The Timer - Dungeon Master Tools

Looks harmless, right?

 So I've seen a few recommendations about using a timer during a session before, but I've never tried it. Professor Dungeon Master over at Dungeoncraft swears by them. I recently had a chance to use one while running the adventure Salvage Operation from the Ghost of Saltmarsh adventure book. Guess what, it worked great. It drove up the tension of the finale sequence to impressive levels. I'm certainly going to look to add this to future set piece encounters.

Now you could use an actual timer counting down seconds until something happens. But the timer in Salvage Operation is built right into the encounter. So lets set the scene here. The characters enter a ship floating abandoned on the high seas. They are looking for a heavy box that requires two characters to move. It is at the bottom of the ship. So the characters search the ship, encounter traps and monsters along the way. When the reach the bottom, the hold is partially flooded, but the box is there. 

The moment one of the characters touches the box, all hell breaks loose. A giant octopus attacks the ship and tries to tear it apart. The adventure then breaks down what occurs in the environment round by round. First, tentacles explode into the hull hitting some characters. Next round the ship shifts throwing some of them around. Next round the ship starts to sink. The whole time more tentacles are smashing throughs he hull. The characters are trying to escape and two of them are lugging that heavy box around with them (need to keep it in hand if they want to get paid). Any monsters left on board are trying to escape. And the rowboats out in the water attempt to get closer to save the characters. Each round things get worse as the ship continues to sink and level by level gets flooded with sea water. 

"There are going to be two dead people in here!"

Now this set up is pretty complicated with lots of moving parts (literally and figuratively). But you can keep it simple. There is that scene in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom where Indy and Short Round are trapped in the room with the ceiling and spikes closing in on them. Round by round it gets more frantic as they try different things to get out. Meanwhile Willy is outside of the trap attempting to help. You could easily capture this moment in D&D, with plenty of different elements to keep all the characters engaged in the danger.

Now I wouldn't abuse these timers. I would keep them for key moments in an adventure where it is important to drive up tension or increase the sense of danger. Using these constantly can take away some of the fun they add. 

Dungeons are the obvious place to use them, since you control so much of the environment, and the creatures. But as you can see in Salvage Operation you can do this just about anywhere. 

So the first thing you need to consider is how many rounds you want this to take. The fewer rounds, the more intense the situation. Professor Dungeon Master often rolls a four sided dice and the result is how many rounds will pass before something happens. I used this in a different adventure. A dragon was heading toward the characters and I rolled a D4 to determine how far away he was. I rolled a 4 and the characters scrambled to get off the roof of the shrine and inside before the dragon arrived. That was a blast.

"I did not sign up for this!"

But you can be a bit more structured like Salvage Operation was with each round describing how the stakes got higher and higher with each round. And that can be important, you want each round to get more and more intense. So you can stretch out the danger. You may even want to put a single round where nothing new happens just to give the players a moment to catch up. Salvage Operation has the octopus constantly bombarding the ship, but if the characters attack the tentacles and do enough damage, the octopus stops for a round.

 Last you want to make sure you don't remove choices from your players. You can use the round by round structure as a guide, but if you players figure out a clever way to get around some of the obstacles, then let them do it. The object is to create tension, not railroad the players.

So using timers is a great way to increase the stakes in an encounter or sequence. Try working one into one of your dungeons or set piece encounters the next time you are prepping for the game.