quite understand them.

Could you give me a couple sentence description of what a Clock might look like in a 5e session?

It sounds like a super useful tool!

Click to expand...

It's a tool to track things happening in the world, usually without player interference.

In Monster of the Week, for instance, the monster has something they're trying to accomplish, and the clock periodically advances a step, with the end being something disastrous happening. Actions by the players can delay, stop or even reverse the clock in some games, but if they do nothing, stuff gets progressively worse.

You could use this for the armies of the evil overlord advancing on the heartland of the players' home nation, or an evil cult moving closer to successfully conducting a ritual, or even guards locking down a facility that PC thieves are trying to rob.

It's a pretty simple concept, but once you embed it into a game or an adventure, it becomes a very reliable tool to put pressure on the players without the GM necessarily having to juggle 10,000 things. They can just look at the clock info they wrote down ahead of time and see what the NPCs are doing next and decide what, if anything, the PCs might have done to alter that trajectory.

JiffyPopTart said:

I've seen the term Clocks used a bunch but never have played a game that used them for me to quite understand them.

Could you give me a couple sentence description of what a Clock might look like in a 5e session?

It sounds like a super useful tool!

Click to expand...

Its like skill challenges, but more general/simpler.


So like instead of a skill challenge where x successes are needed befor y failures, you have a progress clock which shows how fsr you are progressed in task X (to make them non binary) counting successes. Like counting ticks (knowing how many you need to finish)


Now to have some pressure you could also add a villain clock, which progresses after each skill check /big action by players. And if it is full then something bad happens, but its not sure what. (This clock would need more ticks to fill than the progress clock).


Its just a way to check a big progress by adding small events (successes or just time passing)

JiffyPopTart said:

I've seen the term Clocks used a bunch but never have played a game that used them for me to quite understand them.

Could you give me a couple sentence description of what a Clock might look like in a 5e session?

It sounds like a super useful tool!

Click to expand...

The foundational way to use Clocks is as a representation of either (a) "You Complete X" or (b) "This Thing Happens". As I learned of them through BitD my go to example would be as a heist. So you've got a Clock A, which is the players making progress toward their goal, and Clock B, which is whether the alarm for the guards is raised. In 5e terms, you would present obstacles, ask for skill checks, and whether or not the PCs succeed on the roll or not (and you can choose to use degrees of success/failure rather than a strict binary) determines how much of each/either clock you fill in.

The physical representation of the clock itself is like a Pie Chart. You're filling in wedges for each success/failure

Another way to incorporate these into 5e would be through downtime activities. If your PCs have downtime between adventures, you can have them roll to make progress on projects they might be working on, like researching or a spell or a demon lord's truename or crafting a magic weapon or gathering ingredients for an extremely powerful ritual.

Tigris said:

Its like skill challenges, but more general/simpler.


So like instead of a skill challenge where x successes are needed befor y failures, you have a progress clock which shows how fsr you are progressed in task X (to make them non binary) counting successes. Like counting ticks (knowing how many you need to finish)


Now to have some pressure you could also add a villain clock, which progresses after each skill check /big action by players. And if it is full then something bad happens, but its not sure what. (This clock would need more ticks to fill than the progress clock).


Its just a way to check a big progress by adding small events (successes or just time passing)

Click to expand...

Ahh...I see. That's not quite as specific of a game mechanic as I was picturing.

JiffyPopTart said:

Ahh...I see. That's not quite as specific of a game mechanic as I was picturing.

Click to expand...

In the case of Blades in the Dark, it is more integrated into play in a few ways. However, when I use it in many other games, it’s just as an easy progress tracker or countdown timer.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

It's a tool to track things happening in the world, usually without player interference.

In Monster of the Week, for instance, the monster has something they're trying to accomplish, and the clock periodically advances a step, with the end being something disastrous happening. Actions by the players can delay, stop or even reverse the clock in some games, but if they do nothing, stuff gets progressively worse.

You could use this for the armies of the evil overlord advancing on the heartland of the players' home nation, or an evil cult moving closer to successfully conducting a ritual, or even guards locking down a facility that PC thieves are trying to rob.

It's a pretty simple concept, but once you embed it into a game or an adventure, it becomes a very reliable tool to put pressure on the players without the GM necessarily having to juggle 10,000 things. They can just look at the clock info they wrote down ahead of time and see what the NPCs are doing next and decide what, if anything, the PCs might have done to alter that trajectory.

Click to expand...

Gradine said:

The foundational way to use Clocks is as a representation of either (a) "You Complete X" or (b) "This Thing Happens". As I learned of them through BitD my go to example would be as a heist. So you've got a Clock A, which is the players making progress toward their goal, and Clock B, which is whether the alarm for the guards is raised. In 5e terms, you would present obstacles, ask for skill checks, and whether or not the PCs succeed on the roll or not (and you can choose to use degrees of success/failure rather than a strict binary) determines how much of each/either clock you fill in.

The physical representation of the clock itself is like a Pie Chart. You're filling in wedges for each success/failure
View attachment 432359
Another way to incorporate these into 5e would be through downtime activities. If your PCs have downtime between adventures, you can have them roll to make progress on projects they might be working on, like researching or a spell or a demon lord's truename or crafting a magic weapon or gathering ingredients for an extremely powerful ritual.

Click to expand...

These are both good explanations, but one thing i think should be made clear is that ANYTHING can be a clock -- it is a way of determining when the next thing happens, even if that next thing is "the fight is over." Obviously, the most basic example is "the boss's HP is a clock" but literally in Ironsworn (for example) the difficulty of the antagonist encounter is just a clock. What is neat about this approach is that you can advance the "victory" clock without being forced to resort to causing HP damage. It gives players more options in that "tactical infinity" space.