Pacing Mechanics

[Totally Guy]

I was rereading Lacuna last night and I started thinking about how amazing pacing mechanics are.

They are basically things change the game as the game progresses to deliver new twists and put different kinds of pressure on the players.

In Lacuna, (sort of like Inception, you adventure in a dream world) there are two pacing mechanics: Heartbeat and Static

Heartbeat gives the player a limited number of dice rolls with which to play with. After a few rolls they become much better than normal but after that sweet spot is exhausted you hit a point where rolling to influence the dream can kill you. Then there's Static. When certain things (bad) happen in play the GM counts a point of Static. After so many points have been accumulated the dream world becomes more twisted and more enemies are introduced.

What other games use a pacing mechanic? What's it like?

What do you like about them? What do you dislike about them?

[The Rose Dragon]

It sort of reminds me of Don't Rest Your Head, where players have three pools of dice, and the GM gets one pool of dice. The GM's dice pool is mostly static per antagonist, but the players have Discipline, Exhaustion and Madness. Discipline represents your normal skills, Exhaustion represents your insomniac powers and Madness represents your super powers. However, whenever you start tapping the latter two pools, there is a chance that you will get a higher rating in your Exhaustion and Madness, which means you must roll more dice from them, which brings you closer to crashing or nightmares. The ultimate goal is to regain your ability to sleep without attracting unwanted attention, but you also need to be alive to do so, and some enemies are too powerful to be defeated with Discipline alone.

[NichG]

I generally like the idea, but I think it needs to be limited to certain chunks of time, rather than a game-long resource like Sanity in Call of Cthulhu. Otherwise, you end up getting player fatigue or overcautiousness, where players become afraid to take any sort of action since it'll likely just carry them along a death spiral.

Within a single session or a handful of sessions though, it can make it so the game doesn't fall into a rut. DMs often have to work to make sure that everyone in the party has a chance to shine - it'd be interesting if you had a system where different classes or character abilities functioned better or worse during different segments of the pacing, sort of a natural way to vary the importance of different characters.

[Knaight]

Dread has a really nice pacing mechanic, due to its task resolution system. One pulls blocks from a Jenga tower, and if the Jenga tower collapses bad things happen. What this means is that tension naturally ratchets up, until the tower collapses and is rebuilt, dropping it and allowing it to come back up again. Trail of Cthulhu uses a similar concept (depletion of an inherently limited concept), but it doesn't do quite as good a job with it, in my opinion.

[mint]

Dread has a really nice pacing mechanic, due to its task resolution system. One pulls blocks from a Jenga tower, and if the Jenga tower collapses bad things happen. What this means is that tension naturally ratchets up, until the tower collapses and is rebuilt, dropping it and allowing it to come back up again. Trail of Cthulhu uses a similar concept (depletion of an inherently limited concept), but it doesn't do quite as good a job with it, in my opinion.

I ruthlessly stole the Jenga pacing mechanic and apply it to 3.5 when appropriate and sometimes when it isn't (which is even more fun sometimes).
It is such a clever thing. Dread rocks.