22. Progress Clocks (2) - When and Why
This post is heavily influenced by Thomas Manuel’s 2024 Last Ditch Consequences. I would recommend reading that first, or indeed, instead.
With an assumed good understanding of what Clocks are and what they hope to achieve, I want to talk very frankly about the when and why.
Page 16 gives a stream of good times that you might want to use clocks: A race, stages of a defence-in-depth, to represent a window of opportunity, and long-term projects. In each case, we’re reaching for clocks for the same reason - We have an idea of what a future-state looks like, but we don’t have much detail about the middle, and so we use a clock. This is the use-case for clocks. Not races, or tug-of-wars or even mounting tension, but rather “progression”. There is a state in which something should happen (oh we KNOW something should happen) but getting from here to there is either too busy to hold in our heads, or we don’t want to define it too clearly (intentionally to preserve mystery, or because we want to focus elsewhere). This is where Clocks come in: By moving something from the fictional world and into the abstract world, we reduce the amount of brain-space that we need to assign to it (“the Lord’s bodyguards are Tier IV professionals and are experts at spotting trouble” vs “6-clock”), and if the game is well designed (which Blades is), we can then move it back to the fictional world when we’re ready. In this way, Clocks are a Catalyst of play. Not a “speedometer”(p15), but a road name. It makes it easier for us to travel, but doesn’t come on the journey with us. Hence, Catalyst.
Catalysts reduce the energy required for things around them to interact, but are not themselves an active contributor to the reaction. A 6-clock might help you understand the abstraction, but it doesn’t convey anything of itself. This is in stark contrast to versions like Dungeon World’s Fronts which (as written here by Strandberg and Rudzki, 2019 - Christ. 2019. A reference the DW Tavern on Google Plus. My bones are aging into dust. I can’t believe how long I’ve had my head in this whole RPG gig) are specifical fictional paths, without mechanics, that are designed to fill in the steps between initial state of play and the enemy fulfilling their goals. Front Describe, Clocks Catalyse. Fronts are GPS directions, Clocks are the time-remaining indicator. Both great. Glad we have both. The world needs both. But the important thing is that if I write that a Dungeon World (LaTorra & Koebel, 2013) front, I need to understand the progression of the danger:
“Impending Doom & Grim Portents
3) For each Danger, ask yourself: what’s its trajectory? If it gets going and runs unchecked, what’s the irrevocable bad thing that will happen? That’s you impending doom. (If the list of dooms in the book help, great! If they feel confining, forget them!)
4) For each Danger, plot out 2-4 “steps” along the way to that impending doom, your grim portents.
Don’t go into a lot of detail, but these should be observable, concrete things. Things that the PCs can see, or get word of, of otherwise be affected by, and (this is crucial) react to and possibly prevent.
“Lord Douchebag doubles the taxes,” then “Lord Douchebag’s goons start ransacking homes for ‘hidden wealth’” and then “Lord Douchebag’s goons burn down a few houses and kill a few holdouts” and then “Lord Douchebag’s reign of terror: killing anyone who question him or try to flee.” All leading up to the doom of: “the villagers are brutally enslaved, famished, hopeless and forlorn.””
The limitation here compared to Blades clocks is self-evident: You cannot apply a consequence in a Dungeon World Front abstractly, and instead, when you mark it off, as a GM you move the fiction ahead, inexorably, toward the Grim Portent.
And….doesn’t that just sound exhausting sometimes? Don’t get me wrong, Grim Portents and Fronts exist because doing this off-the-dome would be almost IMPOSSIBLE. One would be spinning narrative plates with an inhuman pace. But there is not level of Front below "action”, nothing that doesn’t generate momentum. There’s no breather in Dungeon World’s fronts.
As an aside, this isn’t a value judgement. It’s just the pace at which Dungeon World plays. *World games that hew closest to Apocalypse World 1st and 2nd editions also bring it’s breakneck pace that slams MC and Play alike through pulse-pounding drama. Blades does not. Neither better or worse, but yknow. Blades breathes.
As we mentioned though, Blades Clocks aren’t fictionally prescriptive. We can tick off a segment and not worry about significant drama. In fact, that’s what Blades Clocks actually do: They slow down the pacing by a few roles, and give us somewhere to put success and consequences without everything moving ahead too quickly.
In the piece you should be reading right now instead, Manuel (2024) writes:
“I call it “last ditch consequences” which isn’t super clear but is easier to say than “the consequence that the GM can always dish out, even when it’s late and they’re tired and they can’t think of anything creative”.
Basically the idea is that in games with a partial success (which I love), it can be hard to think of consequences all the time. ”
The fact that Blades has a non-impactful layer allows it to be a place where we put rolls and consequences and the “fiction” of the game into a holding pattern. For anyone who has ever pushed tin before (and I sure as hell didn’t, I was Air Combat. My idea of separation is when no aircraft trade paint), you know the value of a holding pattern. It’s a brain reliever. When an air craft cuts a 360 degree turn there are standard procedures for length, rate of turn, and speed. For that reason, if I have too many aircraft at once, and I spin one, I know that in three minutes it’ll be in pretty much the same spot that it is right now. It doesn’t move anything forward (again, not me. I’m Air Combat, if I ask a fighter pilot to spin, the official response is “Chamber, go fuck yourself, I’ve decided to fly at the speed of sound just to fuck with your math”). Clocks are a place for me to say “not right now, see you in three minutes”.
In the previous ep, I mentioned that John prescribes that clocks should be about outcome, not method. And this is another reason why. By focusing on the outcome, we only care about it when it’s filled, not at every step of the way. This creates a Last Ditch Success/Failure mechanic which is incredibly useful.
We’ve been bemoaning for a long time time the “nothing happens” rolls in RPGs, and a wave of PbtA’s praise was specifically in support of its continuous momentum (often referred to as “fail forward”, though they are separate but related effects). But like, maybe there is a place for nothing happens, in order to take the foot off the pedal now and again. Maybe there’s a place for GMs to park things for a while. Anecdotally, I and others have been saying “I’m going to hold 1 for my Hard Move” for a while, especially after a stream of 6-s. It’s useful to have this kind of tool.
That said, as a structuralist, I always love a little more support to the GM. This is what I’m seeing in Bump in the Dark (Thomas, unpublished. Beta 2023-24) with the MC having a handful of Strings and things they can do with them. It means that as a GM I can pull them immediately, or I can save them up for later! I do the same with Double Agent rolls in a current hack.
I love this idea that it isn’t “nothing happens” but rather “Clementine will remember that”. By taking the Miss or 1-3 or “with cost” and visibly placing it somewhere with intentionality, we create a perception of consequence without having to do the work to make consequence. Then, when we spend that currency later, we generate a link between the act of failure and the effect of consequence, without actually having to draw that line to begin.
In Blades, it asks us to assign that consequence to a topic immediately (“+2 heat”, even if not exactly why). But I wonder what the game would look like if we just had a “GM Clock”, that the GM could pour consequences into, in much the same way Thomas (2024) and (notably in the conversation right now) Daggerheart (Starke, unplublished, beta 2024).
Huh, would you look at that. FitD Scooby-Dooing and Fantasy Heroics, both finding similar solutions to this. Huh. That could be a thing? Is anyone in the OSR doing Last Ditch GM Currencies to defer like this. Might be a bit gamey for them, but MoSh (McCoy 2021? 2023? How are we dating this incredibly long-tailed Kickstarter) is crying out for this.
