In OSR (and possibly other trad gamers I don’t know how wide spread the practice is) a hazard die is used as a clock to tell when an encounter happens. It’s a neat way of taking the load of timing when monsters show up off the GM’s shoulders and I’m for reducing loads on any player.
I have half a thought to introduce a hazard die to the Energy System but in the system’s style. In this case it would be a dice pool. The weird trick is that a hazard die is there to indicate a variable timing mechanism. In this case, that would be when a die depletes. Only that’s really weird because most rolls and their values are just ignored which seems like a waste.
Sometimes you can make a hazard die do more timing tasks. I think that’s what I’d like to do with rolls that don’t deplete but the system already handles most of the other things that people use to track with a hazard die.
It could indicate some kind of distance, or time interval. The system doesn’t really worry about those things though.
I could flip this and make the roll result be the number of dice in the next challenge. That means most rolls would be an encounter, but it doesn’t have to be a monster per se. It just indicates the intensity of the next challenge. When the pool depletes, You’ve reached the end of the adventure.
I’ll mull it over.