Topic: The "Clock mechanic" in Rolemaster

[Giovanni81]

"Clock mechanic" was popularized by 'Blades In The Dark' and 'Fabula Ultima' .... I wonder how to use it in general in RPGs.
I have in mind 4 variants (for RMU).

A. you assume that the time in the real world is proportional to the time in the fictional word.
Let say 1 hour real = 3 hour fiction.
PCs have a limited amount of fiction time to reach their goal.

B. you count the total time in the fiction: you count the number of actions the PCs perform by the duration of the actions (an estimate).
As usual PCs have a limited amount of fiction time to reach their goal.
[this variant is the most realistic but requires a lot of bookkeeping]

C. you simply count the total number of action PCs perform. (number of 'ticks')
PCs have a limited amount of 'ticks' to reach their goal.
[as above but bookkeeping is a bit less]

D. each time PCs roll a 66, in addition to the unusual event, a 'tick' is scored.
PCs have a limited amount of 'ticks' to reach their goal.

IMHO A and D are the best and I slightly prefer A.

Which variant do you prefer? (there is also the option E: "the whole idea of clocks is garbage" )

[MisterK]

The clock mechanism is IMHO a good idea, but it is much more flexible than counting actions or counting against real time (which I personally find an abominable idea). It is meant to maintain pressure, so it must relate to the current situation. If the situation is that the PCs want to catch a fleeing NPC, then the clock goes according to the relative failure and successes of the racing check. If the situation is that the PCs must find a new source of water before the whole settlement they live in does of thirst or must move out, then the clock models the dwindling water resources and its running speed can vary according to what happens (if the PCs find a cache, they gain resources; if some people fall ill and must be cared for, this consumes water more quickly, and so on). If a PC is trying to court a woman who has another suitor, the clock might represent how close the PC is to actually winning her heart, or, conversely, how close they are to being left in the dust.

Clocks are meant to model how close the PCs are to a given outcome (usually success or failure), with this outcome being somehow related to time. But the key words are "model" and "somehow". A model is an abstraction of reality. And "somehow" does not mean "linearly" or even "literally".

When a clock hand moves, it means "time is ticking". But assigning a fixed amount of time to each move, or to each quadrant, is being far too literal in my opinion. The best image I can come up with is the Doomsday Clock: it doesn't actually represent time, but the closer it comes to midnight, the more you know how deep in crap we all are

[Giovanni81]

Your objection was shared by some Italian also.

What you are describing it's the originale clock of BitD:  IMHO is a sort of "fake" clock.

It's more a psycological tool to put pressure on the players.

It's like an campaign where the risk of dying during a fight is near to zero.
Lot of people find this sort of things interesting....

But for me no well defined victory conditions == no fun.
[I know I'm an exception]

 

   

[Giovanni81]

One different proposal, always for more 'objective' clocks is this:

Use clock only for long lasting period of times.

"In 90 days the time of the ritual will come and the cultist will conquer the nation."

* in Rolemaster you must recover for long time so you'll try to minimize the number of fights and make your activities more efficient. (Of course you'll try also to stop the cultists.)

* in D&D 5e with the gritty realism variant active the same consideration applies.

[Druss_the_Legend]

Doomsday Coins
These coins will be used to track the passage of time for the session.
There are 5 Doomsday Coins. GM will delete these as the party progress through the mission.
Once the last Doomsday Coin is deleted, the exit portal will close.
Throughout the session an assigned timekeeper will refresh this page and update the party.

The sands of time fall fast. Decisive action will give the Heroes of Heqt the best chance of success.

I am using the above mechanic for a quest that has limited time to complete. Its a real time crunch with just 35mins of game time to complete. The party have to find an item in a dungeon and get to the exit before the time expires. I was initially going to use a stopwatch with 1:1 game time to real time but then spotted this post and was inspired to create a different tracking system. This is visual and flexible enough that I can adjust as needed. I have merely created a post in facebook on our rpg home pg with images of 5 diff coins.

https://nz.pinterest.com/pin/13651605109151838/

[Giovanni81]

Yes, A proposal says simply 'proportional'.... the proportionality constant is left to the master.... 1:3 it's just a possibility.

So in summary:
* with long lasting clock there are no problems: just count the number of days in fiction. (completely doable)
* with clock dedicated to little intervals of time you should estimate and count the number of hours (and minutes!) for each action performed: error prone and slow. So you have to do an assumption that simplify the task. The A proposal or the doomsday coins go in this direction.

[MisterK]

The thing is, any "clock" that is proportional to in-game time has existed in RPGs almost since they were invented, and it has likely existed in wargames long before that (time-based victory conditions are a staple of asymmetric battles). So there's nothing new here.

Having a clock proportional to *real time* I find an abomination, because players are not characters - everything OOC takes time that cannot be measured IC and vice versa. It breaks the fourth wall in the worst possible way.

So while I can easily understand, and even appreciate, a plot where the characters have a finite number of hours/days/months to complete a goal or prevent a event, I don't find using a clock for that innovative in any way. If players know the limit and the stakes, the clock serves no purpose. If they don't, the clock is meaningless.

[Giovanni81]

Yes maybe the title should be "tracking fiction time" and should not mention "clock mechanic".

About A: it's not clear from what I said but you should change the non fiction time allowed excluding OOC. If a player exit the room to have sigarette or talks about his childhood half an hour this should not count. Only time spent using PCs should count.

[MisterK]

Yes maybe the title should be "tracking fiction time" and should not mention "clock mechanic".

About A: it's not clear from what I said but you should change the non fiction time allowed excluding OOC. If a player exit the room to have sigarette or talks about his childhood half an hour this should not count. Only time spent using PCs should count.

It's not just that. Interactions between GM and players often take either a shorter time or a longer time than their real-time equivalent. When you describe a room, for instance, the time taken to describe it and for players to ask for details (and you to provide the details) is much longer than the time needed to have a  look around, and then notice the few details they are looking for. On the other hand, a full room search can take much more time than the time taken to describe the outcome.

The general rule is: there is absolutely no relation between real-time and game time, except in *some* cases when PCs and NPCs interact verbally (and not always even in that case). Furthermore, in most cases, adjudicating the time it takes to accomplish something is a GM call. As a result, in-game time is arbitraru in most cases, which means that, basically, the clock moves at the speed the GM decides it would move. It's just a way to make the players believe that they have time agency, whereas they really don't, or at best, only marginally so.

It's even true for time travel - no one knows how long a journey would actually take in fantasy games. Players agree that the GM is the adjudicator of in-game time spent. But if the GM also defines a clock that sets a time limit on their actions, the GM is both judge and party: setting the time limit, and defining how much time it takes to accomplish something. It's an illusion of agency, and not a particularly convincing one at that.

The only way to restore actual player agency over in-game time is to remove constraining time limits. The only exception is when using combat rules: characters have a limited palette of actions and the time consumed by each is established, so a clock provides a measure of agency that the GM cannot skew or overtake (unless some actions take an indefinite amount of time and those actions are necessary, in which case you are back to step one).

[Giovanni81]

in most cases, adjudicating the time it takes to accomplish something is a GM call. As a result, in-game time is arbitrary in most cases, which means that, basically, the clock moves at the speed the GM decides it would move.

I completely agree on this.
That's why I proposed A: you do not have to adjudicate nothing. Just fix a number of hours of real world time.

It's not just that. Interactions between GM and players often take either a shorter time or a longer time than their real-time equivalent. When you describe a room, for instance, the time taken to describe it and for players to ask for details (and you to provide the details) is much longer than the time needed to have a  look around, and then notice the few details they are looking for. On the other hand, a full room search can take much more time than the time taken to describe the outcome.

You should calculate an 'average ratio' as follows:
(It's just an example, the assumption is that each activity as the same weight)

* social interaction 1:1
* combat 6:1 (a 10 seconds activity can require 1 minute in Roll20)
* search 1:20 (the result of a 20 minutes search can be described in 1 minute)
so (1+6+1/20)/3 = 7.05/3

So 2.35 is your average ratio.

So if in fiction time PCs have 4 hours (i.e to escape a dungeon on fire before everything burns) you can fix 2 rpg sessions in real time.

But the whole point is this: the actual conversion factor does not matter too much. Just decide a 'realistic' number of sessions to have the problem solved.

[jdale]

Using real time increases pressure on the players (not just the characters); it gives incentive to ask fewer questions and to take action with less information. That could be good for setting the tone, it could be bad if it results in frustration because your descriptions of the situation were not sufficiently clear. It also discourages time spent roleplaying, especially intra-party interactions, when you could be advancing the scenario with actions (that tend more towards game mechanics).

Personally I think it makes more sense to focus on in-game time spent but know your players, not every group is the same in what they want from a game. Are they going to enjoy making bad choices because of that pressure or will that make them unhappy and feel they are unable to play their characters appropriately?

[Giovanni81]

I agree also on this point: less time for role playing so you should use time constraints not too often and only if the group appreciate this kind of stuff. It's almost mandatory to talk about this in the session zero.

[Druss_the_Legend]

Doomsday Coins
These coins will be used to track the passage of time for the session.
There are 5 Doomsday Coins. GM will delete these as the party progress through the mission.
Once the last Doomsday Coin is deleted, the exit portal will close.
Throughout the session an assigned timekeeper will refresh this page and update the party.

The sands of time fall fast. Decisive action will give the Heroes of Heqt the best chance of success.

I am using the above mechanic for a quest that has limited time to complete. Its a real time crunch with just 35mins of game time to complete. The party have to find an item in a dungeon and get to the exit before the time expires. I was initially going to use a stopwatch with 1:1 game time to real time but then spotted this post and was inspired to create a different tracking system. This is visual and flexible enough that I can adjust as needed. I have merely created a post in facebook on our rpg home pg with images of 5 diff coins.

https://nz.pinterest.com/pin/13651605109151838/

I used the Doomsday Coins in a 4 hr session last night online and despite the uncertainty of the players at first the system worked perfectly. One player was the official timekeeper. All players had access to the visual coins on our group facebook pg but the timekeeper had the job of checking the 'timer' aka doomsday clock regularly. As you would expect the timekeeper was now and then distracted by the live play enough to be reminded to check but the system worked in part because no player even the timekeeper knew exactly when a coin would be deleted, only that they would be remove at the GMs descresion throughout the session.

It was very effective from my point of view because all I needed to say is time is running out which was enough for the players to speed up. I did this whenever I felt the players were taking longer than was reasonable to decide what there characters were doing. I didnt even delete a coin for the message to be understood. just gentle reminders to move quicker through possible actions such as searching, reading runes, picking locks or talking about tactics.

Another reason the timer worked is because we had established the party had a precise game time limit to achieve their goal. There was a magic portal that would close and remove their escape route out of the dungeon. If they miss the portal they will be stranded and fail their quest which is to get resources (magic weapons and armour) out of the dungeon and to a far off city under siege.

To allowed certain things to take place with a 'paused clock' and a few times I would simply reassure the players that this action or event will take no time off the clock. This gave the group opportunities to roleplay or read clues or make important decisions about the groups resources without duress. I actually noticed that when the timer was off my players were still pretty efficient with their decisions.

We ended the 4 hr session with One Doomsday coin remaining and at the start of a combat. How long that last coin lasts is anyone's guess but I am in full control of it and may just play out the battle and give a number of game rounds as the final timer and add in some new unique coins just for the combat itself which i real time would be fast but in gametime will be very slow. This gives the finale combat its deserved importance and will let the players showcase their cool items they have worked so hard to find.

Naturally this sort of pressure doomsday timer should be used sparingly but its a useful tool to have in your back pocket as a GM and I highly recommend using something like this with your own playgroup when time is crucial in the success or failure of an important task/quest.