Tension on a Timer: How Progress Clocks Keep Your Game Exciting

Word up my homes.

Today we’re going to talk about “Progress Clocks”. I think these were first introduced by John Harper with Blades in the Dark. (Correction 2025-03-12 I'm reliably informed that they were introduced first in Apocalypse World!) They weren’t the first solution to the particular problems they address, but I do think that they’re perhaps the most elegant.

You’ll understand in a bit.

Why Use a Progress Clock?

You’ve all felt that, right? That anticlimactic feeling that comes from presenting your players this mountain to climb, only for them to simply roll Athletics and pass. “Well done, you’re at the top, well that was dull”. Extreme example I know, but I’m trying to illustrate a point here :)

Experienced GMs might have other techniques for circumventing this problem, but Progress Clocks are for turning a single mechanical success or failure event into something that matches its theme. They’re for showing players exactly what the stakes are, and for managing their expectations regarding how they’re currently performing.

They prevent a couple of failed rolls from completely derailing the players’ current plan.

How does a Progress Clock work?

You draw a circle, and you divide it into a number of pizza slices. 3-6 slices is common, but you can go higher or lower to taste.

You then label that circle with the event that WILL happen once the clock is filled in, and you put it out in front of the players so that they understand what’s at stake.

Then as relevant in game activities take place, you colour in those pizza slices, representing the final event drawing closer. Depending on the sheer influence of the activity that has happened, you may wish to fill in more than one slice. You should also be open to the idea of filling in the entire clock in one go if the situation justifies it (or even disregarding the clock entirely) - You might have thought that something is quite big and complex and worthy of 8 slices, but your players might come up with something that deals with it in one swoop. You’ll know when it happens, don’t impede this.

I should note, it’s not just in game activity that might fill a clock, it might literally represent the passage of time itself.

When do you use a Progress Clock?

You know when you’re running a game and the players want to do something, you might call for a check, and if they succeed, happy days? Well, Progress Clocks are for when the action is too big or significant that it’s success or failure should fall down to a single mechanical event like a dice roll.

Likewise, imagine your players trying to break someone out of jail and there’s this really cool stealth session. Unfortunately they just failed a stealth roll and tripped over in front of a guard, so now the guards are alerted to their presence, and unless you the entire place to come down upon them over a simple misstep, you’ve got to tie yourself in narrative knots trying to justify why the first guard hasn’t just raised the alarm.

Or imagine if your players are trying to accomplish something before this other thing that they cannot affect happens. You might have two clocks here, one for the players progress and one for the other event.

What are the Types of Progress Clock?

Ticking Bomb (or even it’s inverse)

The Ticking Bomb Progress Clock represents how long until something terrible happens. In that time, they need to find a way to circumvent the problem or to prepare for it. This is the classic heist Progress Clock, representing how many mess ups PCs can make before the guards are alerted - in the meantime the PCs want to be in and out.

Competing

Competing Progress Clocks are used to show the progress of two separate events that do not influence each other. For example, the PCs might be trying to evacuate the village in the valley before the Dam breaks. The PCs might advance their clock by sounding the alarms, and guiding people across the bridge, and the Dam’s clock might advance as you roll a check to see if the crack in the damn wall is growing.

Tug of War

Possibly the most complicated to explain, there are two possible event outcomes, and you don’t start these clocks empty. Tug of War Progress Clocks represent two outcomes that DO influence each other. So if the PCs were running away from a monster, as the PCs succeeded in their checks they might fill the clock, and as they fail, then the clock empties. The outcomes in this case would be either a successful escape, or the Monster catching up to them.

Multiple

Not technically a type of clock, but there’s no reason why you can’t have a string of clocks together to accomplish a bigger thing. For example, if we go back to that heist example - The big picture might be “steal the gemstone” but you might present the players with the following clocks (again, allowing them to circumvent any that they reasonably find a work around for):

1. Deal with the guards

2. Make a route inside

3. Get past the traps

4. Evade the security investigating the alarm

5. Get back to the hideout

Conclusion

Nice, hopefully that makes sense to you. If you could use more information, checkout Sly Flourish’s video for extra guidance, or reach out to me on Bluesky.

By the way, I’m currently making a one shot adventure for GOZR called The Rusted Colossus, about a giant old mech that’s been uncovered in the desert. I’m planning on referencing this post, so that if people need pointers on Progress Clocks, they’ve got them. If you’ve come from there - this is time travel. Hello future people! I hope my adventure came out well :)

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.

Using time as ttrpg currency to press urgency

Hey there, I’ve got a bit of a crazy idea in my head. A few months ago I watched a sci-fi movie called “In Time” starring Justin Trousersnake. It was OK to be honest, the hook was that in a dystopian future traditional currency is replaced with ‘life-time’.

The way this worked, upon birth people were augmented with a system that stopped them biologically aging at the point of early adulthood, but at that exact transitional moment, a clock on their wrist starts ticking backwards, counting down the rest of their lifespan.

This life-time as it’s known, is then traded as a currency, your wages are paid in life-time, and you buy your food and pay your rent with life-time.

The film was attempting to make a very blunt point about the modern low tax, low regulation, free-market Western economy, so of course - this situation empowers those that are ahead to get further ahead. It leads to the lower classes getting paid poverty wages forcing them to turn to loan sharks, gambling and criminal activities to survive.

As far as the film’s story goes, life-time creates frenetic pressure on Mr. Trousersnake as he’s literally in a race against time to save his mum, the girl, and the entirety of society from the evils of cAPiTaliSM.

Using real timers in games

OK, carpark that for a second, because now I’m going to talk about Shadowdark RPG and then rein it all back together again.

There’s a cool mechanic in Shadowdark whereby whenever you light a torch, you set a timer going on your phone for 60 minutes. At the end of the timer, the torch goes out. This serves to keep the urgency up and stop the players from becoming too cautious, it encourages them to take creative risks and makes the game much more action packed.

It’s method contrasts against OSR D&D which tries to solve the same problem, but it instead measures the passage of time abstractly using “dungeon turns” as 10 minute blocks per round of player actions (Modern D&D doesn’t bother with any of this, and just encourages hand waving it away).

While Shadowdark’s real-time method isn’t perfect, since the flow of in-game time rarely matches real-world time, it feels more organic and immersive. Traditional dungeon turns require conscious discipline to do right, and can easily feel rigid and boardgame-like, requiring bookkeeping that can bog down gameplay.

All that said, on balance, if you’re used to abstracting anyway, using real timers won’t break verisimilitude, and the Shadowdark method works well.

OK, so what’s the big idea Jimmi - this blog is meant to be about getting to the point?

OK, OK, sheesh. You’ve probably put two and two together by now, or read the title of this post, so I’ll get to the point.

In sci-fi games, what if we applied ‘life-time’ to track player character wealth? You could have them set a timer on their phone which you could add to and subtract from manually as the situation required.

Players could steal life-time from enemies or have it stolen from them. They might raid a bank where dormant life-time is stored on USB-style devices or loan time to desperate NPCs.

My theory is that, like in Shadowdark, that this would drive the player activity and create a sense of urgency at the table, effectively getting rid of those sessions where everyone mulls around with analysis paralysis.

As a bonus, it’d also take care of having to manually account for the weight and amount of your character’s currency!

Conclusion

Using life-time in this way feels like it could be a game changer, but I’ve not tried it myself yet, so I’m going to integrate it into future games of Mothership to see how I get on with it. Mothership specifically seems like a good fit to me, since the tone of the game is all dystopian future and economic horror anyway, but you might be able to bake it into your fantasy games - magic is a thing! Get in touch if you have any thoughts about it. I’m on Bluesky or you could use my contact form.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.

These are the best death rules for your rpg

…in my opinion

Before we get started, I want to be straight with you. This post contains links to my new online zazzle store - tldr: I designed a mug… because I’m peculiar and I think it’s funny. You don’t need to buy the mug, if you like these death rules, just use your own.

Oh, whilst I’m writing disclaimers, this D&D house rule of mine is inspired by the death rules in Mothership 1e, which is a fantastic little game by Tuesday Knight Games.

setup

You are going to need an opaque mug, cup or similar vessel, and you’re going to need a handful of d20s.

how to use the best death rules

The moment a player character goes down in battle, you take a d20 and you hide it under the mug. You put the mug out on the table for all to see. For every player turn that the character remains “down” you hide another d20 under the mug, this is important, so don’t forget!

At this point, no one knows the status of the character, all we know is that the longer they’re down, the more dice they’re getting, and the worse their odds of survival. Feel that tension baby!

The spicy bit

When another character goes to revive the downed character, be it during or after battle, using a spell or just a stabilising action, that’s when the fun begins.

The player making the revive action first shakes the mug, and reveals the d20s within. Read them as follows, with later conditions superseding earlier ones:

Condition 1) If at least 3 dice show a result of less than 11, the character is dead.

Condition 2) If any dice show a result of natural 1, the character is dead.

Condition 3) If any dice show a result of natural 20, the character is alive. (This overrules condition 1)

Condition 4) If multiple dice show results of 1 and 20, they cancel each other out. (This overrules conditions 2 and 3)

If the character is dead, the revive action fails.

Why do this?

Characters die, and the moment should be a glorious tension dripping swan song of nail biting action! Standard D&D rules (for example) rob you of this because everyone at the table knows your exact condition at all times, so there’s no need to rush over to cast healing word on you if you’ve already rolled 2 public successes on your death saves.

With my rules, You could be dead on turn 1. You could be dead even if they cast healing word on you immediately. The only thing players know for sure is that the longer they leave you face down in the dirt, the greater the odds are that you’ve stabbed your last goblin. Also, other than a natural 20, there is no way to ‘self stabilise’.

This creates a beautiful sense of urgency at the table, suddenly, someone going down is a cause for massive alarm that requires an immediate response. All the while, waiting patiently, the downed player has no idea if it’s already too late, sitting there grinning with anticipation, half imagining their next character…

About that mug I mentioned…

Because I’m peculiar, I thought it would be funny to actually make a specific mug for this purpose, so I designed one using royalty free art and stuck it up on Zazzle. “The Mug Of Death” amuses me greatly, and it has the best death rules laid out on it.

The Mug of Death
by DomainOfManyThings

I know what you’re thinking, and to respond your very reasonable question: The image on the mug is intentionally upside down, because the mug is meant to be flipped over during play to hide the dice. When it is correctly oriented, everyone will be able to read the image as:

If you want one here’s the link to buy one from Zazzle (your transaction is entirely with them). I get a kickback from them, and it helps me keep the lights on.

But seriously (and I cannot stress this enough), just use a mug you have kicking around in your kitchen instead! Unless you’re peculiar too of course, in which case thank you very much in advance.

Conclusion

So that’s it, use these death rules to make character’s going down a spicier occasion, and then bask like a sea lion on the rocks of tension it creates!

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.

Combat in Mothership rpg really doesn’t have to be complicated

The Alexandrian did a piece a couple of months back about combat in Mothership 1e, and how it’s a little confusing with the rules as written. It seems that there’s some discrepancy between the core books about the exact process.

Specifically, the ‘Player’s Survival Guide’ has a Violent Encounters section which indicates that all rolls are made player facing - that is, the players roll for their check and the monsters automatically succeed if the players fail.

This contrasts against the ‘Unconfirmed Contact Reports’ book, which serves as a kind of Monster Manual, whereby the monsters are given Combat and Instinct stats which imply that the Warden rolls for monster combat.

Having scoured the official Discord for interpretations, I’ve discovered that the author, Sean Mccoy, prefers the player facing method and merely presents the other option (perhaps somewhat confusingly) as a choice.

So how does the player facing method work exactly?

As I understand it, the way it’s supposed to work all combat is simultaneous. Get rid of your D&D baggage about every character having their own turn, in this, the Warden begins by telegraphing the monsters action:

Warden: “The monster starts hurtling down the corridor towards Tommy, it’s going to violently pin you to the ground“

Then the players say what they’re all going to do in response. Now, they aren’t limited to doing actions that would nullify the monsters telegraphed attack, they can do whatever they want within the boundaries of 1 move and 1 action, but for the sake of Tommy, it’s probably a good idea:

Tommy: “Can I dive down the laundry shoot off to my side?“

Then the Warden has to decide if what Tommy is doing automatically succeeds, or if he wants him to roll. For the record, I’d let him auto succeed because Mothership is supposed to reward clever play over last resort dice rolling.

Warden: “Great, Tommy dives down the laundry shaft just as the monster pounces, missing you by inches…“

The key thing to remember with this is that the players can’t do actions that would take an amount of time greater than the amount of time implied by the monsters telegraphed attack. This is one of those things that everyone can police at the table quite easily. After one round like this, the Warden needs to decide if combat continues or not. If so, rinse and repeat!

Doesn’t sound particularly complicated, what’s the fuss?

Bringing me back to the Alexandrian then. Reading between the lines, Justin’s principle issue seems to be with what I refer to as “GM Conflict of Interest“. This is where a GM has that awkward internalised battle between executing the most tactically advantageous move for this allegedly deadly monster, or giving the PC a fighting chance and pulling your punches.

Mothership exaggerates this phenomenon because the monsters don’t have to roll to see if their attacks succeed, which means that the Warden is pretty much directly choosing whether or not to put the PC in a ‘save or die’ position.

Fortunately, I believe there is a solution to this problem. If we look to Free League’s Alien RPG, they have a system whereby the monsters roll against a table to see what their close combat action will be, and these results generally range from nothing, to panic inducing, to trapping, to mild, heavy, and fatal attacks.

We can incorporate this into Mothership. At the point where the Warden telegraphs threat, (unless it seems obvious to them what the monster should do next) they first roll against a table and then interpret the results given the situation. The result will be the threat that is telegraphed.

Sorted, no more GM Conflict of Interest - the dice gods have decided.

Did you whip up a little table for us then Jimmi?

You can bet your sweet potatoes I did! Without further ado, I give you the Monster Action Decision Table:

| d10 | Telegraphed action

| 1 | Monster withdraws

| 2 | Temp withdraw / Setup ambush

| 3 | Force a save

| 4 | Flip the terms of engagement

| 5 | Force a panic check

| 6 | Trap someone

| 7 | Light attack

| 8 | Medium attack

| 9 | Heavy attack

| 10 | Fatal / Signature attack

It’s worth giving a bit of an explanation for some these:

“Temp withdraw / Setup ambush“ as opposed to running away, the monster feigns a retreat, and if pursued it pounces from the shadows!

“Flip the terms of engagement” means to fundamentally alter the nature of the combat scenario to make it more advantageous for the monster, for example, turn out the lights or spray acid blood all over the floor.

“Trap someone” can mean pinning someone down, grappling onto them, or simply cornering them as you slowly advance, mandible jaw dripping with vile intent…

“Fatal / Signature attack“ in the context of a Xenomorph, this would be using it’s wicked little inner mouth to perform a fatal head bite. This result will clearly vary from monster to monster, and environment to environment. Maybe the 3 headed dog shoves you off a cliff?

The “light”, “medium”, and “heavy” attacks respectively will also depend on the monster in question, to calculate their damage I’d reduce each damage potential by a third. So starting with the Heavy attack with the maximum damage potential as written in your module, say 3d10 if that’s what it was, that’d mean I’d make Medium attacks be 2d10, and Light’s would be 1d10

Conclusion

What do you think? Simply take advantage of your dice to remove the headache of GM Conflict of Interest, and fix the biggest problem with Mothership’s combat!

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.

the pip system is the best inventory management solution for your RPG

…In my opinion

The Pip System as I use it is broadly lifted from Mausritter by Isaac Williams, which is a brilliant little D&D adjacent fantasy RPG starring mice as heroes against the evil forces of Rats, Frogs and Cats. Check it out, it’s won awards and stuff!

pip system Setup

By default, each player character should have ten item slots. You can easily just represent this as empty rows on a list. If the player buys a better bag for their character, give them 15 item slots instead.

On the right hand side of each row, you should have three empty circles drawn in pen, known as “pips”. Players mark or rub out the insides of the pips with a pencil to represent the abstract quantity or quality of the given item.

This way, each row will contain an item with 1, 2, 3, or 0 pips filled in. These amounts of pips can represent abstract quantities and qualities.

The more pips are marked, the better the situation is.

How to use the Pip System

Consumable items can stack, so that one item slot might carry multiple arrows, rations, spell components, or whatever. However the amount of things in the stack is abstracted to either lots, plenty, a few, or none, according to its pips. Never fall into the trap of allowing your players to place an actual granular value against an item as it undermines the system.

In otherwise exactly the same abstract way, non-consumable items don’t stack, but they can deteriorate, like swords or armour getting damaged with use. So such an item might be in perfect, good, bad, or destroyed condition represented accordingly by its pips.

The key message is that the quantity or quality of the item in the stack is represented by how many adjacent pips are filled in.

Depreciation

After a battle, for any item that saw some use during the battle, roll a d6, on a result of 1-3 reduce the pips of that item by 1. This is called “rolling for depreciation”. 

Outside of battle, anytime someone uses an item on a per use basis, roll for depreciation again.

In this way, player characters will find their swords starting to chip, their shields breaking with overuse, and their arrow and potion supply dwindling.

Restocking

Whenever players loot a body, they might find armour, weapons, potions, whatever. But these looted items should always be one pips worth to represent their scavenged quality.

If players buy the items from a shop, or find them in chests etc, then the items should be three pips worth.

Likewise, players can take their swords and armour to a blacksmith and have them repaired (pip restoration) for a fee.

Use my Pip System Tracker

You absolutely can (and probably should) very easily make up your own inventory sheets for this system, but if you want to support this blog, please sign up to the free Mailer of Many Things, and you’ll be given a link to my exclusive premade A5 pip inventory sheet, as well as receiving occasional news round ups from this site and the broader tabletop news ecosystem.

You’ll notice the additional sections for currency and pocket items on my inventory sheet - I basically allow for infinite coins to be carried, and as many tiny items as your player can justify fitting in their characters pockets.

For most forms of treasure that players are likely to encounter on their adventures, I like to apply some abstraction and stack them together under “valuables” on the main sheet, the pips in this instance indicate the value of your row of valuables. Once a row of valuables hits three pips, if you pick up some more, it’s time for a new item row of valuables! Players won’t know exactly how much a given row of valuables is until they sell it at a shop for currency, and that can be up to the GMs discretion.

This way, for most types of treasure that players encounter, they will still need to weigh up if it’s worth using up an item slot for.

Why Use the pip System?

You might have noticed that I gave away the juice immediately with this blog post, but for anyone who’s interested in the reasoning and theory, read on, dear reader!

Granular Inventory Systems Slow Everything Down

Contemporary official D&D suffers from a really bad inventory system, it asks players to continually be adding and subtracting literal weights of items using the near globally rejected Imperial System of measurement.

Using granular weights and measurements to track inventories further places burden on the DM to either invent an appropriate weight for things on a per item basis, or it asks them to stop the game and look up a list somewhere to get the weight of something.

This is painful, and unless you have a kink for accounting, I can’t imagine anyone ever sticking with it in favour of following the conventional wisdom of just hand-waving the system altogether and playing by “feels”.

Hand-Waving Inventory Systems Can Undermine the Game 

One of the three key pillars of D&D is exploration, and inventory is a major part of what makes exploration interesting and consequential, it creates a good problem for players to try and solve. Intrepid explorers should be asking:

• Do I have the right equipment for the job?

• Do I have enough food and water to keep going?

• Is my torch going to last?

• Is my gear going to last?

• Have I got enough arrows?

• How much should I sacrifice to be able to carry away more loot?

In addition to this, without good inventory management you have no consistent system to track the deterioration and consumption of your stuff. The logical conclusion from this is that you’ll never need to spend your loot to replace said stuff.

Now your game economy is ruined, players can just collect infinite amounts of gold without needing to spend any meaningful amounts of it, which begs the question; What is the motivation to go on adventures to collect more?

Game designers have tried to answer this by inventing subsystems of varying complexity for buying keeps and businesses as a way to try and get you to spend. It’s like they casually forgot that D&D is about running around having heroic adventures, not managing your property portfolio!

I jest of course, people do actually enjoy the power fantasy of having their dudes owning a keep or similar in D&D and that’s all well and good*, so I guess the point I’m trying to make is that the game shouldn’t have to rely upon this in order to have a game-functional economy.

conclusion

So that’s it, in the Venn-diagram of granular and abstract inventory management systems for TTRPGs, the Pip System sits nicely in the middle, occupying a best of both worlds position which supports players making interesting and impactful choices without forcing anyone to perform boring accounting tasks.

Hey, thanks for reading - you’re good people. If you’ve enjoyed reading this, it’d be great if you could share it on your socials, and maybe think about subscribing to the Mailer of Many Things! Either way, catch you later.

*My own D&D character, Mendagg, is a Dwarf cleric-come-chef who wants above all else to own a pirate ship that he can convert into a floating restaurant. It’s gonna have a mahoosive shark jaw above the entrance and it will serve the finest dishes from across the land - he’s even been collecting recipes on his adventures.