The best RPG mechanic in any game | Beginner Tips 

Progress Clocks remind me of playing Hangman as a kid. Bonus points if you can make your 'clock' an illustration of something happening, like dramatically erasing a burning wick that's about to ignite a powder keg. Or a pie thats being eaten!

I had the idea for an uncertain clock Storm Weather system. You'd roll 2d8 and the players would see the Higher dice number, and the lower number would be the number of days/turns/etc until the Storm hits every cycle.

For opposed goals, I like tic-tac-toe (naughts & crosses). Each space is a skill or ability check. The opponents block certain routes to success while trying to get their own.

Haven't tried this so the idea might be rubbish, but to combat the problem of players being able to see how much "cushion" they have left, what if the clock was the basis for a probabilistic event? For example, representing the DC of being detected by a guard, or the number (or number of sides) of dice being rolled against a DC. So as it changes, it increases or decreases the likelihood of something happening rather than directly causing it to happen. I feel like that would also work pretty well narratively, at least for some things; you keep bungling stealth checks, you're more likely to get caught by the guards. You keep trying to crack a safe, the more likely you are to get it... and the more likely you are to get caught by guards ;-) Could be a pain to balance, and might be more trouble than its worth, but I figured I'd throw it out there since I didn't see anyone else talking about it.

Progress/threat clocks where definitely present in Apocalypse World before Blades in the Dark, but mostly for more long term threats. It is more of a GM mechanic there rather than en everyone mechanic.

I have an alternative view on how to properly use a progress clock. The players don't need to know how many successes they need to pass an event or mission, and they don't need to know how many failures they can stand to afford before suffering consequences. They only need to know the nature of the rewards and/or potential consequences. I feel like this can cut down on meta-gaming and encourage more natural story-telling. If they got their required three successes in a row right off the bat, it's fine to keep going and let them get a failure or even two before ending with a close call or a chase into a different challenge or a big fight

The only PbtA I’ve played (in co-op mode, so I sorta GM’d it too) was Ironsworn. I just realized the linear progress bars (progress tracks) it uses are the same as clocks. I think. They’re always 10 boxes but the amount you increase them by depends on the difficulty.

Reviewed Blades in the Dark. Don't care for the gnre but progress clocks are great. I'm working on adapting them for car chases in my Gangbusters BX games.

I think even that example of a clock's shortcoming being the players feeling "safe" because they have _plenty_ of ticks before they're caught, I think being directly spotted by a guard would either immediately fill the clock, or -- if the players are quick and knock out the guard, hide his unconscious body --- it'd at least provide a few ticks all at once. Going from "oh, we have 6 ticks left, we've got this" to "oh no, that was 3 ticks all on its own... guys this is getting hairy, we can't afford to be seen again". I really need to run more Blades / FitD games. My group only played one, which I ran. And I could've done it better. I also needed them to have more buy-in with their characters, the setting, and the system itself. But I think those latter and be achieved. But I _have_ used clocks in other games. In fact, I did it before I ever even heard of Blades in the Dark. It just wasn't a circle with pie slices. It was a row of boxes that I'd check off to mark progress. Not as aesthetically pleasing but the same basic thing. But the real difference is in the visibility of them to the players. And that's where I screwed up because I has just keeping them in my notes that the players don't see, and it didn't occur to me on my read-throughs of the the book that it should be seen by the players, but it totally makes sense now.

Gonna be using this in a Bloodborne-inspired campaign to track growing devolution into a beast. We’ll see how this goes…

Having never used a progress clock... is the clock seen by the players? Could it be hidden, yet you still tell them that the failure could be turning into a +1 on the clock?

What is the difference between a progress clock and the skill challenge system introduced in D&D 4e?

It can be a downside if you show it to the players, but if you don't, it's a great tool for the GM to keep track of progress, specially when there's more than just one. I have come up with this idea before, but in the form of "best of n". Like in beet of 5, wins the party who wins 3 rolls in 5.

Never played BitD but this is interesting although I don’t really understand some aspects. How do you determine how many segments the clock is? Where is the line between when something is an Action Roll (? I think that’s what it’s called) where everything is resolved in 1 Action, and when that Action is only completed in segments (via Clock)?. It seems like the clocks are a lot more work to manage for the GM, especially as it seems you can have multiple clocks running at same time? (I might have misunderstood here). Anyway thanks for the video.

I really don't understand clocks. It's a scale from zero to six. What makes it a clock? Is it just that it's drawn in a circle? What's the innovation here?

I don't like this idea too much. Because this makes it no longer matter if the characters do everything perfectly or not. If they do everything wrong or make a bustle anyway the nearby guards might not even appear because their clock does not indicate it yet (if I understood correctly that the clock advances due to mistakes and/or actions), and if the players do everything perfectly and well planned, are negative things going to happen to them anyway because that's what the clock says? This mechanic is not really necessary, it is simply a matter of good planning by the GM about how everything is distributed in the place and applying common sense. But I see use in it as a mechanic for SOLO RPG, in which you are emulating a GM and it would be good for you to give all the guards a clock, for example, to simulate uncertainty about patrol/surveillance routines.

The zoom in and out it really throwing me, sorry.

Why do we constanly put fancy dresses on simple counters? The thumbnail shows two counters at 4/6.