21. Progress Clocks - Structure
Remember when this was about reading a wonderful evocative game and considering the outcomes of play, and not looking over the driest parts of a game text? I remember. I long for those days again. Alas, if RPG books are horny recipes, some part of it has to be the shopping list.
I want to open with an important assertion: clocks are not an invention of John Harper, Blades isn’t the first game to use clocks, and it may not even be the most innovative use of clocks. HOWEVER! It’s one of my favourites, and I’m so glad that Blades and its use of clocks gets the attention it deserves. I am going to be unreservedly applauding clocks and their use in Blades throughout the next few days, and I’m going to do that with full respect to the lineage of the tech, but also just an astounding amount of respect for John and Blades’ application of them.
Today we’ll talk a little about Clock Structure, and tomorrow we’ll talk a little about Clock usage.
“Sneaking into the Bluecoat Watch tower? Make a clock to track the alert level of the patrolling guards. When the PCs suffer consequences from partial successes or missed rolls, fill in segments on the clock until the alarm is raised.
Generally, the more complex the problem, the more segments in the progress clock.
A complex obstacle is a 4-segment clock. A more complicated obstacle is a 6-clock. A daunting obstacle is an 8-segment clock.”
Firstly, I want to point out a piece of genius that may slip under the radar for other people: The use of 4-, 6-, 8-segements. I cut my teeth designing applied games for the Royal Australian Air Force. I worked with some of the most thoughtful and responsive decision-makers in the world. I worked with fighter pilots, who balance decision speed and quality every time they act. I learned in those spheres that “big middle little” or “small medium large” was the most complex I ever wanted to get with picking from a group of options. Everything else overloads the brain and turns it into a calculation. If you want a speedy decision, employ heuristics and get people to bucket their answers. That’s what Harper is doing here, and I doubt many GMs even notice how much they’re helping.
4-Clocks are small, when something isn’t settled by a roll. 6-Clocks are “complicated”, meaning multiple interactions, and 8-s are the clocks where you go “yeah that’s a big clock”. As a GM if you’re ever asked to pick a clock you just do that in your head: Big, Little, somewhere in the Middle. That’s it. Genius. Saying “Create a clock with as many segments as you choose, here’s some examples” would’ve been on brand for Blades’ as a “best practices” document. But this, right here, where it does some RULES. This fucking rocks. I guarantee if GMs had to essentially “stat up HP” every time they engaged with Clocks, it would’ve been a very different reception.
I want to zoom in on one of my favourite pieces of text in this section. This is the shit they should give Ennies for:
“When you create a clock, make it about the obstacle, not the method. The clocks
for an infiltration should be “Interior Patrols” and “The Tower,” not “Sneak Past the Guards” or “Climb the Tower.” The patrols and the tower are the obstacles— the PCs can attempt to overcome them in a variety of ways. ”
This is phenomenal advice. Advice that can truly slip through the cracks. The game only looks for verbs for Action ratings (Wreck and Hunt and Study), otherwise it’s about objectives. Making a clock into a verb (“Fix the gate”) closes off the PCs’ avenues for approach. This is fascinating and John delivers this so concisely. I’m so about this paragraph.
However, focusing on outcomes sets up a really weird outcome. Not bad, honestly, but weird. Clocks quantify previously unquantified concepts. All of a sudden we’re not talking about “sneaking past the guards” we’re talking about “filling the progress clock before we fill the alert clock”, and this matters because Position and Effect are relative to a goal, but absolute to a clock.
When scaling The Tower (an arduous climb that begs for a 6-Clock) we could discuss our character’s actions in terms of outcomes: “I want to reach the window on the 3rd floor.” Normally, the position/effect conversation would be relative to that goal, and this is SO UNCLEAR in the book. It actually tells you that effect is relative to the expectations of normal people (effect, p24). But that’s just not true. For example, if you believe the text that "Standard” effect (“You achieve what we’d expect as “normal” with this action.”- Effect p24) and “Limited” effect (“You achieve a partial or weak effect” - Effect p24) are referring to expected human capacity. But they aren’t. Effect level refers to the desires of the player or goals of the character.
“Una wants to tear down a stone guard tower that the Silver Nails are using
as a lair. She says, “I take my sledgehammer over there and I Wreck the thing, smashing it down stone by stone. Ha! I rolled a crit! Great effect!” Obviously, this isn’t possible. A person can’t smash down a stone tower with a sledgehammer. We know it’s inherently silly, like jumping over the moon. But this is also codified in the effect factors. The tower is dominant in quality, scale, and potency. Unless those factors are countered somehow, Una’s effect level is zero before she starts. No matter what she rolls for her action, she’ll have no effect. This concept is useful when assessing other very tough (but achievable) situations.”
Read this quote. Una’s effect level is not judged against what is normal for a person it’s judged against whether or not there is impact or a goal achieved. If it were true that Effect were about our expectations, then Una would have Standard Effect and achieve nothing. We’d be discussing Position/Effect/Expectation as a trio. So, the assessment of effect is relative to the goal the PCs are trying to achieve.
Clocks, however, are relative. They’re absolute. I guess they’re kind of relative given that you select, 4-, 6-, or 8- when you make it, but once they’re in play, they’re absolute. The Tower 6-Clock is a 6-clock no matter how you look at it. Which means it needs 2x Great effects (3 ticks on a clock) or 3x Standard Effects (2 ticks on a clock) to fill it up.
This means the assessment of any Action Roll that is going to be ticking up against the The Tower now has its effect level judged relative to 1/2 x The Tower. Of course, I don’t mean this is actually voiced and considered at the table, but it is still true. If we have The Tower ticked to 3 segments, what is our desired play behaviour (using the rest of Blades as a guide)? I would suggest the desired play behaviour is to have Players drive their characters into ambitious, risky situations so that they can get the best version of their goal to attempt to satiate their greed (drawing liberally from player best practices, p 182). Set big goals, chase big fish. But no, because I’m now trying to tick a clock, I’m incentivised to set a goal that askes the least of me so that I can best angle for Great Effect. Now, my Effect Level is what matters to my forward progression, not my goal.
And again, I KNOW that fiction-first. And I KNOW that in reality, at the table, people tend to play forward first, and then look to clocks afterward (more on that tomorrow, or sneak peak and just read whatever Thomas Manuel is posting these days, because I’m gonna crib from the Indie RPG Newsletter like a beast). But the structure of the game is such that instead of talking about whether “dropping alchemical smoke in the vents and running silently through the confusion up the stairs of The Tower” is something I can achieve, what we can end up deciding is how much impact that idea should have on a Clock. Or, let me put it this way: If I can have an ambitious goal, which requires a few moving parts, some gear, and is desperate, but gets me standard effect, OR if I can have a boring goal, which requires no moving parts, no extra gear, and is controlled, and also give me standard effect, then why would I ever choose the risky play?
In normal play it’s because the scales/magnitude/potency are different. The Complex Plan brings so much to bear that our “standard effect” is still likely to influence the fiction in a much bigger way than the Simple Plan (I’m just a scoundrel, and life is a nightmare). However, if we choose to apply it to a clock, Standard Effect is Standard Effect. Two Ticks still spend. So we motivate play opposite to our desired behaviour.
This is the problem that John is referring to when he finishes this section with this text: “Remember that a clock tracks progress. It reflects the fictional situation, so the group can gauge how they’re doing. A clock is like a speedometer in a car. It shows the speed of the vehicle—it doesn’t determine the speed.”
And…I think he’s wrong. I thin- I mean, kind of wrong. I don’t think the text is wrong. Or the idea is wrong. This is going to come up a lot in any analysis of Blades’ text: I don’t disagree with Harper. But I do think they’re wrong sometimes. And this is one of those cases. Yes, John, I agree entirely that clocks should be descriptive tools that reflect the fictional situation. They absolutely should be the speedometer. But that isn’t what the rules make them do.
In the next section, that lists the types of clocks and fun ways to use them, John says “The PCs might have a progress clock called “Escape” while the Bluecoats have a clock called “Cornered.” If the PCs finish their clock before the Bluecoats fill theirs, they get away.” (p16). That is the prescriptive application of a Clock. IF the clock says, THEN the PCs get away. That isn’t a speedometer, it’s the speed limit (or, I guess, the sum of all forces acting on the car, you fucking nerd). This isn’t descriptive and it isn’t the clock responding to the fiction. And this is overwhelmingly how I see them used in play and in the text.
Now, one could say that the fractal nature of clocks (their ability to zoom in and out on fiction and remain self-similar) is the answer here. “That standard affect action impacts The Tower clock, but the simple standard effect action just impacts a different clock called The Stairway”. But now we’re adding another layer to our negotiation. Position/Effect/And what that effect is relative to. Position/Effect/Clock/#ofTicks etc. Frankly, my answer is easier.
This is how roleplaying games work. The fiction and mechanics influence each other. Sometimes we let the fiction lead, and sometimes we let the dice roll tell us what happens. Sometimes the two don’t line up and when they do, it’s a choice on which one we prioritise. Blades almost universally preferences the fictional circumstances in its rules, and it almost ALWAYS does in its asides. Even the asides for Progress Clocks say to tick them and extend them however you need to so that they fit the fiction (“But you should always feel free to adjust a clock in play to better reflect the situation.” p 15). But the rules itself are rigid. Rigid in a way the choice of the size of clock isn’t. This isn’t a failing of Blades in the Dark, and especially not a failing of John, it’s rather a feature of abstraction. It’s the abstraction we’ve been looking at for years. It’s the abstraction that means I get flooded with Tik Toks of people pretend fighting in five-foot squares over six seconds, and it’s the abstraction that lets peasant railguns and Sir Bearington exist. Reality gets mushed through play-doh shape-maker of rules and as many versions of the truth as you have people at your table. Sometimes shit just gets turned into numbers, and if you’re not clever about turning them back into real things again, you’re going to have someone trying to shoot an Arrowhead of Total Destruction. It’s up to us at the table to prioritise being intellectually honest and true to the worlds we want to create.
So, yeah, it’s far from exclusive to Clocks or Blades. But it’s kinda weird though, isn’t it?
