Doom Clocks, abstracted info-gathering and a Clash of Traditions

The Doom Clock

In his PbtA-based, Ghostbusters-meets-D&D dungeon-crawler game Breakers, John Harper includes a particular conceit that grabbed my imagination and wouldn't let go, in the way certain ideas do. It's called the Cloud of Woe, and it's an unkillable entity of pure evil that coalesces and ruins the player characters' day if they spend too long faffing around. Mechanically, it's a countdown clock: every time they rest, or if they fail certain rolls, or stand around arguing, the GM shades in a segment of the clock. Once the clock is full, the Cloud appears and it's left to the GM how definitive the game-over is, but at the very least the PCs are going to have to flee.

Cloud of woah

The Cloud of Woe seems to have two very obvious implications: 1) someone urgently needs to design a TTRPG based on the popular John Wick movie franchise in which the players play criminals performing some kind of heist, but the titular boogeyman-assassin has been hired to stop them, and when the clock fills up the GM narrates the bloody deaths of all the characters in a storm of bullets, ju jitsu and improbably immaculate hair.

And 2), and more the focus of this post, this mechanic is easily generalisable to all dungeon crawls. I'm not suggesting it's revolutionary to include some kind of timer in your game to apply pressure and stop the players treating the adventure like a holiday. There are lots of ways of doing this, and countdown clocks in particular are a tried and tested trick, especially in the world of PbtA. But there's something so beautifully whole and definite about the Cloud of Woe. It's inevitable in a way the slew of countdown clocks you might use to run your sprawling, narrative-led Apocalypse or Dungeon World campaigns aren't. Those games treat their clocks as contingent, as descriptive as they are prescriptive of the fiction. Those clocks can be stopped or turned back or completely destroyed. This is because they are designed for keeping track of the stakes in an ongoing narrative that could spin out in any direction, not for imposing a structure on the game. In a game specifically designed around dungeon crawls (or other self-contained adventures) you want something that imposes a hard limit, a fail state.

So for a while I've been thinking about applying the Cloud of Woe idea to Harper's earlier experiment with the same kind of game, World of Dungeons. This is an ultra stripped down version of Dungeon World, and it's where the narrative-focused PbtA tradition overlaps with the dungeon-focused minimalism of the OSR. (I'm treating it as my jumping off point for pursuing my curiosity about the OSR, which could be very neatly expressed by a jealous girlfriend meme).

The Cold War's gift to tabletop roleplaying game design

WoDu leaves things a little more open than Breakers: the rules are clearly designed for simple, constrained dungeon crawling, but it doesn't give you the specific premise. So to project the Cloud of Woe back onto WoDu, we can call it the "Doom Clock". Each dungeon has a Doom. This is what happens when the time runs out. The dungeon is flooded. The ceiling collapses. The ancient god whose body the party is traversing awakens. Whatever it is, it's incontrovertible. It might well be the end of the party; it's definitely the end of the adventure.

Trying this out, I went with an army of metal-and-fire automata that stand motionless in the central chamber until the presence of intruders ignites their ancient animating magic and they awaken to mercilessly destroy our hapless level 1 treasure-hunters. Right now we're halfway through this two-session game and the clock is halfway full. So far so good.

Abstract Information Gathering and a Clash of Traditions

But it's here that the Doom Clock comes into tension with another (also rather Harperian) idea that I'm using: abstracted information gathering. That is, in place of the old school technique of the "rumour table", I decided to just have the players make a roll at the beginning of the session to see how much knowledge they managed to scrape together about the dungeon before setting out. In standard PbtA "custom move" speak it looks like this:

When you attempt to gather information on the trials ahead, roll +Intelligence (to study tomes of obscure lore) or roll +Charisma (to ask the townspeople what rumours they have heard). On a 10+, hold 3. On a 7-9, hold 2. On a 6-, hold 1. You can spend 1 hold at any time during the adventure to ask the GM for a relevant piece of information about the dungeon or its history.

It's pretty bland but it's hopefully functional: the PCs get some abstract "information points" that they can spend to learn something helpful when the need arises. No need to prep a rumour table and no chance that you spend precious table time playing out the acquisition of knowledge that might never become relevant depending on how the adventure shakes out. Lovely.

But when the players came across the army of constructs and opted to spend one of their points to find out what it was, I honoured the mechanic by essentially telling them that, yes, this is the Doom Clock for this dungeon: "you read about the sorceress's army of golems, which animate to defend the dungeon when they sense intruders. It might take them a little while because the magic is so old, but you think if you spend too long down here you're definitely gonna have to reckon with these guys".

Isn't this a bit of a copout? This kind of abstraction is a powerful way of skipping to the exciting part, but here it seems to come into conflict with OSR principles that I was hoping to square with the PbtA framework. Specifically, the OSR wants players to solve problems through their own ingenuity, not with a dice roll and stat modifier. When it comes to information gathering, that seems to mean they should concern themselves with the nitty gritty - and thus I, as a GM, should concern myself with it too. The non-abstract approach is to actually seed clues to the nature of the Doom Clock throughout, and let the players try to discover them. This is more work, and there's far more potential for it to go wrong or be done badly, but it means that when the players discover what it is they're up against so they can prepare for the exact nature of the cataclysm that awaits them if they get complacent, they've earned that discovery as players.

And that's pretty close to the heart of the disagreement between these two philosophies. PbtA gifts things to its players because it wants them to embody genre-specific archetypes, and that means they get to do cool stuff. Dungeon World's Fighter never loses her sword, and adventurers come prepared. But the OSR says if you want your character to be cool then you need to make them cool: make sure you don't lose your sword, and make sure you find the information you need. Where do we draw the battle lines in squaring these approaches? Are they even remotely compatible at all? Maybe I'll gain some more insight once I start my foray into the OSR proper.

In the mean time, if you'd like to join me in playing a whole bunch of different TTRPGs for five or fewer sessions at a time, get in touch on Twitter (@AlexBro97829019) and I'll send you a link to the Discord server.