I have used a hack in previous games called the Armageddon Clock. The GM keeps a stack of ten to twenty poker chips by his side. Each chip represents an abstract amount of time. When the party does something time-consuming, one chip is removed. When the chips are all gone, something really bad happens to the party.
This could be a good resource that can be depleted in a 7-9 roll. What do you guys think?
Sounds good, kind of like the Doom Pool in Marvel.
On a 7-9 result something concrete has to happen. If a roll results in a purely mechanical change, it can be jarring.
What I was going for was trying to quantify expenditures of time. When time passes, the NPC’s agenda can be advanced. Maybe a smaller clock would be better though.
Addinmg to Adam Koebel ‘s statement, you could “show signs of impending doom” Reduce the counters to something like 5 or 10, and then write as many indicators that the danger is getting more iminent.
Each time you announce one of these things happening – be it in response to a roll or just as a passage of time, you reduce your pool of tokens. That’s pretty much how Fronts work in a simplified way.
But you don’t need all that to have something really bad happen to the party. You’ve got hard moves and impending dooms!
The DW aquivalent would be grim portents.