I won't bore you with the details (although I might post about it in the future because I'm basically reskinning dnd for scifi because most scifi systems don't gel with me), but I am building a short campaign where my players find a bomb at the beginning. The bomb will display a timer that I will have on the table that will do a countdown (still playing with how many hours, but I'm thinking 10 hours so we can split it over two days) and obviously when it reaches zero it will go off.
They won't be able to dismantle the bomb but they will be able to slow it (add an extra hour or so) and the only way to stop it is by finding the person who put it there. There's other ways out, like a rescue ship, or escape pods etc etc, but I won't go into it now.
I'm just trying to figure out how to accurately predict a good time frame for this. Normally in dnd the players set the pace a lot of the time so I want to hear some opinions on how to do this in a fun and suspenseful way from people who are used to dm-ing shorter and more structured campaigns. I think it could be super intense and exciting.
What do you think? I'd love to hear all kinds of opinions!
#Does anyone have any experience with using real life timers in DnD?
flint token
faint sundial
the main thing is not having a disjunction between in-game actions and time spent vs the countdown
jaunty pebble
There's one whole system that uses IRL timers for torches, but I haven't played that one.
What I have done that might work here is run an adventure that has a specified number of "turns", which I limited to 10 minutes IRL each. Set the timer for each turn, and let it wind down, then spin down the counter so they can see how many turns are left. If they take an action that specifically takes up a whole turn (you'd have to define these ahead of time), then start the timer over and spin the counter.