#64: One Cool Trick With Clocks
I. Dear Reader
This week I want to tell you about a cool little trick I did in our last session of Band of Blades. The mission was to attack a camp of undead and blow it up. Standard stuff for this game. The players rolled badly on the engagement roll and kept their perfect record of starting in a Desperate position. I described how as they were creeping up on the camp, a Ve’gat (the biggest baddest thing in the camp, a giant armoured undead lizard with swords) finds them and charges. Terrified, the squad flees leaving only the PCs facing this beast which outclasses them on every possible metric. They’re doomed.
And my players look me in the eye and say, “We’re going to flashback. This was the plan all along.” And I say, “Of course, it was.”
The plan now - sorry, the plan all along - was to lure the Ve’gat outside the camp and then split into two teams. One to distract the beast, the other to blow up the camp. Traditionally, we’d split the party for something like this. Keep cutting between the two teams - see how each objective was going along. But my players decided that maybe they could keep it simple and we could just play out how they keep the beast distracted and somehow abstract the process of the other team blowing up the camp. I thought this was pretty cool. Splitting up the party is nice but staying together so we can see teamwork scenes is nicer.
But how do we abstract the entire mission? I created two large (ten segment) clocks. The first clock was “Hold off the Ve’gat”. When this clock was full, the mission was successful. They had distracted the beast long enough for the other team to succeed. The second clock was “The second team is destroyed”. For every two ticks on this clock, one member of the second team wasn’t going to make it back.
This worked really well. Whenever I need a hard-hitting consequence for a fail or partial success, I ticked the second clock. Eventually, with a lot of luck and skill, my players completed the mission successfully, holding off the Ve’gat (not killing, just surviving - the vibe was exactly like the original Predator movie). But the second clock had been ticked 4 times. So when everyone meets back up at camp, two members of the squad aren’t going to be there. It’s going to be a tense scene to start out the next session. Can’t wait.
Yours with one eye on the clock,
Thomas
II. Media of the Week
Nothing to do with RPGs but I’ve been laughing at this all week. And since we were talking about verbs, it’s a song about JRR Tolkien and all the walking in Lord of the Rings.
I missed out on sharing this when it came out but here’s a seminar on running one-shots with lots of advice especially around pacing and things like that.
III. Links of the Week
A really good post to bookmark if you’re designing a PbtA game: Brandon Leon-Gambetta breaks down the structure of moves. It was originally on twitter but is now available as a nice blog post.
Reporting from the Melbourne International Games Week 2021, an article about how lockdown led to a rise in playing tabletop RPGs
Watabou, map generator extraordinaire, has released an automatic overland map generator with towns and dungeons that link out to generators of their own. It’s a beautiful piece of work.
An exhaustive A-Z on how to prep a zine for ZineQuest
A really wonderful essay about solo journaling games and the importance of silence is to the experience: “I learned from that experience that one of the best tools you can use in any roleplaying experience — solo or group — was silence, or if not silence itself, then at least a lack of narrative.”
In an attempt to explain to his child’s teachers how to grade a game design project, Vincent Baker defines lots of terms and breaks down some key concepts with lots of examples from card games and Chess.
IV. Small Ads
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