Watch Your Time

I know this will seem like I'm playing it up because it's the spooky month, but... I don't remember when I wrote this. I found it one day on my computer, copied it without checking for the timestamp, and I've been saving it for October. Yes, sometimes I pre-write my games, but not all of them make it here. Maybe I'll talk about that after publishing the final game in December. Speaking of, I'm not sure if I'll continue this challenge into 2024 or not. It's a nice way of keeping myself engaged in the game design, while also exploring new ideas every month and prototyping quickly. But I'm not sure if it's necessary, and how long can I keep it up. So, I plan to retire this trend after 2023. I will write new RPGs on this blog the way this started—when I feel like I have an idea worth sharing. Most of these were just that, but there were times when I realized I was forcing it. Bars on Mars would be the only published example of that, and my unpublished fae-themed game would be another. There are some games that I regret because they could have used more polish were they longer, such as Clues and Hunches, but I can say that generally most of these gave me some new tool or perspective for designing my games.

 

I'd imagine this system would be perfect for the situations, in which you need to hide away from a monster and move out when the time is right.
This art piece is a cover art for The Dark Eye made by Luisa Preissler.

Watch Your Time

Stopwatch that can be stopped without looking at its numbers required.

The GM describes a scary life-threatening situation. It could be a natural disaster, a slasher movie monster attack, or anything else scary. Play only situations that won't cause actual distress to the players. Each player then describes a character they'll control who's involved in the situation.

Players take turns. On their turn, a player describes what their character does to prevent this situation, escape it, or assist someone else. The player then starts the stopwatch and stops it blindly. They mark X if the final time is less than 50 seconds. Their character dies if they are marked with three X's, or if the last time is 60 seconds or more. Otherwise, the player adds up all the numbers (ignore the third decimal and beyond), marking a success if their sum equals 20 or more. The GM can increase or decrease the difficulty by 5 depending on the circumstances.

The GM must announce when a life-threatening situation is over, beginning a moment of peace. At this moment, each player can remove one X from any character. Whoever ends with none gets to subtract 1 from their future difficulties.

The Adventures of Lua and Nina, by Felipe Cavalcanti

Who doesn't like conflict resolution gimmicks? Sure dice are a classic, and the cards provide interesting complexity to a game. But some people crave novelty. Whether it's playing a game with a Jenga tower (like Dread), or the Rubix cubes, bringing something new to the table is interesting. This time, I wanted to emulate the time-sensitive tasks with something beyond a random die roll. Realizing that the decimals of a stopwatch are pretty much a random die roll, I figured I'd try giving this a go. It's bizarre, and I'll likely never end up using this in a proper TTRPG of mine, but it's a neat experiment regardless.

Honestly, not much else to say about this one. It's quite minimal, and definitely closer to the Proof of Concept side rather than an Actual Game side. But it is what it is, so I'm running with it.

Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!