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The “underclock” system by Goblin Punch is pretty interesting!
You roll an exploding d6 and subtract it from 20 and something happens when you hit zero (and right away I wanna change it to you add up until you reach twenty. I am that much worse at subtraction than addition).
Exploring a new room (including long hallways).
Moving through 3 already-explored rooms.
Lingering or searches.
Making noise (e.g. kicking down a door).
For me, exploring new rooms and lingering & searches already trigger turns ticking up. (And you can move and search in one turn.)
And making noise doesn’t interact with times or the turn system, but either triggers an encounter check right away, an additional one outside of the turn system. Or it makes the next check be two-dice-use-the-higher.
But “per three already-explored rooms”, that’s what caused me to really pay attention here! In 5e RAW you can move incredibly quickly through the dungeon, so fast that it’s almost dumb. You move 30 feet per round which is a normal walking speed, less than six km/h, but compared to the creepy crawling of Moldvay’s exploration speed it’s lightning. It’s a hundred times faster! But that’s how we’ve been doing it; exploring new areas Moldvay crawling, re-treading already-explored areas 5e speedwalking a hundred times faster. So things like new exits out or portals throughout the dungeons haven’t been particularly appreciated since we already have pretty much fast travel. “OK, we go back to the room with the bull statue” and that’s just a single exploration turn as long as it’s within 2000′.
Reading this makes me remember that I can have other things trigger encounter checks, not just “three turns passed”.
Goblin Puch shows the math how one d6 roll on the underclock is roughly equivalent to one d6 encounter check. (EV is approx six rolls for both.) So it’s a li’l wild that he’s checking every room—no wonder he’s getting more encounters this way!
Some dungeons are stocked and then the random encounters are just extra, other dungeons instruct us to roll every room in addition to the time-based random encounters. Either works well.
So for me the one-in-eighteen per turn is pretty good since that’s supposed to be extra, an extra risk. OK, no, honestly, it’s a li’l low. Sometimes nothing happens because those ones never get rolled and we’re bored.
My takeaway here is that the least I can do is have three explored rooms count as one turn for random encounter purposes only, it doesn’t cost torch time or shoes. I remember when playing Labyrinth Lord before I started my own group and became a DM, it was exciting that we pointed to the map and said “we wanna go here” and the DM then rolled a bunch of math and said “OK, but as you turn this corner, there’s a patrol of skeletons!” That’s something I loved as a player but that doesn’t typically happen with our own system of “explored space” being that much faster. Even though it’s super expected that something would show up because when you move through huge swaths of dungeon, you’re bound to run into something no matter how well you know the twists and turns there!
I’ve really loved turns in D&D so much that we added them back in to our 5e game from B/X. It’s probably the biggest difference from 5e. Never had a problem with them. I track them in a paper notebook incrementing them on my side, while the players on their side are playing freeform and normally. My latest kick has been drawing a box with an X in it; that’s six lines, one per turn, and each X:d box makes one hour. (It's been working well but I've already learned that I must also come up with a faster-to-draw symbol for just marking hours, when they go by more quickly, like when they travel for two hours in the wilderness.)
So OK. Sticking with turns, and extra encounter checks for noise, but also... nine rooms of explored space is a d6 check. It would be better if I could add these “pseudo”-turns (three rooms of explored space) in with the real turns for encounter check purposes but that’d be super fiddly to track. Keeping them split instead, I can just count the rooms as they “fast travel”.
Whether these numbers are too low, if one-encounter-per-18-turns (three hours) along with one encounter per 54 retreated rooms is too low, that’s a separate issue. They probably are way too low. But that’s a separate question from the shape of the system itself.
Goblin Punch’s clock roll matches one normal roll, it just adds this tense countdown feel, but the main difference is how much often he’s doing the clock rolls. Once per room instead of once per three rooms make it one encounter per hour instead of one per three hours. If that’s what we wanted we could just change the encounter rate from d6 per three turns to d2 per three turns or d6 every single turn or something like that.
Now, the DMs that are switching to the underclock system are doing that because they see other advantages with the system and not just the increased encounter rate. And that’s great! I’m glad they found a tool that they liked. Me, I was like “ah, no, there’s a lot about underclock that I don’t like, it’s a li’l too [symbolic diceland] instead of the diegetics of time passing normally”, what made me pay attention to the article was how it pointed out that 1/18 is low and how explored space is too safe.
Actually maybe it should be a check for every three explored rooms.
With underclock:
(The clock is set up to match an 1/6 roll but he’s rolling it that much more often!)
My old system:
The idea I was juggling around above, I was thinking of bumping explored space danger up to 1/54 but maybe I should go a li’l further!
My players don’t hate encounters, they’re just prudent about their torch time and shoe time, so if I make it so that every three rooms is a d6, or every room is a d20, but don’t charge any more time, maybe that’s gonna make the game more fun for everyone?
Because if I’m moving through a city I’m gonna meet almost the same amount of people if I’m moving quickly through the city as if I’m moving slowly through it? I dunno!