Why I dislike 10-Minute Turns (And Why I Love the Clock)

If you aren't familiar with Goblin Punch's Underclock, I'd recommend reading that before reading this.

I doubt I'm about to say anything that hasn't been said before, but I think the concept of 10 minute turns for dungeon exploration is silly. I get the point: provide a simple and consistent procedure for dungeon exploration to make resource management and random encounter generation as easy as possible. Does it do that? Yes, sort of. It does it effectively enough, though I think we can do better (chances are, we can always do better). Let me start with my major points against 10 minute turns.

1. Let's start with the most obvious: 10 minute turns break verisimilitude. By their nature, they are restrictive. Everything must fit into a 10 minute slot or a 0 minute slot, even things for which either slot makes no sense. It also leaves no opportunity for "something you thought would take long took basically no time" or the opposite.
2. I find 10 minute turns extraordinary tedious. Mark down duration, roll for random encounters, so on and so forth. There's a laundry list of things that must be done after every single turn, which is an issue when taking turns are the most common action players do.
3. I find turns actively discourage experimentation. If you know that any action can result in wasting 10 minutes, then taking actions becomes a dangerous dance of "will this take 10 minutes". Examining a cool statue becomes risky when it could mean losing a sixth of your torch and a roll for random encounters. Ultimately this problem is born of the restrictive nature of 10 minute turns, but I'm listing it separately because I feel it is an extreme antithesis to the game we play.
4. Random encounters lose a lot of interest when they are truly random. Random encounters are best as a tool to drive the narrative and build suspense, but when they just appear they lose a lot of interest.

If you read about the Underclock, I'm sure you can see where this is going.

I've finally be given an opportunity to run a new campaign for some friends, and I've been using the Underclock in it, though I simply refer to it as the Clock. Whenever the players do something that takes time, or makes noise, I roll a d6 and subtract it from 20, with 6's exploding. When they do something that takes a VERY long time, or makes a lot of noise while taking time, I'll roll multiple d6's, with 6's exploding. When the Clock strikes below 0, a random encounter appears. That's not all I do, but it's the gist.

The big point of the Clock is that the players can see it. Random encounters are no longer truly random, the players now know when things are going to happen and tension is built. They plan around the Clock, but I think that's a good thing. Adventurers should have a sixth sense for when something is about to go wrong. This fixes problem 4.

It also helps that a full cycle of the Clock is approximately an hour. Things take as much time as they need, as represented by the roll of the d6. If the roll is low, then it didn't take much time. If the roll is high, it took a while. This fixes issue 1. The whole rolling for the Clock thing is easy too. Just some d6's and simple subtraction, and when it goes below 0 an hour has passed and torches will go out and spells will need to be reset. Makes issue 2 a non factor too. And finally, because I control when the clock is rolled, I can choose not to roll it for things that are short and simple. Examing a statue could take 2 minutes. That's not worthy of the Clock, and fixes issue 3.

Basically, I wrote all this to talk about how much I like the Underclock and how much it fixes one of my largest issues with old school play. I'm not saying it's perfect for you, but it is perfect for me, partially because I am a fan of cutting a lot of the fat out of my games. I find such strict time keeping unnecessary for the way I play, so I prefer a system that removes it.