Have you ever, as a GM, spent weeks or months haranguing your players with a major villain to set them up for an awesome final confrontation? Have you ever been disappointed to have said villain killed by a lucky shot before the climax barely got started?
Or on the flip side, have your players ever been tediously bored with a seemingly endless battle of attrition against the Big Boss and his epic reserve of hit points?
Do you envy those awesome cinematic duels and swordfights in movies like Star Wars, the Princess Bride, Rob Roy and all those glorious Errol Flynn pictures?
Yeah me too. So this is where I put together the idea of another use for the Progress Tracker... climactic duels!
Think about it. Using a progress tracker, you can set up a scene that can be far more cinematic than the usual back and forth tedium.
You can keep track of the time that goes by, and the neat terrain and environments that the duel brings the warriors into, offering not only cool backdrops, but hazards, obstacles and useful props.
Example: Your Duel Tracker has nine spaces, with Key Event markers on the 3rd, 6th and 9th places. Every time either combatant takes a turn, advance the tracker by one.
The battle begins in a throne room. Once the tracker reaches the 3rd space, the characters involved have inadvertently headed up some stairs onto a balcony. Once it reaches the 6th space, they've entered an armory, with walls covered in shields, swords and halberds. Once the tracker reaches the 9th and final space, they've exited the palace and onto a narrow bridge over an endless drop. A perfect place to end the duel.
Each environment has its own interesting things to work with. For example, on the stairs, each character has to make a Coordination check on their turn or else stumble, granting an extra fortune dice to his opponent' next action.
The cool thing about this tracker is that you can explain to your players that while the tracker is going on, the characters involved are constantly clashing swords, despite whatever actions are taken. A player can use witty banter and social/support Actions in lieu of attack ones.
You could even replace the concept of doing hit point damage entirely and simply give the wounded target a critical card instead that lasts until the next "scene", or something. Only once the characters reach the final scene (ie, the narrow bridge) do things actually count. That could maybe be handled by an opposed Weapon Skill test, like a tug of war using another tracker.
This is the kind of more abstract storytelling that this game offers thanks to it's useful tools.
What do you think? Have any of you used a system like this before?