Doomtracks

 

So in the world of nebulous world of rpg writing at the moment here is this thing

Doomtracks
A mechanism to show how the danger of a location or a campaign increases or decreases. You can have in-campaign events add to or subtract from this. Hopefully, players will have some effect. As a device in board games, it works well in an RPG and as a physical thing on the table the GM can play with is a valuable dramatic plot. 

Sometimes if you running say a 4-hour game perhaps a one-off game a doom track lets you impose your real-world constraints on time using this game mechanic. You can indicate the climax of the game is close. You can possibly kill a few players by turning off your kindly fudges or actually punishing bad decisions.

Lots of games to me are about the theatre of danger. Horror games taught me making people feel like they are in danger is lot of satisfaction in gaming. My favourite superhero game TSR Marvel threats are comic code approvable and death and killing is mechanically unlikely but it still helps to make the characters feel like their threats are dangerous and credible. Beating worthy enemies makes you more worthy. Killing a disabled kobold family living in a log is not so much glory. In Call of Cthulhu and BRP games players always feel fragile and could fall off a ladder and die. Rolemaster also. The different game mechanics and how deadly they are changes this theatre of presenting people with credible threats but it is still something the referee needs to manage and stage to keep engaging. 

Doomtracks can also be a kind of dungeon realism.

This is my dungeon Defcon system

CLEAR - 1in12 encounter 
business as usual, often doing downtime stuff like manual labour or ritual or art
GREEN - 2in12 encounter
3-4 hear inhabitants of the dungeon if listening
+2 guards at major posts
Sub boss will try to handle this matter
Starts when evidence of murder or violence or damage inside the dungeon discovered
Guarding animals missing or noisy, alarms or traps set off or disarmed are also causes
The occasional vanishing could be put down to some dungeon monster eating locals in secret
AMBER - 3in12 encounter 
3-4 hear inhabitants of the dungeon if listening, non-combatants hide in silence
+50% guards at major posts, lock all doors, guards searching the dungeon
The boss is informed
Non-combatants all hear alarm, hide and lock doors and valuables quickly
Fleeing guards report losses and spread panic which reaches the top
More than one corpse, at a time found or any fleeing guards, panicking set off this condition 
RED - 4in12 encounter
5-8 hear inhabitants of the dungeon if listening, some non-combatants might flee or be armed
Hold major guard posts rest searching for intruders
Non-combatants armed and at assembly point ready to flee with a prepared escape path
A major attack or invasion by enemies will trigger this
The bosses and their best will actively hunt intruders using any available population

Random encounters could also start getting high numbers if a random range
Maybe 1-2 monsters or several non-combatants could appear at CLEAR
At least the average dice roll range for GREEN
AMBER could have maximum and RED could have bonus elite or sub-boss

So I did lots of con games with doom tracks with the escalation of threats like angry mobs. the apocalypse starting, etc and they do help with pacing games. 

You could also use various tracks for your game world to keep track of the power of factions (each could have its own score). Maybe even alignment powers could have a track maybe astrologers can see it in the heavens.  

They work well in horror or even investigations and you can regions where the track is higher or lower. Clocks make everyone work faster and consider not doing the slowest possible means for little reward in time. Adding a clock to a mini-campaign and using a doom track to physically show danger increasing will make players sneakier. A doom track could be a strip with perhaps some squared highlighted or coloured to represent an escalation. A nuclear-war-style doomsday clock with seconds to midnight might be extra dramatic but perfect for a cold war spy game.

You could leave the end or colour codes ambiguous to players.
"What does that colour mean?"
"Oh don't worry"
"What happens when it reaches 40?"
"Nobody seems to be sure"
"Why are there no more squares after 40"
"The gods stopped answering divinations answers then"



You could fit this into a sandbox also and transition characters from murder hobos to landed gentry and have them become aware of some ticking time bomb or Sword of Damocles above them.

A doomtrack could be used like a moral score of the mob and say adventurers in government made terrible decisions the score would rise to result in rioting and revolution.

An important point: like any good thing beware of overdoing it. Appearing to force drama or repeating the same pacing and fudging result to do it can be tiring too. I had one DM where the boss monster fights all felt like we would almost all be dead then somehow we would just make it. Sounds heroic? Not really because I'm pretty sure they didn't even use HP just cared that we felt a level of threat and futility. It was every game the same over-the-top boss fights where our rolls or cleverness or carefully saved resources or min-maxed characters didn't matter. I had one DM who started every game with an over-the-top fight scene and at least if we did poorly we would get help but this too diminishes risk and agency. But the main take on this is to vary your formulas a bit or subvert them to keep people on their toes.

It is ok for adventurers to back off or run away and surrender and possibly we should normalise these things and codify what happens better or can be turned to advantage like in almost every adventure tv show ever made. We let villains take us to a secret base escape and kill the boss and ruin their doomsday weapon no probs. Though Mutant Epoch RPG has the more mean answer to those problems (don't get captured here please shoot me more the rule in this game). In a horror game, the doom track should be worse. In a fantasy sandbox, it could be more subtle and long-lasting. TORG RPG kind of has this with the way invading cosms plant stelae in a triangular grid to invade which is one of several doomtracks in the setting one which players can damage. Perhaps after a while, they realise something greater is needed like eliminating some bosses or damaging some facilities or stealing some McGuffin.

In game events that add to the doomtrack help shape how players act and it could be they fail or make a mistake or realise their actions have more significance. Perhaps a villain deceives them and they recover a relic for evil and so the doomtrack climbs and the constellations change. Perhaps more werewolves are seen. Slowly they could put together clues that perhaps our patron and these relics are problems. Players when they figure out how to act may wish to do positive things and weigh up the benefits of certain actions. You could even present them with different options with different results and risks.

Various milestones on your doomtrack might give the bad guys more perks like undead wyvern riders or a zombie army. Things that affect the landscape or sky or manifest in nature are all good. This could include the economy collapsing, or certain goods becoming scarce in wartime. Maybe the common folk turn on our heroes at some point just want the war to be over. Maybe gates open at some point and new higher monsters appear on all your encounter tables. The apocalypse doesn't have to happen in one day.