Welcome to the first part of a miniseries that I’ve been promising for a long time. One that lots of you have been begging for. I’m going to take you on a journey that ends with a complete, comprehensive, revised version of my old Tension Pool mechanic. Except there’s more to it than that. Because what I’ve actually got for you is the core of a series of technically system-neutral time-based mechanics for fantasy adventure that underpin delving, exploration, wilderness travel, and town-based downtime.

And for those of you following Project Slapdash, you can consider a lot of this preview material. Because you can bet your ass I ain’t doing all this work just to fix mistakes in the current edition of one of the world’s roleplaying games.

This is going to be a journey because, as many of you have requested, I’m doing this in classic The Angry GM style. I’m going to take you through the design journey.

Meanwhile, don’t fret if you weren’t here for the original Tension Pool. I’ll explain what needs explaining, but we’re mostly starting fresh anyway.

That’s enough Long, Rambling Introduction. Let’s start the journey that ends at the New and Improved Tension Pool…

It’s About Time

Isn’t it weird how so few current roleplaying games have a system for tracking the single most important resource that exists in everything ever: time?

Hear me out before you start tippity-typing your corrections in my comment section. I’m not saying that roleplaying games don’t have mechanics based on time. They certainly do. But that’s not quite what I’m talking about here. Because mechanics based on time aren’t the same as a timekeeping mechanic.

Even Blades in the Dark, which I swear I’m not harping on, doesn’t technically have a timekeeping mechanic even though it looks like it does. BitD’s clock system is actually a progress tracker. Which is awesome by the way. That’s why I invented one of my own a decade ago. I called it the Whatever Stat, and I’ve used it in countless hacks since.

I’ve also been using a pie clock of my own since 2017 as part of my own personal, ever-evolving version of the Tension Pool, which I’ve revealed to my players and some members of my inner circle of supporters and hinted at, but was stupidly holding back due to some plans that never ended up happening. Which is what I’m finally fixing today and in the coming weeks.

But I digress…

How do you track time in your roleplaying game of choice? How do you know what time it is? What day it is? How do you know how much time passed in a scene? Or between one scene and the next? How do you record it? Do you just estimate? Do you have a bespoke system? Are you still using old-school turns and rounds tickmarks? Do you not even bother?

Isn’t it kind of weird that that’s a question you have to answer? Think about it.

In the current edition of Dungeons & Dragons, for example, there are all sorts of things that require you to know what time it is or how much time has passed. Spells and effects have durations, right? The light cantrip lasts for an hour. Torches do too. Characters need to eat one rations every day. You have to wait sixteen hours after a long rest before you’re allowed to take another. You have to pay lifestyle costs every so many days or weeks or whatever.

That said, D&D doesn’t really care much about time on a system level. It’s mostly just about when things get used up, when characters recover, and when costs are tracked. Specific adventures, especially those written by savvy scenario designers who know how important time actually is, may do more with it, but, sadly, they’re usually just limited to ticking time bomb style, “If you don’t win by this hour on this day, the adventure fails,” kind of challenges.

Still, that’s better than nothing.

Now, other systems do more than just say, “After so many hours, torches die, and people starve.” Some systems, for example, use random events as a core feature that are tied to the passage of time. Call them random encounters, wandering monsters, complications, or whatever. They used to be an assumed, core part of D&D too, but they were stupidly dropped and replaced with nothing. Other engines have different time-based elements. For example, lots of systems have downtime mechanics for doing town activities.

When you think about it, though, those systems just shine a big ole spotlight at the gaping mechanical hole where some actual means of tracking time should be. How many games with downtime systems actually use downtime hours as this weird spendable currency you earn by playing the game? That’s really abstract, isn’t it? What sense does that make? What does it mean when you’ve spent all your downtime hours, but you’re still in town? What does being out of hours even mean? It’s bullshit.

So, you see it, right? So many roleplaying games have stuff that depends, somehow, on time passing. They assume you, the Game Master, are keeping track of how much time is going by. But how many systems actually give you, the Game Master, a system for determining the passage of time? Or at least tracking that shit? I’m not complaining that there aren’t hard and fast rules like, “A normally furnished, reasonably uncluttered room takes exactly 2.5 minutes to search per five-foot square of floor space.” No one wants that crap. Hell, there’s a reason every reasonable person gave up on the clunky-as-hell turns and rounds tickmark system of days gone by.

Roleplaying games give you all sorts of tracking tools, right? You get character sheets, stat blocks, maps, and all kinds of record sheets. Why don’t you get a clock? Why don’t you get some way to track and communicate the passage of time?

The problem here is really a skipped step. Say you’re designing a roleplaying game, right? Eventually, you get to something like downtime or random encounters or whatever, and you realize time matters in this particular case. So now you’re stuck either just assuming the Game Master has some way to keep track of time already, as with durations, rests, and random encounters, or else you have to build a weird, abstract mechanic like downtime hours that don’t depend on the tracking of time at all.

And I’m not immune to that. That’s why I built the old Tension Pool the way I did.

A Brief History of Angry Timekeeping

Back in 2016, after playing the new Doom game and running a brief mini-campaign using my old Mentzer Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set, which was the best and only true edition of Basic Dungeons and Dragons, I realized I desperately wanted a way to make time matter in D&D. That said, I didn’t want to contrive time pressure into every adventure and campaign and plot I wrote forever and I didn’t just want to hamfistedly cram wandering monsters back into the game and call it a day. No. I wanted a system-level solution for several problems.

I’m not going to rehash all the arguments for making my old system the way it was, nor am I going to link back to them. Especially because it took me a couple of iterations to get it right. I’ll just say that my goal was just to make my players actually think about how much time they were spending on the crap their characters were doing. Especially repeatedly re-attempting failed checks to open locks and search rooms, as well as just standing around for interminable minutes debating which of two identical tunnels they were going to explore first because they were definitely going to explore both eventually.

Now, don’t misunderstand me. I wasn’t trying to punish wasted time. That’s a stupid way to think. Honestly, if you ever use the word punish in a game-design capacity, you’re just telling me you suck at design without telling me you suck at design. I just wanted the players to consider efficiency as part of the decision-making process. And because I knew that making time a thing would invite a certain amount of metagame thinking, I wanted to make a system that captured the weirdly subjective perception of and anxiety about time that real humans feel all the time.

That led to the Tension Pool. What’s funny is that, at the time, it was just this throwaway mechanical design exercise. But man, did it ever explode. It became one of the five most popular things I’ve ever done, and huge numbers of people read it and continue to use it today. I’ve discovered people who’ve never even heard of me have been using it for years. Man, am I ever a dumbass about publishing and trademarking, huh?

Even funnier, it’s the only one of my hacks that I’ve consistently used over the years. I use it in almost every game I run in some form, regardless of the system. Kind of. I actually use a different version of it. Which is what we’re building to here.

The Tension Pool is really simple. That’s part of the design. You have this visible pool of zero to six, six-sided dice on the table. The dice, called Tension Dice, represent time spent on tasks in dangerous, adventuring environments, and the pool represents the growing danger of spending more time on tasks. At least, that’s the technically correct description. The one that doesn’t put a value judgment on things, but simply makes efficiency worth considering.

As a Game Master, when your players declare actions, you have to decide whether they’re just normal actions or whether they’re particularly time-consuming or whether they risk problems or even both.

When the players take a time-consuming action, like searching a room or picking a lock or anything else that takes more than a minute or two, you add a Tension Die to the Tension Pool. After you add the sixth Tension Die to the Tension Pool, you grab all the dice and roll them. If any show a one, you introduce a Complication into the adventure. Either way, the Tension Pool is clear now, and you start filling it up again.

For risky actions, you immediately roll whatever Tension Dice are in the Tension Pool, checking for a Complication, but you don’t clear the Tension Pool in this case. You put the dice back, and the Tension Pool keeps growing.

For actions that are both risky and time-consuming, you add a Tension Die to the Tension Pool and then roll all the dice.

The Complications come off a separate Complication Table, either a generic one or one you build for your adventure. Most folks just use random encounter tables, and I’m fine with that. Random encounters are fun. But Complications can also include random incidental problems like food spoilage, exposure, injury, or whatever else you decide works for your game and adventure.

To be honest, my biggest regret with the old Tension Pool is that I didn’t spend nearly enough time on Complications and how to do them well. I will definitely be fixing that in this miniseries.

Apart from just providing a general time, tension, and random event system, the Tension Pool also provides some basic, vague timekeeping. Because time-consuming actions can be assumed to chew up several minutes and because characters are only broadly, vaguely aware of the passage of time, you can assume a die represents about ten minutes of in-game time, so every time you clear the Tension Pool, an hour has passed. I even tried to tie the Tension Pool to duration mechanics early on, and it kind of worked if you squinted hard enough and accepted that precision time-keeping was impossible anyway in the fantasy adventure world and everything was kind of fuzzy.

Remember that. It’ll be useful later.

The whole Tension Pool thing is an easy, elegant system. My early drafts were too complicated, and the complexity didn’t add anything, and then other people kept trying to add complexity because they don’t understand design and elegance, but the version I described here is the right way to do it. It’s easy to keep in your head and use at the table; it makes time, risk, and efficiency matter at the table. And the Complication Tables are fun to make and use if you do it right. Which no one ever did. Because I never told anyone how.

I’m really sorry about that.

At its core, though, the Tension Pool was just another abstract mechanic that was related to time and vaguely time-based, but highlighted the total lack of a good, solid timekeeping mechanic at its core.

Because time matters. Time matters a lot.

In Studying, You Learned That Man Is Mortal

Time just doesn’t matter much in roleplaying games, does it?

Now, that’s partly down to the whole narrative gameplay thing. When a single sentence of narration can describe a blink-and-you-miss-it attack or hours of work brewing a potion or an entire, uneventful week in town or a month of ship travel or an entire season between campaign chapters in which the party hunkers down in town to wait out the winter, players don’t even feel the passage of time. But when you factor in that, outside of adventures in which Shrub Niggurath will rise from the Pumpkin Patch when the full moon reaches its apex in three days, there’s always another hour or day or week in which to get stuff done, time just doesn’t matter.

And, as I said above, you can’t always contrive a ticking time bomb, and you shouldn’t try. Honestly, “You have 48 hours before you lose the adventure,” is the worst way to use time in an adventure anyway.

Compare all that to how you experience time in real life. It’s pretty much the most limited resource there is, isn’t it? From the moment we’re born, our days are numbered, and we have no idea what the number is. Every hour you lose or waste is gone forever. Worse, it’s almost impossible to know how long anything is actually going to take. Consequently, while some people manage to be well-adjusted about this shit, most of us spend most of our lives in a state of time-induced panic.

Time anxiety is just a core part of the human experience.

Time also figures heavily into how we make decisions. Think about your last errand day. You know what errand day is, right? That’s the day you set aside to get all your errands done. Sometimes, you plan errand day because it’s the only day you have off from work and you have to get everything done. Sometimes, you plan it just so you can actually have a real day off tomorrow with nothing to do. It doesn’t matter. What matters is we all plan errand days, and they’re always full of time anxiety. When traffic slows to a crawl because of an accident, your stress rises. When you have to run back into the store because you forgot something, that’s even more stress.

But it’s not just about stress, either. Consider what happens when the store doesn’t have the new seasonal Pumpkin Bread Rice Crunchy Cereal with Marshmallow Ghosts you’ve been waiting for all year. Do you take the time to go to another store? Is it worth it? Do you have the time? Should you just pick up a box of Fruity O’Leeries even though that’s really more of a summer breakfast? Or maybe you can stop at a different store on the way home from work tomorrow? But what about your special day off tomorrow? Is it even special without marshmallow ghosts? Suddenly, time anxiety is part of the decision-making process, isn’t it?

Sometimes, it even goes the other way. Have you ever had one of those blessed moments when you’ve lost track of time on errand day because it’s going smoothly and traffic is clear and you’re just slapping along to one of your favorite bops on the iTunes, or whatever the kids say, and then you look at the clock and realize it’s earlier than you thought and you’re already almost done with errand day? Then what do you do? You probably think, “I should stop for lunch and try one of those new Cheesy Blasters from Tacos Somos Nostros. I’ve got the time. Hell, I’ve earned it, and I didn’t spec in Constitution saving throws for nothing.”

But it’s not always about trying to get everything done in a firmly limited amount of time. Lots of times, we don’t even know how much time we have or how long it’ll take to get stuff done. Imagine your girlfriend is coming over after she gets off work and you’ve promised to cook dinner. The trouble is, she’s not sure when she can get to your house. “That’s fine, you say. Come over whenever.” Then, you have a busy week, and you don’t do anything you planned to do in advance. So now it’s the day of the date, and you’ve got to clean the bathroom, dust, vacuum, go to the store, and at least prep the ingredients, and you have no idea when she’s going to ring the bell. So what do you do? You start strategizing and prioritizing. Maybe you do the most important stuff first. Maybe you try to do things in parallel. Maybe you decide to eat the cost of getting groceries delivered, trading money for more time. Or maybe you just start crossing stuff off the list. Given your track record, you’re probably not going to end up in the bedroom, so you can skip cleaning and vacuuming in there and just keep the door closed.

At least, that’s my strategy. Sigh…

There’s even a certain kind of time anxiety that comes from boredom, tedium, and inaction. We humans have a tough time wasting time or carrying out protracted, tedious tasks. The passage of time just slows to a crawl, right? Ever been stuck in bed sick? Or stuck in the hospital? Ever done it without a television, books, a phone, or a Nintendo Switch?

That last point is especially interesting when you look at D&D’s limitations on Long Rests, isn’t it? Say the party wakes up after a Long Rest, immediately has a disastrous first encounter, ends up nearly dead, and wants to take another Long Rest. You say, “You can’t. You have to wait sixteen hours.” What keeps them from saying, “Fine. We return to camp and sit there waiting for sixteen hours to pass and then take a Long Rest?” Technically nothing. As a Game Master, there is literally no justification for you saying, “No, you can’t do that.” From a gameplay perspective, it doesn’t even matter. It’s just down to you saying, “You sit all day at camp nursing your wounds and waiting for night to fall. Then, you eat one ration each and go to sleep. The next day…”

But that seems unthinkably inhuman, doesn’t it? That would be a torturous day for most of us.

Then, too, there’s all the stuff I talked about in the first Tension Pool design articles. The strangely subjective, ebbing and flowing awareness of time and strange cycle of tension and release that comes with it in tense, time-limited situations. I invited you to consider taking a timed test at school and how your awareness of time comes and goes. You go into work trances, then glance at the clock and evaluate. If it’s earlier than you think it should be, you relax a little and take it easier on the next few questions. If you feel like you’re running out of time, though, you panic and start working frantically. Maybe you even skip hard questions and answer all the easy ones so you can at least complete as many as possible.

That’s what the Tension Pool emulates. It emulates how humans experience time and stress, not how time actually passes.

Because, really, it’s not time that matters. Time is just a thing that passes.

It’s Not About Time… But It Should Be

The Tension Pool isn’t about time. That’s why I didn’t call it the Time Pool. Except, originally, I did call it the Time Pool. Even I fuck up sometimes. But, as I said, the Tension Pool isn’t about time. It’s not even really about the experience of time. It’s actually about incentivizing efficiency.

Without any sort of time-tracking at all, players know they can take all the time in the world. They can search the same room over and over until they’re sure they’re not missing anything. They can take as many Short Rests as they want or even sit in camp all day waiting for darkness and the next Long Rest rather than adventure without enough Spell Slots and Hit Dice.

On the other hand, with a firm ticking time bomb built into the adventure, you swing in completely the other direction. Players can’t afford to waste any time at all. Since they don’t know what’s coming in the adventure or how many encounters they have to get through, every minute not spent making progress moves them closer to failure instead. That’s basically a “race ahead or die trying” setup.

The middle ground that I’m talking about is where efficiency becomes part of the decision-making process. Efficiency doesn’t have to be the most important thing, and sometimes it’s the least important thing, and different players may prioritize efficiency differently, but it still figures into the decision-making process somewhere. Moreover, as situations change, efficiency can move up or down the priority ladder.

The Tension Pool says, “You can take as much time as you want, but the more time you take, the more extra Complications that weren’t planned as part of the original adventure are likely to befall you, so maybe think about that.” It’s not punishing players who waste time; it’s just inviting players to treat efficiency as part of the strategic decision-making process.

But, as I noted above, we humans experience time and time anxiety in lots of different ways and, often, that stuff gets layered on top of each other. The Tension Pool just says, “There’s a risk to inefficiency,” which is fine and dandy, and, to some extent, that should always be true. But it should be most true only in certain situations. Like, say, when the party is delving into hostile territory like a dungeon.

But that’s only part of the gameplay experience.

Consider wilderness travel, for a moment. Yeah, Complications arise, and that’s important, but what’s more important is resource costs, right? The longer you spend in the wilderness, the more food and water and camp supplies you consume. Yeah, you might also get eaten by wolves or get infected with throat spiders, but that stuff’s pretty rare and less on your mind than whether your supplies will hold out long enough for you to get where you’re going.

Now think about time in town. Complications might still arise, but there’s a good game-design case that they actually shouldn’t. That’s a story for another time, though. Because even if Complications arise, they’re not like dungeon and wilderness Complications. Resource costs, though, are an issue. Every day you’re in town, you’re paying for room and board. It’s kind of like the wilderness in that regard. But resource costs aren’t the biggest issue, are they? Time anxiety in town should be more like errand day. You have a whole list of things to get done; every day you spend in town is a day you’re spending money to live and not earning money or rewards, and you may not even know how much time you have in town before something pulls you away. So you need to prioritize. And when things go wrong, that might force you to change the plan.

That, really, is the bigger goal here. The Tension Pool is nice, and it does its job, but it’s really only providing one dimension of time anxiety. But if The Tension Pool were a true time-tracking mechanic that worked at every level of gameplay, then you could layer other system-level mechanics on top of it, like wilderness travel tracking and resource consumption and downtime activities in town. Beyond that, scenario designers could then build other layers on top for event timelines and ticking time bombs. Or just make good Complication tables because that’s all they need for the adventure they’re writing.

So consider that the design statement for this little miniseries. We’re going to turn the Tension Pool into a sort of universal time-keeping mechanic so we have a clock built right into the core of our system, then layer on Complications as a general-purpose way of incentivizing efficiency in all you do, and then, once that’s in place, we can talk about things like better searching mechanics, town activities, and wilderness travel and exploration.

How’s that for a plan?