I’m admittedly a pretty impatient player, which I think comes from being in a few too many D&D campaigns in recent years that take “roleplay heavy” to mean “nothing happens.” I don’t really like random encounters, I want to get on with the story.
Now, this is unfair, and I know it. I think random encounters can have value, including in the basic task of making resource management in D&D a real and thus interesting challenge. Having to actually think about rationing your spell slots or worrying about your short rests is something that matters a lot to keeping D&D combat interesting, and is really often neglected in the modern play culture. But since we’re not playing D&D, and I know my players are also people who like story a lot more than they like random fights, as they approached their first period on the road this session, it took me a little while to work out what to do.
I considered skipping the party straight to Vallaki, the settlement where they’re headed, and where the next round of concrete story beats are set to happen. They’re all excited to get there, so why delay it? If they were adventurers new to Barovia, establishing the danger of travel and some of the other elements of the world could be useful, but as they’re natives, that feels less pressing. But at the same time, skipping ahead just didn’t feel right, either.
I realised I wanted the characters to have a bit of time to bed in. The players want plot, but they’ve also said they want space to get to know each other and roleplay, and I think continually being given new, essential information to react to and plot threads to chase isn’t always conducive to that.
So, a bonding road trip. I threw in a few creepy non-combat encounters from the book, but decided the core of the travel would be the use of a clock.
Daggerheart borrows clock and countdown mechanics from Blades in the Dark (who I doubt originated it, but its designer John Harper worked on Daggerheart so it seems like a safe bet that’s where it came from), which is a way of breaking down steps in a complex task without the GM necessarily defining what those steps are. So, in this case, I presented a four-part ‘Travel to Vallaki’ clock. The players could fill in a segment of the clock by proposing something they did to assist in the journey and rolling to see how successful they were. They might say that they kept watch every night, or somebody could invent a vampire-repelling device, or whatever they wanted. If the solution made sense, and they succeeded on their roll, some number of clock segments filled. When it was all full, they arrived safely in Vallaki.
This is a big departure from D&D travel mechanics, where the steps are very mechanised. Roll perception, roll survival, roll to overcome specifically defined obstacles, and flavour those actions if you feel like it. Adjusting from asking “can I roll Sleight of Hand to pick their pocket?” to instead describing how they are going about trying to pick that pocket and choosing what to roll based on the actual actions described is something we’re still working on, so they didn’t seem quite sure how to tackle at first.
But once one player jumped in with an idea, it clicked into place and they really enjoyed it! It led to exactly the kind of moments of roleplay and showing off skills that I was hoping for, and rolling with fear created great moments for non-combat creepy encounter to heighten the general sense of dread.
As I was describing the concept to them, I said something along the lines of, “I don’t have secret correct answers to this, this is how you guys get to define what kinds of obstacles you find it interesting to face.” And completely accidentally, as I was saying those words, they’re what made the purpose of clocks really click for me, too. I think because I have run a lot of City of Mist/Mist Engine, where statuses basically act as a form of countdown clock, I was really comfortable with using them in that way, but was sometimes less certain about using them to represent obstacles or challenges. Now I think I probably need to worry about overusing them, as that framework—that it empowers the players to pose then solve the element of the problem they find most fun to deal with—is something I absolutely understand how to use and am super excited to use to frame a whole range of different types of challenge.