The Gaming Den

Posted: **Mon Jul 11, 2016 2:56 pm**

Are there any good rules that give downtime options for adventurers? There's using the straight Perform/Profession/Craft skill checks to make turnip money. Spellcasters who take item crafting feats can end up spending a bunch of their time downtime making magic items; a lantern of revealing takes about a month, for example. That's just out of the core book, be it Pathfinder or 3.X.

There's the business rules out of the DMG2, which are likely needing the Economicon's suggested tweaks to be better, but I don't know if 'better' is enough to count as 'good'.

There's also just taking a piece of the Tome of Prowess, the Background Abilities specifically, and otherwise using the rest of the rules as-is; providing actual training options. I've had one player express concern about that, because they don't like the idea of a wizard missing out on being scholarly due to the conflicting need to craft magic items; though I personally felt like just blinking slowly at them and going "...so?" They were also worried about monster lore stuff, but I've personally found the overall Knowledge (bear) mechanics to be garbage.

Pathfinder has a system for downtime, but this is Paizo we're talking about; and most of their work is a garbage fire. In theory, this instance could be an exception, but I haven't read it in any detail to say one way or the other.

Are there any other options or considerations?

Posted: **Mon Jul 11, 2016 3:12 pm**

Any part of the Pathfinder downtime rules that relate to running a business are broken in interesting and sometimes hilarious ways, but the rest of it (retraining, making items, changing animal companions, training animals, "scheming" to get some tokens that can be redemmed for +2 skill bonuses on an upcoming known adventure, etc) is fine. Hardly revolutionary though - most of it is just consolidating various skill uses.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 12:43 am**

The business rules are ... very Paizo. Like a microcosm of Paizo design, in that they have lots of intricate parts, which are all individually costed, but no overall design (or not a good one, anyway).

You can run a business with the kind of buildings and staff that make sense ... and then it will bring in tiny, piddly amounts of gp that might pay for itself after many months.

Or, you can create a garbage-dump empire by just building tons of Pits, rolling separately for each one (bad math in the rules), and reinvesting the profits into more Pits. And eventually some Laborers to help you build Pits, and later on a few Guards to help you recruit Laborers. I tried calculating it one time, and IIRC you can go from one Pit to millions of gold per day in less than a year.

Posted: **Thu Jul 14, 2016 6:54 am**

Dowtime/prep time is best when the system is built from the ground up to support it and PC's/NPC's have abilities that interact with the rules. Say Hunter's Moon:

http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=56491

Pursuit ("Legwork"): The phase starts off with the GM determining what the monster is up to, and then the PC's react to that.

-Monster roll: The GM rolls for what the monster is up to such as targeting specific people or going on a rampage, if the monster succeeds they get a benefit like a new ability to use, more morale (ablative hitpoints). and PC’s have to roll against that skill to stop it

-Location roll: Determines where the upcoming battle takes place, locations have unique effects like “Warehouse: players receive a free item”, “subway: anyone who rolls a fumble takes damage from being hit by a train”.

PC’s get 1 action to spend on things like researching the monster's weakness, stopping the monster from eating people, and so on:
-Weakness investigation: Finding out the monster’s weakness, making it easier to kill the monster or figuring out what body part you have to damage to disable its powers ("By piercing its chest it can't breath fire anymore!")

-Behavior Investigation: Finding out what the monster’s capabilities are, what triggers its super powers. ("The monster feeds off of anger and gets stronger when it senses it")
-Location Change: Change location of battle ("This monster flies, lets not fight it on the cliffside")
-Practice: Training, prepping weapons and so on, gives a bonus to the next battle.
-Support: Lower emotion, change status condition of allies (healing them), change emotion from fear/hate

It's all actions that directly affect the upcoming battle encounter, or deal with recovering between encounters.

The dungeon crawler Darkest Dungeon also has a nice camping system:
http://darkestdungeon.gamepedia.com/Camp

You have X amount of time units to spend on fortifying the camp from ambush, healing HP and stress, getting combat boosts for the next battle, and so on.

The Gaming Den

Adventurer Downtime

Adventurer Downtime