This week we are going to play with progress tracks. They are handy to use when solo role playing to give your character some direction and to know how close or far they are from completing their quest. They can be used for tracking resources and the over lap between tracks and clocks is significant, but I’m thinking about what other things could be tracking.

Design a progress track for your character’s emotional or narrative arc, not just mechanical advancement.

Or

Design a progress track for a system you use often which doesn’t already have one.

For my Star Trek Captain’s Log game I created an entire bridge crew and then populated my Mythic Adventure Lists for the crew as a whole. If I roll to move toward or away of a thread there is a chance that it could be the thread of any number of the bridge crew.

I was thinking that one thing to ensure that each character had their moment in the limelight was to create an character arc track for each character. I wrote fairly detailed backgrounds for each character and they are all laced with their motivations, so it would be easy to pull out a development arc for each one and track when they are moving along it.

For example, the chief of security on the ship is a bit more philosophical and idealistic than one might expect from a Chief of Security. It was the reason she was appointed to the job, but she is young and as she continues to travel through space her philosophical and idealistic side will be tested by the practical affairs of life. She will need to learn to balance her idealistic side with the pragmatic nature of her position.

I plan to give her a tracker which will allow me to mark when she moves closer to finding that balance. Anytime that her philosophical side comes in odds with the practical world and she is able to learn from that experience she gets a mark. Once the track is done, I’ll have some kind of culminating experience and set her off on a new path.

How else have you used tracks in the past?

Please share your ideas with us.