Thoughts on countdowns

[Morrus]

Would having a Genre savvy villain set the bomb to blow on 5 seconds (aka 2 dice) be a real jerk move???

Hah!

Well, he doesn't know how many turns it'll take to deplete down to 2 dice. It might be 5 seconds, it might be 20 minutes! So his genre-savviness doesn't help him much!

Though I suppose you could look at it like the villain knows, but the GM and the players don't.

 

[Nagol]

Would having a Genre savvy villain set the bomb to blow on 5 seconds (aka 2 dice) be a real jerk move???

Dr. Despicable, an old CHAMPIONS villain I used, had bombs that loudly called out their countdown sequence: "I'm a 12-second bomb! I'm and 11-second bomb!... etc." and then detonate with one to six seconds remaining.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Hah!

Well, he doesn't know how many turns it'll take to deplete down to 2 dice. It might be 5 seconds, it might be 20 minutes! So his genre-savviness doesn't help him much!

Though I suppose you could look at it like the villain knows, but the GM and the players don't.

I meant 5 seconds left on the clock... so you have 8 dice and 10 mins on the clock, as the dice go down I describe the timer dropping, when there are 2 dice left I say "Boom"
the players look at me "No one die left on the timer..."
"sorry the villain set the bomb to blow at 00:05 instead of 00:00"

 

[MarkB]

It might be interesting to randomise the effects caused by the countdown in some situations. For instance, a fire spreading through a spaceship's engine room might have a chance to take out any one of a number of different systems each time it spreads further.

Some countdowns may be something of a death-spiral, with the situation growing harder to combat as it progresses, increasing the difficulty level of replenishing the dice pool each time it shrinks.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

It might be interesting to randomise the effects caused by the countdown in some situations. For instance, a fire spreading through a spaceship's engine room might have a chance to take out any one of a number of different systems each time it spreads further.

Some countdowns may be something of a death-spiral, with the situation growing harder to combat as it progresses, increasing the difficulty level of replenishing the dice pool each time it shrinks.

I am totally imagining the reasons to use this...

How much oxygen does a fire eat up on a ship?

How long until the NPC can get a teleporter lock to get you out of a fire fight?

When does that Calvary arrive?

How long before the Nebula takes your shields down?

How long before the radiation becomes lethal?

 

[GMMichael]

I wonder - has anybody had chance to try the countdown mechanic yet?

I'll squeeze it into the next game I play, which might very well be a Plusfinder game.
[MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION]: have you thought about dubbing it the "Random Countdown" mechanic? Sure, it could be used for normal countdowns, but it really shines as a countdown for which almost no one knows the actual time remaining.

The ticking time-bomb: not the best use for this mechanic. The cliche' for these requires everyone to know exactly how much time is left.

Onset of radiation poisoning: an excellent use of the mechanic. Would hardier characters get more dice in their pools?

I'm trying to compare this to the "recharge" mechanic used in Forry. I've never played the game seriously, but as I understand it, a special ability/effect becomes usable again when the user rolls the appropriate result on a d6 (strangely labeled as a standard d6, instead of a roleplaying d6). It seems they're effectively the same mechanic, except in the Forry version, you get just one die in the pool. Does that mean the Countdown just lasts longer?

Speaking of D&D 4ed, they could've used the (Random) Countdown mechanic to recharge the encounter and daily powers. That would at least add some verisimilitude to "encounter" powers, instead of being the complete meta-game feature that they are now.

 

[delericho]

(For those not familiar with it, the countdown mechanic starts with a pool of d6s and every turn or other interval - the pool is rolled and any 6s are removed. This keeps happening until the last dice is removed, at which point the countdown timer has effectively run out. The basic use is for the death/dying rules - you form a pool based on your END score and roll it each turn until you die or until somebody manages to give you appropriate medical care).

That is a lovely mechanic. The one and only tweak I would make would be to remove dice on a '1' rather than a '6', because surely a '6' should be a good thing?

Some countdowns may be something of a death-spiral, with the situation growing harder to combat as it progresses, increasing the difficulty level of replenishing the dice pool each time it shrinks.

I might have missed something, but I didn't think that was implicit in the example given. I was under the impression that you had a countdown pool of dice, but that wasn't necessarily the same pool used to replenish - so while you might only have a pool of 3 dice remaining in the countdown, the medic would still have his full 6 dice to try to heal you. But I might have mis-read that.

But even in those cases where it does have that death spiral effect, I think that may be a feature rather than a bug - if your ship is breaking up, you might try first to fix it, but after a while the damage has reached a point where you instead have to just abandon ship.

 

[Morrus]

Would hardier characters get more dice in their pools?

Sometimes. In the above example, the pool size is equal to their ENDURANCE attribute.

 

[Morrus]

I am totally imagining the reasons to use this...

How much oxygen does a fire eat up on a ship?

How long until the NPC can get a teleporter lock to get you out of a fire fight?

When does that Calvary arrive?

How long before the Nebula takes your shields down?

How long before the radiation becomes lethal?

Exactly!

It could also be used for spell durations, things like that.

 

[MarkB]

That is a lovely mechanic. The one and only tweak I would make would be to remove dice on a '1' rather than a '6', because surely a '6' should be a good thing?

Bear in mind that countdowns aren't automatically bad. Someone earlier gave a "lock on with the teleporter" example, and in that example you'll want to roll plenty of sixes and might be trying to use skill checks to pull dice out of the pool, if such an option exists.

I might have missed something, but I didn't think that was implicit in the example given. I was under the impression that you had a countdown pool of dice, but that wasn't necessarily the same pool used to replenish - so while you might only have a pool of 3 dice remaining in the countdown, the medic would still have his full 6 dice to try to heal you. But I might have mis-read that.

But even in those cases where it does have that death spiral effect, I think that may be a feature rather than a bug - if your ship is breaking up, you might try first to fix it, but after a while the damage has reached a point where you instead have to just abandon ship.

It wasn't part of the example given - I was suggesting it as another possible variant.