3.The Spotlight Tracker

3. The Spotlight Tracker (Extended)

3.1 Base Rule (from the Daggerheart core rules)

At the start of a session or scene, each player takes 3 tokens. Spend one token each time a stake gets resolved (see §3.2). When a player hits 0 tokens, the spotlight skips them — until everyone has spent all of theirs. Then tokens refresh.

3.2 What Costs a Token: The Stake Rule

The trigger is not “a roll happened.” It’s not “a resource was spent.” It is:

A token is spent when a stake in the story gets resolved. That’s when the scene moves from “we don’t know what happens” to “here’s what happened.” That can come from a dice roll, or from the GM simply ruling automatic success or failure.

This means:

Idle roleplay, jokes, and color with nothing at stake: free, no token.
A GM-ruled automatic win or loss on something that mattered (a locked door, talking past a guard): costs a token, even with no roll.
Any action roll that settles a real question: costs a token.
Spending Hope to invoke an Aspect, use a Hope Feature, or adjust a roll that’s already happening: free, no extra token. It rides along on the token that roll is already spending.

Example: At the shrine, the bard cracks a joke about the Overseer’s mood. No stakes, no token. Then the warrior tries to force open the shrine’s sealed door. That’s a real question with real stakes, so it costs a token whether she rolls or not. The GM just rules it open automatically, since it’s clearly within her strength. It still costs the token, because a question (“can she get through?”) just got answered. Later, the ranger spends Hope on the “Riddled with Updrafts” Aspect during her own jump roll. That’s free, since it’s just boosting a roll that’s already spending its own token.

3.3 Scope: All Scenes, Not Just Combat

The core rules say “session or scene.” They don’t say “combat only.” This supplement makes that rule explicit everywhere. The tracker works the same way in social and exploration scenes as it does in a fight, using the same trigger. This does two things:

Keeps the spotlight fair — every player gets a countable claim on scene focus, even outside combat, where the loudest player would otherwise take over.
One rule to learn, works everywhere — players learn it wherever it comes up first, and it carries over cleanly.

Example: The party has a tense talk with a mountain-pass warlord. There’s no combat at all. Normally the party’s most talkative player would carry every exchange. But the Spotlight Tracker applies here too. Each resolved stake — a persuasion roll, a GM-ruled bluff that clearly works — costs that player a token, same as in a fight. Once she’s out of tokens, the spotlight naturally moves to a quieter player.

🎨 Art Prompt — The Warlord's Table
a weathered mountain warlord in fur and iron armor seated at a long
wooden table inside a smoky stone hall, surrounded by silent armored
retainers, a small adventuring party standing before him
mid-negotiation, torches casting long shadows on carved stone walls,
tense diplomatic atmosphere, painterly fantasy illustration, warm
firelight against cold stone, detailed character expressions,
cinematic composition --ar 16:9

3.4 Optional Tightening: Per-Round Refresh

The base rule refreshes tokens once every player has spent all of theirs. That’s scarcity at the scene level. A table that wants tighter pressure, round by round, can instead refresh each player’s 3 tokens every combat round.

Caution: this raises the cost of a bad Difficulty guess by a lot (see §7). Pair it with clear Difficulty communication before you run it.

3.5 The Scene Clock — Different From Standard Countdowns (new — formalized and corrected here)

The core rules already have Countdowns. They solve a different problem than this section is for. A Countdown lives inside the story. It tracks a real threat, or a piece of progress the characters could actually see — like siege weapons breaking through a wall, or a thief racing to their hideout. Standard countdowns move by 1 per action roll. Dynamic countdowns move by a different amount depending on how well the roll went. Critical Success moves it 3. Success with Hope moves it 2. Success with Fear moves it 1. Failure with Hope moves it 0. And here’s the key part — they can move the wrong way. A Failure with Fear can push a Consequence Countdown down hard. Or it can push a Progress Countdown up, undoing progress already made. The core rules run these side by side too. The Bustling Marketplace’s Sticky Fingers feature races a Progress Countdown (6) against an independent Consequence Countdown (4). Two clocks, different sizes, different triggers, and neither one based on how many players are at the table. This is a solid tool already. This supplement isn’t replacing it.

What Countdowns don’t give you is a promise that the scene will ever end. Since dynamic countdowns can move backward, a scene built only from Countdowns has no guarantee it wraps up. Every tick can be doing exactly what it’s supposed to, while the scene as a whole swings back and forth — progress, setback, progress, setback — for as long as the table keeps rolling. Nothing in the core rules puts a ceiling on that.

That’s the exact gap the Scene Clock fills. It’s worth being clear about what kind of tool it is, since it’s easy to mistake for “just a Countdown with different flavor text” — it isn’t one. The simplest way to picture it: it works like the player deck in the board game Pandemic, not like an in-story threat. When Pandemic’s deck runs out, the game ends — right then, no matter how well things were going, no matter what you were about to do next. That deck was never tracking something happening in the game’s world. It was always just the number of moves you get. The whole game is about making the most of that fixed budget, not racing to beat some in-story countdown. The Scene Clock works the same way:

One-way. It only ever moves in one direction. It can’t move backward, can’t be paused, can’t reverse on a bad roll the way a Countdown can.
One per scene, never more than one. Two Scene Clocks would just be two ceilings competing with each other — that defeats the whole point.
Outside the story, not inside it. It isn’t tracking a threat, a fire, or a rival. It’s a limit on table time, sitting one level above whatever’s happening in the story. The characters can’t sense it at all.
Its count is the sum of every Spotlight token spent by any player in the scene (using §3.2’s trigger). Not a separate number to track — just a running total of tokens you’re already tracking. At 0: the scene’s limit has been reached. This isn’t a fresh complication made up on the spot. The consequence was already announced ahead of time (decided and told to the players before the scene starts, per §7). It simply locks in. Whatever’s unresolved when the tokens run out stays unresolved, the same way an unfinished Pandemic turn doesn’t get extra time just because you were close. This is a hard stop on table time, not a story beat the GM springs on the players.

Sizing. This is a starting point, not a formula for every scene. Use ticks per player:

Standard: 3 ticks / player
Major: 2 ticks / player
Climactic: 1–2 ticks / player Big, high-stakes scenes still get exactly one Scene Clock. Think of a campaign-defining battle, with lots of enemies and goals. Just make the number bigger. The GM sizes it by judgment, not the per-player formula. This matches how the core rules size their own Countdowns — by how big the moment feels, not by party size. Castle Siege’s Countdown is 6. Cliffside Ascent’s is 12. Neither one is based on how many PCs show up. Underneath that single ceiling, run as many standard Countdowns as the story needs — a siege-weapons Consequence Countdown, a reinforcements trigger, a personal duel clock, all racing each other, exactly like Sticky Fingers does. These aren’t competing tools. Countdowns handle in-story tension and can swing freely. The single Scene Clock overhead just makes sure the table doesn’t drag on for four hours right along with them.

Playtest finding: pick the tier based on how many complications you expect, not just party size. Two heists had the same basic shape — three PCs, locate/bypass/secure/extract. But they felt very different at the table. Tier alone wasn’t the reason why. One had a Major-tier clock (6, for 3 players). That scene kept generating its own complications, like a fire that caught faster than expected, moving the deadline up on its own. It ran all the way to zero on the final roll. No slack left anywhere. The other had a Standard-tier clock (9, for 3 players). That run was cleaner — no extra escalation, mostly solid rolls. It finished at 5, with room to spare. Clock size and how many complications show up are two separate dials. They add together. They don’t stand in for each other. Weigh both when picking a tier, not just party size.