For the past 4-5 years I've read, played, and run quite a few Forged in the Dark games, everything from the classics like Blades in the Dark and Scum & Villainy to more recent showings like Beam Saber and Girl by Moonlight, and even my friends' own Songs for the Dusk or CASE & SOUL.
Across all of those games, no matter how conservative or esoteric the other game mechanics are relative to other FitD titles, one mechanic (that, truthfully, is almost not a mechanic unto itself) remains pretty evergreen - progress clocks, a simple way of visually representing some obstacles for PCs to overcome, or the countdown towards an impending narrative event, or whatever else the game or GM needs.
Clocks might truly be the closest to a universally-applicable TTRPG mechanic (if you want to be reductive, dealing damage to a pool of HP until enemies die in D&D is basically a progress clock with extra steps and way more granular math), but they are not the only way of going about it, and today I want to highlight how one of my favorite systems, Wild Words (link to the draft SRD), which powers one of my favorite RPGs ever, The Wildsea, handles it.
The Wildsea as a game and the underlying Wild Words framework by extension obviously owes a lot to FitD design (Blades gets cited on the book's opening page!), with mechanics like Wildsea's d6 dice pool with 1-3/4-5/6 result bands (though the SRD does gesture at other dice systems), and a progress-measuring mechanism like tracks, but tracks are not clocks in some interesting ways that I want to talk about in this post.
Firstly, there is the obvious visual difference - a clock is a circle with slices inside, a track is a linked chain of circles or squares. Already this has some fun quirks to it, simply in terms of drawing the two (on a physical page or a virtual tabletop or what have you) - tracks take up a scaling amount of horizontal space, whereas clocks are pretty static in their surface area (just split it up into more slices).
Because of this, clocks can only really be (easily and nicely, at least) created in 2-slice increments, and 12 is kind of the upper limit in most cases - in contrast, it's very easy to draw up a 5, 7, or 20-step track without it looking too ugly or strange. (Though an overlong track can be similarly boring to an overlarge clock - but track breaks can help with that, more on those in a bit)
Almost directly related to that, the rates at which clocks and tracks generally fill up also differ - FitD clocks tend to advance in multi-step increments (most often, anywhere between 2 and 5 at a time, in my experience), whereas WW tracks generally advance by one, maybe two marks at a time (The Wildsea at least has some caveats to that, such as Massive impact [née effect] that can fill an entire track at once, and hazards that deal damage to players' aspects in larger, more FitD-like chunks) - this is pretty neutral by itself, ultimately, but does have a slightly different feel to it, and how it interacts with pacing.
Hell, one-step tracks are totally a thing you can do (such as some especially potent and therefore 'fragile' character abilities in the Wildsea) - meanwhile, when's the last time you saw a one-step clock?
Where things diverge more significantly is in the additional 'tech' that the two have - the progress clocks page outlines things like racing, linked, and tug-of-war clocks, but I've found those to be quite rare in my experience, and most FitD games don't really have any extra functionality to the clocks themselves, with it being mostly dependent on the specific rule or subsystem they are attached to (like faction clocks that tie into GM-facing downtime bits, or recovery clocks that interact with player-facing downtime actions and currency like coin) - maybe there are some games that do something extra there (there's a lot of FitD games out there, after all!), but I haven't seen them.
In contrast, even in their original Wildsea iteration, tracks already do few additional things, as outlined in the SRD and seen in the Wildsea and its expansion, Storm & Root.
For starters, there's track breaks, which I suppose do have their clock counterpart by way of linked clocks, where you string together multiple tracks, or perhaps break one up into smaller chunks, to signify changes and twists and turns in an encounter or some other scenario.
In this example, to paraphrase the source, the entire track covers a group of seafaring marauders (one bad guy per box, perhaps), and hitting the break towards the end signifies their ship ramming the PCs' vessel, damaging the hull and destabilizing the deck. You could probably do this with clocks, of course, but replicating this 1:1, as an 11-step (oof) clock with a break jutting out the side near the end would be strange to say the least (and that much more awkward when you play online, as I exclusively do). It's like programming, or real-world languages - you can approximately express just about anything in any language, but certain concepts are just easier or more elegant to convey in some than others.
The other big thing that tracks have going for them over plain clocks is that where clocks are binary (a segment is either marked or unmarked), tracks are trinary by default, where boxes can be marked, unmarked, or 'burned' - represented by a cross rather than a slash (I suppose this is another minor difference between clocks and tracks: clocks you can fill in however), wherein removing such a burn is permanent or at least much more difficult to undo than a regular mark, which can translate to either heavy mechanical effort (like resource expenditure) or serious narrative focus (like a side quest's worth) - though burn can theoretically be a good thing to the players too (such as gaining strong, deep trust of an NPC that is not gonna fade away as easily).
Again, could you 'burn' a step on a progress clock? Probably, though you'd need to establish a convention between what a normal mark versus a burn looks like (like hatching versus cross-hatching), and it would likewise be awkward to represent in online play, or at least through text - whereas it's pretty straightforward to do this for a track [X]-[/]-[ ]-[ ].
There are some other things in both the base Wildsea game and the aforementioned expansion that further do cool things with tracks that you couldn't do if the game just used clocks (like the Mire mechanic in the base game, or the Scrutiny mechanic in the expansion), but that's getting too into the specifics of Wildsea versus generalized Wild Words design, and this is already a very long post, but I hope it illustrates why I'm as obsessed with the Wildsea and Wild Words as I am!
