Rach and Rich bring on Paul Beakley of the Indie Game Reading Club blog to talk about his amazing article called Prep 2.0 (https://www.indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/prep-2-0/) and using Clocks in PbtA games!
Timecodes:
0:01:35 - Read a Sitch
0:14:28 - Open Your Brain to Prep 2.0
0:20:06 - It’s all about Clocks!
The IGRC blog:
Paul’s Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/igrc/posts
Is there a good guide somewhere on what a character keeper is? I’ve heard it mentioned but it seems to be a gauntlet specific thing that’s not written up in any rules books.
Hey there Curufea! The Gauntlet blog has a three article series on them, written by the amazing @Michael_G_Barford. I think it’s a good place to start:
This is an interesting topic and I very much enjoyed hearing your thoughts on it.
I’ve only used clocks when I’ve run Scum & Villainy but there I found them quite effortless, assuming you put some thought into what you used them for (i.e., nothing that is quickly resolved with a single roll).
I used a similar technique to replace skill challenges when I was running D&D 4E, though I’m honestly not sure if I started doing that before or after I read Apocalypse World. What I ended up with there was a fairly involved mini-game that was fun and interesting but sadly the class imbalances in the 4E classes made it a bit wonky. (The Bard with Jack of All Trades always had a lot more options than the Str Cleric, and fixing that would require fixing the whole skill system which I wasn’t really up for at the time.)
Thanks for the links! And I do agree that separating the idea of a segment of a clock and an actual acheived event in a game is something to keep an eye on - especially as something occuring later that may backtrack progress on that clock is very counter-intuitive. You can’t always create an antagonists progress clock in response, you do sometimes need to wind back the original.