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Message: <blockquote data-quote="hawkeyefan" data-source="post: 9851153" data-attributes="member: 6785785">Not really. The ticking of a clock should correspond to something in the fiction. It can just be descriptive, but it aligns with some progression of the situation. I mean… if the GM in a D&D game said something like “the guards perk up at the sound of your entrance, more alert now than they were before” would you describe that as nothing happens? Also, there’s no reason a Clock needs to only be temporary. Quite the opposite, I think… having Clocks be in play continuously, requiring attention from the players, is one of the ways to keep the pressure on them. Clocks should progress during Downtime… and may require the use of Downtime Actions to address them… which then taxes that resource.I think this is the kind of thing that is harder to perceive when first running this game. All the different systems feed into each other and should add up to a high pressure situation for the Crew, where the choice of how to spend DTAs and whether they spend coin for more all become meaningful decisions. I won’t say that I’ve never had nothing happen on a roll in BitD. I’ve done it. Usually because it becomes clear that the risk was very small… let’s say a 4-5 on a Controlled/Standard roll in a scene where the situation has been otherwise resolved. It might even have been better to not even call for a roll, but there seemed to be some level of risk, even if minor. But that should be an exception rather than the rule. Given the way the game works on a mechanical level, with the GM not rolling, player rolls are carrying a lot of weight. There should be a feeling when the dice are picked up that things won’t be the same after this roll, either for good or ill. So a GM for BitD has that as one of their primary roles… the need to come up with interesting complications. Yeah… this can be tough. And it takes some time to get comfortable with it and then improve at it. I've gotten very comfortable with letting the fictional situation dictate what kind of consequences I bring into play. it took me some time to do that… luckily, until I got better at it, the game has some solid ones to default to. Harm and Heat are great for that. I tended to rely too much on Harm early on… but that by no means made the game terrible or anything. It was just a little less dynamic than it might have been otherwise. Ticking a Clock is another default way to levy a consequence. Ticking a Clock shouldn’t feel like nothing happening, and if it does, I’d work to figure out why and see what I could do about it. If I found there was no way to correct this… some idiosyncratic trait shared by all the players that simply prevented them from seeing a Clock as a progressing situation… then I’d try to rely on Clocks less often.</blockquote>

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