I like countdown timers and drama dice. Any mechanism where I know there is a threat of something happening, normally something bad, but also for good things, like holding out for the cavalry to come and save me.
Drama dice are often a dice pool, where the more dice mean that the event is less lively to happen. You throw all the dice and discard any that come up showing their highest face.
Countdown times are often numerical values. You throw a die, and if you roll under that value, what you threw becomes the new value. If you roll over the value, then the value drops by one.
With drama dice, when you discard the last die, the event happens, with a countdown; when it reaches zero, the event happens.
These kinds of countdowns work well when you know what the event is that may or may not happen.
Recently, I have been playing with a different mechanism.
I like stuff that prompts me to make a move by the bad guy, or advance their plans, or ramp up the danger. I sometimes use a Threat mechanic that slowly increases. I also like to use failing forward, letting myself ‘off’ for a failed dice roll while knowing I will pay for that failure later.
Momentum triggers roll all of these things into a single game mechanic. Each time your character fails in some way, but for the good of the story you convert that success into a success to keep the momentum going, put a token of some sort, I use M&Ms, into a shot glass. Set a threshold for how much momentum the glass will hold, and this will very from scene to scene as your adventure progresses, a lot like a threat level. When the glass overflows, then a bad thing happens.
Imagine you are replacing drama dice with a momentum trigger. The situation is that there are guards patrolling, and you are trying to sneak past them. You set the threat to 4. This means that you can either fail four stealth checks or do up to four things that could be noticed, such as knocking out one of the guards silently (who could still be missed when they don’t check in) or forcing a lock (which a guard could notice and report). You then run the scene of your break-in. When the shot glass holds 4 M&Ms, it is full, and a 5th M&M will trigger the guards. They have noticed something you did and set off the alarms, or one rounds the corner and catches you in the act. At this point, you can also eat the M&Ms.
You can carry the glass over from scene to scene. This would be a character who is riding their luck, and eventually it will catch up with them.
You can also convert M&Ms into some in-game currency that you can use while wearing the GM hat. Maybe they convert into Adversity points that the villain can spend like the characters get Hero points or Inspiration?
Between games, all you need to do is record them as two values, M for the current momentum or M&M count and T for the Threat level before the Momentum triggers the event.
Momentum and Threat are easily renamed into game terms that fit your current campaign which will make them feel more native than my generic terms, but why not give them a go?
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