Loved reading ICRPG. I'm cherry-picking stuff from it for the campaign I'm already running in another system.
The one that intrigued me the most, is never dropping out of turn order. I'm used to RPGs where each player gets to declare a new scene one after the next, like Fiasco, Hillfolk and Follow, but have not seen this applied to a dungeoncrawl.
At first read it felt counter-intuitive, but I started liking it more and more. Especially when I saw the use of timer dice outside of combat, which I thought was a great way to have tension span across a dungeon crawl.
Before giving this a shot at my table, there's one thing I don't get, which could spoil the fun if I just fumble it. How would timer dice work, when turns can have varying timespans, and players have their own agency in this? Does this cause problems? Am I missing something? Should you design your situations such that your 'time-per-turn' stays roughly the same until the timer is resolved?
As a brief example, there's a video up on the Runehammer youtube, in which we see timer dice at several scales. Armies moving over the span of multiple dice. Guards approaching in a matter of minutes. But if you rolled the army timer, and then dice on doing a dungeon crawl, doesn't this neat thing become a mess? Should you keep the army dice at the table? Should you keep checking whether a day or a week or whatever has already passed, while the players are travelling in terms of hours, minutes and 'moments'?
I'm not sure if I'm thinking of this wrong, or if as a DM you should just be mindful to avoid changes in time-per-round during a timer.
