Using time as ttrpg currency to press urgency

Hey there, I’ve got a bit of a crazy idea in my head. A few months ago I watched a sci-fi movie called “In Time” starring Justin Trousersnake. It was OK to be honest, the hook was that in a dystopian future traditional currency is replaced with ‘life-time’.

The way this worked, upon birth people were augmented with a system that stopped them biologically aging at the point of early adulthood, but at that exact transitional moment, a clock on their wrist starts ticking backwards, counting down the rest of their lifespan.

This life-time as it’s known, is then traded as a currency, your wages are paid in life-time, and you buy your food and pay your rent with life-time.

The film was attempting to make a very blunt point about the modern low tax, low regulation, free-market Western economy, so of course - this situation empowers those that are ahead to get further ahead. It leads to the lower classes getting paid poverty wages forcing them to turn to loan sharks, gambling and criminal activities to survive.

As far as the film’s story goes, life-time creates frenetic pressure on Mr. Trousersnake as he’s literally in a race against time to save his mum, the girl, and the entirety of society from the evils of cAPiTaliSM.

Using real timers in games

OK, carpark that for a second, because now I’m going to talk about Shadowdark RPG and then rein it all back together again.

There’s a cool mechanic in Shadowdark whereby whenever you light a torch, you set a timer going on your phone for 60 minutes. At the end of the timer, the torch goes out. This serves to keep the urgency up and stop the players from becoming too cautious, it encourages them to take creative risks and makes the game much more action packed.

It’s method contrasts against OSR D&D which tries to solve the same problem, but it instead measures the passage of time abstractly using “dungeon turns” as 10 minute blocks per round of player actions (Modern D&D doesn’t bother with any of this, and just encourages hand waving it away).

While Shadowdark’s real-time method isn’t perfect, since the flow of in-game time rarely matches real-world time, it feels more organic and immersive. Traditional dungeon turns require conscious discipline to do right, and can easily feel rigid and boardgame-like, requiring bookkeeping that can bog down gameplay.

All that said, on balance, if you’re used to abstracting anyway, using real timers won’t break verisimilitude, and the Shadowdark method works well.

OK, so what’s the big idea Jimmi - this blog is meant to be about getting to the point?

OK, OK, sheesh. You’ve probably put two and two together by now, or read the title of this post, so I’ll get to the point.

In sci-fi games, what if we applied ‘life-time’ to track player character wealth? You could have them set a timer on their phone which you could add to and subtract from manually as the situation required.

Players could steal life-time from enemies or have it stolen from them. They might raid a bank where dormant life-time is stored on USB-style devices or loan time to desperate NPCs.

My theory is that, like in Shadowdark, that this would drive the player activity and create a sense of urgency at the table, effectively getting rid of those sessions where everyone mulls around with analysis paralysis.

As a bonus, it’d also take care of having to manually account for the weight and amount of your character’s currency!

Conclusion

Using life-time in this way feels like it could be a game changer, but I’ve not tried it myself yet, so I’m going to integrate it into future games of Mothership to see how I get on with it. Mothership specifically seems like a good fit to me, since the tone of the game is all dystopian future and economic horror anyway, but you might be able to bake it into your fantasy games - magic is a thing! Get in touch if you have any thoughts about it. I’m on Bluesky or you could use my contact form.

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