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When you use abstract time to narrate events in the game, you sometimes will need to structure that time in a way that the players can engage with from a game perspective. Meaningfully structured abstract time comes in two forms: clocks and hold.
Clocks
The state of the clock can be fully visible to the table, or hidden. Sometimes the mere knowledge that a clock exists is enough to spur the party to action.
We talk about the value of clocks in Pacing the Scene and Time in Scene, where clocks are typically represented as a d6 with each face measuring a segment of time. As we count down segments on the die, we put pressure on players to act, even though we're not always using turn-based initiative.
Clocks in Real Time
The most familiar way to use clocks is just as a way to label a countdown. Most countdowns in this sense happen in real time or turn-by-turn. For example:
- The BBEG is going to complete his ritual in 3 turns. We set a clock of 3 and count down the die faces until the event happens.
- The PCs are trying to flee from a monster. Another kind of turn-by-turn clock is the pursuit die, as outlined in the rules for chase scenes. This clock measures the struggle between the hunter and the prey without directly mapping it to movement speed.
It's possible for the PCs to delay a clock (perhaps by disrupting the ritual), but the clock runs turn-by-turn—parallel to the simulated progression of the encounter. Ultimately, a clock in real time is just a countdown. In the same vein, you can think of AP, MP, and HP as clocks as well, that track the narrative "staying power" of PCs.
Clocks in Abstract Time
When we talk about measuring abstract time through clocks, however, each segment triggers based on a narrative condition rather than at a specific moment in real time.
Sounding the Alarm
The PCs are sneaking through the BBEG's heavily guarded hideout. They are currently stealthed, and have not taken any risky action. The GM sets a clock of 3 to determine when the alarm goes off. In this case, he is establishing that each time the party becomes detected (they take risky action and fail to conceal themselves), they're advancing the clock. Once the clock hits 3, the minions in the BBEG's hideout are aware of an intruder.
Tracking Narrative Moves
Suppose the party has lots of options as to what to do next in the Overworld: they know they can go fight the Insect Lord in the Burning Caves, or they can rescue the Prince from the peasant revolt, or they can explore the collapsed ruin near the Enchanted Forest in search of the Artifact, or they can investigate the BBEG's latest scheme to try and stop him. All these "narrative moves" the players can choose from will take varying amounts of time in the fiction to complete: rescuing the Prince might take weeks of planning, whereas fighting the Insect Lord could take hours plus travel time. But it also follows that the BBEG will complete his scheming if left unchallenged. Thus, to represent abstractly that the BBEG completing his plans is at stake, we might set a clock in narrative moves. If we set a clock of 2, that means after 2 narrative moves the party makes, the BBEG's schemes are complete. A narrative move here a single instance of the party engaging with one of these scenes: they might be able to fight the Insect Lord and rescue the Prince (2 moves), but they don't have time to also get the Artifact.
Influencing Others in Social COmbat
The clock in social combat measures the disposition of the character being influenced over time: the more successes a PC has against the character, the more the PC whittles down her clock to win her over. But each segment of the clock represents abstract time and triggers only when a PC attempts to influence during a window of success.
Defeating NPCs as Story Tags
A third example of the use of clocks in OSR+ is tracking the narrative momentum of NPCs as story tags in an encounter. As a tag, an NPC's "staying power" in the encounter is measured as a clock instead in terms of AP and HP, because we're abstracting down the NPC's mechanics to simplify overall tracking in the encounter. Once the NPC's clock hits 0, he's essentially "out of the action" in a way that makes sense in the fiction.
You can use clocks to track a variety of narrative conditions in this way, but the central concept is that the clock always counts down to a known condition. Simply set a trigger (the PCs do X or Y) and determine the duration of the clock (on a d6).
Hold
Hold is a similar concept to clocks, but it's the inverse. If a clock is counting down to some condition, then hold is counting up. You can represent hold on a d6 in the same way, either in real time or abstract time.
Hold in Real Time
Typically, a PC must do something successfully to achieve hold within an allowed window of success:
- Successfully flip three switches before the trap goes off;
- Land three successful blows against the monster's weak spot to break its legendary resistance
- Make three successful checks while climbing the mountain.
These are all examples that could be played in real time with successive checks, and the clock closely models what is literally happening in the fiction: each time the PC lands a blow against the monster, the PC achieves hold.
Hold in Abstract Time
But when we deal with hold in abstract time, the success may represent many actions taken by the PC or the party in the aggregate over an arbitrary period.
The system already outlines a few downtime mechanics that use hold:
- In the journey mechanic, you decide how long the journey will take by establishing how much hold it takes to complete the journey.
- In the dungeon crawl mechanic, you set an amount of hold required to complete the dungeon. PCs successfully exit the dungeon (or find what they're looking for inside it) when they've achieved enough hold.
- In the montage mechanic, it's possible to resolve a montage over multiple scenes, much like social combat. But instead of whittling down a character's social defense, you're accruing hold toward resolving the outcome of the montage.
Hold in this way become a useful technique for you to use as a GM to measure PC goals. You can use it anywhere you like, as long as you communicate to players these rules of engagement.
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