On Downtime

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The Adventurer's Almanac
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On Downtime

Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

D&D and its many derivatives don't formally give you much to do during downtime. There's shit you can do, and downtime might be the best time to do it, but much like the rest of D&D, it's pretty slapdash. Let's say you're making a game and you don't want some hasty shit that's a footnote in the resting section: What should you consider when you're baking a downtime system into the game? I imagine this has a lot to do with the rest of the system, but let's assume it's for a level & class-based fantasy heartbreaker. What are some things you should include and avoid?

I understand that it's a poor idea to allow characters to amass personal power during their ales & whoring period, but how much is too much? If my character has a background as a blacksmith, should I be able to go pound out some nails for money? What if that's a fairly sustainable lifestyle and I can just go do that? Should I be able to open up my own smithy and get some apprentices and start selling my shit and make the game about that? What about downtime actions when you're in the wilderness?
I have rough ideas on all of this stuff, but I wanted to see the Den's opinion on this one. I think a robust downtime system could add a lot to a game, but I think lots of robust systems can add to a game...
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Re: On Downtime

Post by Blicero »

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote: What if [blacksmithings]'s a fairly sustainable lifestyle and I can just go do that? Should I be able to open up my own smithy and get some apprentices and start selling my shit and make the game about that?
Probably not, that sounds super boring for the other players in your elfgame
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Post by RobbyPants »

If your game directly exchanges money for in-game power, you're probably not going to want to let characters just get "free" money because they wrote "blacksmith" on their character sheet.

Now, if you really want professions, there are still reasons your character might want to be a blacksmith. Your game might feature weapon durability or magic item crafting. Still, there will probably be some professions that translate poorly to things an adventurer would want to do.

Probably the worst, or at least weirdest thing I've seen regarding downtime was the roleplay rules included in the Warhammer Quest board game. I think the goal was to try and keep people just being in dungeons all the time, or something. Traveling to cities involved rolling several times on a dangerous wilderness chart. The bigger the city, the more you traveled, so the more rolls you had to endure. Then, getting shit done in town involved rolls to see if you could find what you wanted. Each week spent in town had an increasing chance in ridiculous catastrophes befalling the town. Whether or not these things happened in your absence was not discussed. If yes, it's unclear how any town is still standing. If no, then the heroes are probably all massive pariahs for being shit magnets.
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Post by Foxwarrior »

There's some appeal to being able to represent stories where the characters spend fewer than half of their waking hours doing intense commando raids into historic cultural sites, like, what if the party archaeologist spent a few weeks cataloguing things the party found and reading dusty tomes to figure out which ancient tomb to despoil next?

The biggest problem is being predictable and limited with how much downtime you get. If the players are completely in control of downtime, they may well go "yeah, let's spend the next twenty years crafting some sweet gear before we go to take on the big boss", and at that point you've completely lost the ability to use the amount of time something takes as a cost. In our Shadowrun campaign we decided to always get one week of downtime between adventures (and Shadowrun has plenty of downtime abilities that are priced on the "couple days" scale). Age of Worms is written to allow unlimited downtime between most modules, but when the players are constantly googling "what will the enemies do next, and when" I ended up picking the shortest amount of time, or close to it, between modules, and then the players still had days or weeks to interfere with events most of the time.
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Post by brized »

It would take a bunch of iterations to get right, but downtime as a resource to gain power can work if there's a secondary required resource:

Leveling up:
  • X days training and:
    Meeting XP requirements.
Researching monster weaknesses, rituals, non-core spells, item blueprints, etc.:
  • X days researching and:
    A library/university/etc. of minimum size/value.
Crafting gear/structures/vehicles:
  • X days working and:
    Equipped magic items have a limit based on character level.
    In-game resources that require adventuring to get, or:
    Functional economy (at least baked-in daily/weekly/monthly limits on what you can buy, ideally diminishing returns as well).
Developing NPC contacts or raising an army:
  • X days hustling and:
    NPCs that can do things that PCs can't, or won't due to prohibitive cost in character resources.
    In-game resources that require adventuring to get, or:
    Functional economy.
    If there are armies, requires a functional mass combat system.
Gathering raw materials or making money in a profession:
  • X days working and:
    Functioning system with baked-in returns based on location (desert, mountains, forest, sacred grove, town, metropolis, etc.) and diminishing returns.
The amount of days increase geometrically or exponentially with character/item/army/NPC level depending on the setting.
Quest rewards can be material resources for the above, or shorten time to complete: Find the Valley of the Jedi, an Elerium Core, get the help of Tony Stark's engineering team, training from Yoda, etc.

Use plots that only last a day or so (think Predator, Aliens, Tremors, Die Hard, etc.).

For longer-term adventures, use a timer to discover early on like in Red Hand of Doom, Masks of Nyarlathotep, XCOM 2, etc. so PCs know how long they have to prepare/power up before they fail, and way to buy more time with some limits, risk, and/or opportunity cost.
Last edited by brized on Fri Apr 10, 2020 8:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Tumbling Down wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:I'm really tempted to stat up a 'Shadzar' for my game, now.
An admirable sentiment but someone beat you to it.
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Post by Kaelik »

What my fiends and fortresses rules attempt to do is structure player actions so they have periodic encounters regardless of what they choose to do with their downtime and while downtime is theoretically powerful in that you can use it to prepare the amount of preparation you can get is limited and the best permanent source is improving your fortress and/or your position in the fortress so that you can be better prepared for future encounters.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

Foxwarrior wrote:The biggest problem is being predictable and limited with how much downtime you get. If the players are completely in control of downtime, they may well go "yeah, let's spend the next twenty years crafting some sweet gear before we go to take on the big boss", and at that point you've completely lost the ability to use the amount of time something takes as a cost.
I agree, this is the sticking point for me. I find it difficult to conceptualize limiting the players' ability to go into downtime without straitjacketing the game flow.
brized wrote:The amount of days increase geometrically or exponentially with character/item level depending on the setting. Quest rewards can be material resources for the above, or shorten time to complete: Find the Valley of the Jedi, an Elerium Core, get the help of Tony Stark's engineering team, training from Yoda, etc.
This is partially what I had in mind - you can fuck off and do downtime stuff for a while if you want, but it still carries a cost or requirement of some kind. Even if you're just hanging out in town, unless you're a homesteader who owns property then you probably require a certain amount of money to survive. You can sit around buying whores all you want, but you're just burning a hole in your pocket and available time left in your imaginary life. Ideally the things you do during downtime are directly related to the shit you do when you're adventuring.
Kaelik wrote:What my fiends and fortresses rules attempt to do is structure player actions so they have periodic encounters regardless of what they choose to do with their downtime and while downtime is theoretically powerful in that you can use it to prepare the amount of preparation you can get is limited and the best permanent source is improving your fortress and/or your position in the fortress so that you can be better prepared for future encounters.
Kaelik, you've been getting a bit ranty lately and it's hard to understand your posts sometimes. That aside, how do you go about doing this without it feeling contrived?
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Post by Kaelik »

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:
Kaelik wrote:What my fiends and fortresses rules attempt to do is structure player actions so they have periodic encounters regardless of what they choose to do with their downtime and while downtime is theoretically powerful in that you can use it to prepare the amount of preparation you can get is limited and the best permanent source is improving your fortress and/or your position in the fortress so that you can be better prepared for future encounters.
Kaelik, you've been getting a bit ranty lately and it's hard to understand your posts sometimes. That aside, how do you go about doing this without it feeling contrived?
I've always been ranty but right now my internet is down so this is all from my phone. But a lot of work comes at the setting level by having there be specific places that are "safer" and by extension having more resources and being subject to attacks for those resources.

Some of it is "contrived" like the part that says if PCs are working in defense then they always get an encounter when someone attacks even though normally some defenders are not going to be involved in every attack. But I think that a certain amount of contrivedness is fine.

But the main part is like the Dungenomicon business rules. By tying up players power investment in a big physical thing and a group of other creatures who work with them it both makes more sense that they would get hit in general since they are bigger and makes them care about defending a larger group of people.
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Post by deaddmwalking »

In combat time (and a lesser extent during exploration) it's pretty easy to make sure every player is involved in what is happening to the party. It absolutely makes sense that downtime is primarily an individual endeavor. The mage researching a new spell or someone forging a new weapon aren't going to require everyone's involvement; as such, these are often best handled in a montage or sequence, or through one-on-one with the DM.

If your 'downtime activity' requires the active participation of the entire party and is directly relevant to the adventure they're on, congratulations, you've replaced downtime with adventuring.

It would be possible to encourage downtime with semi-random events that are generally positive. These could be related to side-quests, or begin introducing characters or resources that might be tapped later. Perhaps more importantly, they can serve to give players a sense of a larger world. In a computer game like Grand Theft Auto, one of the things that surprises/entertains a lot of people is that NPCs are scripted; they'll go to their job, go home and appear to live normal-ish lives. Using downtime as a chance to introduce characters that the players are then invested in if they encounter them again later can't be understated.

It's also important to recognize that a lot of players enjoy a certain amount of fantasy wish-fulfillment. Even if you're bagging groceries in real-life, you're a dragon-killing hero in the game world. Having players receive recognition from the villagers (free drinks, general respect) don't imply risk to life-and-limb, but having bigwigs seek out and consult the PCs about minor things can offer a lot of role-playing and serve as a whole other category of reward.

Ultimately, that means that you have to have things planned for when the PCs aren't dungeon-delving, whether generating random-tables or carefully crafting some additional events... It's easy to make the decision that it doesn't add ENOUGH to make it worth fully committing to. It's going to depend on your players and your GM.
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Post by brized »

The Adventurer's Almanac wrote:This is partially what I had in mind - you can fuck off and do downtime stuff for a while if you want, but it still carries a cost or requirement of some kind. Even if you're just hanging out in town, unless you're a homesteader who owns property then you probably require a certain amount of money to survive. You can sit around buying whores all you want, but you're just burning a hole in your pocket and available time left in your imaginary life. Ideally the things you do during downtime are directly related to the shit you do when you're adventuring.
That reminds me, you ever play Darkest Dungeon? They have a sanity meter that's recovered in various ways like drinking, praying, gambling, whoring, etc. and some characters recover faster some ways than others. That could be flipped where you can get a bonus for a day or a week depending on how you relax for X days or something like that.
Tumbling Down wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:I'm really tempted to stat up a 'Shadzar' for my game, now.
An admirable sentiment but someone beat you to it.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

deaddmwalking wrote:It would be possible to encourage downtime with semi-random events that are generally positive. These could be related to side-quests, or begin introducing characters or resources that might be tapped later. Perhaps more importantly, they can serve to give players a sense of a larger world. In a computer game like Grand Theft Auto, one of the things that surprises/entertains a lot of people is that NPCs are scripted; they'll go to their job, go home and appear to live normal-ish lives. Using downtime as a chance to introduce characters that the players are then invested in if they encounter them again later can't be understated.
You're almost making it sound like there should be random encounters for spending time in town, similarly to how there are random encounters in the wilderness. Obviously you'd need a different attitude towards town encounters, but I've always enjoyed rolling on a table and introducing a new NPC to the party.
brized wrote:That reminds me, you ever play Darkest Dungeon? They have a sanity meter that's recovered in various ways like drinking, praying, gambling, whoring, etc. and some characters recover faster some ways than others. That could be flipped where you can get a bonus for a day or a week depending on how you relax for X days or something like that.
I've played way too much of that game and I already have homebrew bonuses for resting in nice conditions in my pokemon game. I think a sanity meter is only necessary for games with a certain theme, though.
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Post by OgreBattle »

brized wrote:
That reminds me, you ever play Darkest Dungeon? They have a sanity meter that's recovered in various ways like drinking, praying, gambling, whoring, etc. and some characters recover faster some ways than others. That could be flipped where you can get a bonus for a day or a week depending on how you relax for X days or something like that.
Their camping-in-dangerous-area system is also great.

I like how Hunter's Moon seeems to do downtime. It's balancing "stop the monster from eating innocent people" vs "make sure you don't die when you fight the monster, figure out weakness, get the magic artifact etc"
OgreBattle wrote:Been reading about Japanese tabletop RPG's on various blogs, one of the things that gets mentioned is Japanese groups tend to meet less often, like once a month, and games are focused more on one-shot so there's an emphasis on quick character generation but not much on character growth over multiple sessions.

Here's a breakdown of how Hunter's Moon works.


Character Creation
You start with character motivation that gives a general motive of why your PC is hunting monsters. An 'avenger' lost something precious to a monster and is out for revenge, a thrill seeker just wants to test himself and get the adrenaline flowing, a magician belongs to an order with a duty to hunt monsters, and so on. You determine if your character 'hates' or 'fears' the monster, hate means when your hitpoints are low your attack power rises, while fear means when your hitpoints are low your defense rises.

You then pick from a list of skills that you're good at. Different attack powers are tied to skills, and you can have skills disabled from damage. This also applies to monsters.

The game has set phases called "Sundown", "Night", and "Sunrise", so it represents one night of hunting for one gameplay session. Sundown, Night and Sunrise are broken down into further phases of...


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

After that's done you move on to...


Battle: PC’s run into the monster and fight

Battles are pretty short, with everyone getting maybe 1-3 turns before one side has to flee or dies. Hunter's Moon has a 'ablative hp and real hp' system with 'morale' (restores after battle) and 'hp' (when you lose hp you roll to see if you take injuries that disable skills and abilities).

This cycle of "Legwork-> Battle" is then repeated for "midnight" and "sunrise".




The same guys who made Hunter's Moon also made Shinobigami, which focuses on more player vs player interaction as PC's all have hidden agendas. It's kind of like "Mafia". It's still in phases but there's a PC who gets to decide the general theme of the phase like "I'm attacking player X" or "I'm spying on player Y", but other players can interact with it like "I use my scrying ability to jump into the scene and rescue player X from player Z"
Shinobigami overview

Shinobigami is designed to be played in a single sitting, with an entire scenario wrapping up in about four hours. This feature of many Japanese role-playing games is put to great effect in Shinobigami, allowing dynamic characterization between sessions and exciting long-term storyline possibilities.

Before the game begins, each player should have a completed character sheet. The Game Master will hand each player a handout containing their character’s Mission and Secret. Once everyone is ready, play begins.

A scenario is made up of four separate phases: Introduction, Main, Climax, and Ending.
Introduction Phase

The Game Master will introduce the NPCs and the scenario’s inciting incident during this phase, and give each player character a scene. During these Introductory Phase scenes, the character gets to show off their character, describe their appearance, and reveal their Mission to each other. The players will record the names of each character in the People section of the character sheet for future reference. The objective of the scenario, and the “prize”, is introduced.
Main Phase
In the Main Phase, the Prize is put into play: It may stay with one person or change hands several times over the course of the three cycles. During the Main Phase, the players takes turns as the Scene Player. While acting as a Scene Player, a player has narrative control over a scene in which their character comes closer to fulfilling their Mission.

A Scene Player may choose between a Drama Scene and a Combat Scene. During each Drama Scene, a player will roll on the Scene Chart for inspiration, then narrate a scene in which their character uses a skill to forge an Emotional Bond, uncover another character’s Secret or Location, or recover a lost Life Point. If a character has found another character’s Location, they may engage them in a Combat Scene. Combat Scenes are quick, lasting only a number of turns equal to the number of combatants, meaning that each combat is quick and bloody.

A Cycle is complete as soon as each player has taken their turn as Scene Player. A scenario typically has 3 Cycles. Once the final cycle is complete, the Climax Phase begins.


Climax Phase

The Climax Phase is where lines are drawn and the ending determined. Each player will need to rely on allies they think they can trust to survive and complete their goals. A final combat scene with special rules will last a number of rounds as decided by the GM or scenario. This is the only point in the game where a character can be knocked out of the game or even killed. The last person standing can claim the Prize, or perhaps they will reject it in favor of another reward more in line with their true character goals!

Once the people standing lay down their arms, the game moves to the Ending Phase.

Ending Phase
The events of the Ending Phase are largely determined by the outcome of the Climax Phase. Repercussions and the results of complete or failed missions are shown or acted out in a final scene for each character. Finally, experience points are handed based on completed goals, secret goals and player actions. And from there…

Commonly the next step is… to play the game again! Likely another day, and perhaps with a new Game Master. Perhaps all or some of the previous session’s characters will appear again (though it’s not a given). Maybe there will be a new antagonist, or maybe the characters will act as each other’s enemies. With a simple new scenario (and a new “prize” to capture) and new secrets, no two games of Shinobigami will ever feel the same!



Emotional bond mechanic

-Info Sharing: If anyone towards whom you have a bond (positive or negative) learns someone’s Secret, Location, or Ougi, you will automatically and instantly receive that information. So it’s good strategy to start the game off by forming bonds, then letting other people find information for you.

-Emotion Mods: Whenever someone makes a roll, anyone with a bond towards that character may give a +1 bonus or -1 penalty, depending on whether the bond is positive or negative. This can occur once per bond per cycle (of drama scenes) or rounds (battle). In a co-op style game, this can be quite powerful, if everyone was nice enough to be positive towards each other.

-Battle Burst: If a character towards whom you have an emotional bond becomes involved in combat, you may jump in at any time. Normally, only the character called out by the Scene Player, and/or whomever else they decide, joins combat. Of course, you may join in to help or hinder as you see fit.

-Ninpo: Ninpo that either affect the way that bonds or formed or their effects. Missions and Secrets may also involve emotions, too, like the Secret: “You are in love with Player 1. If you and Player 1 don’t have ‘Loyalty’ or ‘Affection’ bonds towards each other by the beginning of the Climax Phase, your Mission becomes: Kill Player 1.”


Enigmas: Environmental secrets that have mechanical effects, usually on the last boss of the scenario. They consist of the ruse, its true form and effect, and the way to cancel it. Enigmas start off unknown, with only the ruse uncovered, and the rest must be uncovered like a Secret, and only then can it be canceled. For example, in a scenario with a boss and 4 underlings, an Enigma might be that “4 generals protect the boss’s weak spot” with the effect being that during a battle, the boss will never suffer the effects of any fumbles he rolls. In order to cancel that effect, the players must defeat all 4 underlings during the Main Phase.
The dice mechanics for both games is a chart based d66 and a roll over/under (I forget) thing, but I'm not really interested in that as you could convert it to dice pools or d20 and work out better math, it's the structured storytelling that interested me.
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Post by Thaluikhain »

Slightly off-topic, but some years back White Dwarf ran their Vogel Passioanta campaign for 40k, and one of the things they did was that you could skip playing a game and get extra fortications for an area you controlled. So, if you couldn't play a game due to something, you got downtime bonuses and didn't lag behind everyone else (in theory at least).

Now, that was a competitive game, so that sort of thing was more important, but it might still be worthwhile to give some kind of downtime bonus to people who miss sessions. Of course you'd probably want them to be less than actually playing the game.
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Post by Wulfbanes »

Mordheim in campaign settings had Underdog Experience bonuses, where if you faced another warband of a higher value, your lads were probably not going to win, but they'd get a bunch of catchup experience.
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Post by merxa »

what opinions do people hold for tying 'leveling' to down time?

more generally I tend towards a more simulationist approach, so ideally people could engage in commerce and try to amass wealth, ingratiate themselves to local noble on their road to becoming the kings tailor, etc

if the party plays a bunch of elves and want to spend 20 years farming or basket weaving, i wouldn't necessary want to say no outright -- but that does mean the group has decided to not become adventurers, and are instead playing The Sims, fantasy dlc.

I imagine some groups want to avoid PCs playing out Isekai tropes, attempting to recreate the industrial revolution, but I would avoid putting in any hard rules to stop such things -- any given gaming group should be able to figure the type of game they want to play without the rules telling them they are doing it all wrong.

For me, downtime suggests opening a space for more narrative driven events as well as roleplaying. As such rules should be more like a structure or scaffolding you can plugin appropriate details.
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Post by hogarth »

Foxwarrior wrote:The biggest problem is being predictable and limited with how much downtime you get. If the players are completely in control of downtime, they may well go "yeah, let's spend the next twenty years crafting some sweet gear before we go to take on the big boss", and at that point you've completely lost the ability to use the amount of time something takes as a cost.
If my D&D group wanted to use downtime to get extra equipment, I'd probably just give them a matching amount of XP as well. So if the party agrees to fast-forward from level 5 to level 11 (say), go right ahead.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

merxa wrote:what opinions do people hold for tying 'leveling' to down time?
I think that having to train for a certain amount of time in order to go from one level to the next in addition to experience requirements are just too restrictive for my tastes. I can understand wanting to feel more like a 'real' adventurer would, spending weeks after a raid healing up and training for the next one, but I also think that's annoying.

That being said, if you can just gain a modest amount of experience from training during downtime and put that towards leveling up, then I think you have the best of both worlds. If you want to fuck off and train for 5 years and come back a few levels higher and make your own level-appropriate gear, then fine. Wanna take a trip to the hyperbolic time chamber and get it all done in an hour? Whatever. If you can just say "my character was training to get stronger" when you skip a session, then that can alleviate some of the pain of missing out on the fun without the GM handwaving things away.
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Post by brized »

Having no downtime for leveling can be setting-breaking, or it can fit. See "Strategies of Advancement" in http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=35813
Tumbling Down wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:I'm really tempted to stat up a 'Shadzar' for my game, now.
An admirable sentiment but someone beat you to it.
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Post by K »

I'd let downtime be a way to rack up social bonuses.

So the guy who goes back go his castle and manages his lands gets bonuses with nobles, and the guy who smiths in a community get bonuses with the commoners.

And then there is the wanderer Gerald of Rivia, who spends his downtime having sex with sorceresses, and he gets social bonuses vs sorceresses.
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

Thanks for the replies, everyone, this has been fairly helpful. I wrote down a very rough framework for how I'd like to do downtime in my game, but I also wound up codifying other aspects of playing the game just to give things a bit more structure. I like feedback on the downtime part, but the rest is fair game too.
Game Flow

There are three major methods of passing time: through Downtime, Travelling, and Adventure Phases. Trainers can gain experience during any phase, but gain the least during Downtime, a modest amount while Travelling, and the most while Adventuring. Each Phase has a different set of special actions you can undertake during them.

Downtime Phases are periods of time that can be quickly skipped over with a mild amount of detail. These phases include a wide variety of activities, from resting to working a professional job to engaging in a hobby. Most creatures spend the majority of their lives in the Downtime Phase, non-Trainers especially.
  • 4 Downtime Phases per day, max - this is if you do not go anywhere or do any adventuring. Most adventurers have 1 Downtime Phase per day, typically spent camping. A Downtime Phase typically lasts 4-8 hours.
  • During the Downtime Phase, you may take up to 2 Downtime Actions. You may take an Extended Rest and use the Training Regimen Command power for free. Training Regimen is explicitly combat training, so most NPCs do not use it.
  • All possible Downtime Actions are listed under the Downtime minigames section.
  • After the first Downtime Action is resolved, you should roll on the Downtime Encounter table to see if anything happens; your Lifestyle determines which table you roll on. You may take your second Downtime Action after the encounter is resolved. Expect the unexpected, even while in town.
  • If you enter the Downtime Phase in the wilderness, consult the Travelling minigame for details, as this phase is resolved slightly differently than if you were in the safety of town.
Travel Phases are periods of time where you travel and explore the world around you. This is done by choosing a Route to your destination, determining various aspects of your journey, then setting off. There are different Movement Options you can take, but you will generally make some Encounter rolls during your journey, not all of which are necessarily hostile.
  • 4 Travel Phases per day, max - this is if you do not do any resting or adventuring all day. Adventurers typically have 1-3 Travel Phases per day.
  • Unlike when you are in town, you and your Pokemon will need to consume resources to survive. You are also likely to encounter Hazards which make your journey more difficult - you should research and prepare for your Route accordingly.
  • Further details can be found in the Travelling minigame section.
Adventure Phases are the periods of time when you are in a specific location with a goal in mind and you are trying to achieve it. These can happen in town, the wilderness, or dungeons. The goals are player-driven, though NPCs will usually have things they need help with. Once your goal is achieved or you abandon it, the Adventure Phase ends and you enter the Travel or Downtime Phase, depending on your actions.
  • Achieving the goals you set is a great way of gaining XP, so you and your GM must come to an agreement on your goal and how much XP is gained for it. Your GM will determine most of the adventure’s difficulty, but the players always have the final say on what their goal is. These goals are almost always something for the entire party to achieve, such as finding and capturing a specific rare Pokemon or running a criminal organization out of town.
  • Your goal has its own level ranging from 1-20, comparable to your own level range. The level of your goal determines the level of most of the NPCs and effects of the adventure you will undertake. For example, your GM might say that taking out Team Rocket is a level 6 goal, meaning you will face opposition that is roughly level 6 and encounter Tier 2 NPCs and effects. You might encounter level 4 grunts that are easy to take out, only to wind up fighting a level 8 admin in the heart of the building.
  • Adventure Phases can be any length of time, but are typically interrupted by the other phases out of necessity. There is no limit to the number of Adventure Phases you can undertake in a day, but your GM is unlikely to agree to attempts to gain easy XP that are completely divorced from your character or campaign premise.
I don't have many Downtime Actions written up yet, but I figure I would need a decent amount of them in order to have a fun minigame, right?
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ETortoise
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Post by ETortoise »

Downtime to me implies several days of not adventuring. so, I don’t think downtime should happen during an adventuring day. Downtime implies long periods of time without adventuring. Characters in camp are resting and recovering though there might be things they can do before bed that can affect recovery, like cooking dinner or making poultices.
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The Adventurer's Almanac
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Post by The Adventurer's Almanac »

Weird, I consider that downtime.
Iduno
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Post by Iduno »

K wrote:I'd let downtime be a way to rack up social bonuses.

So the guy who goes back go his castle and manages his lands gets bonuses with nobles, and the guy who smiths in a community get bonuses with the commoners.
I'd agree with something like this. Adventuring gets you weapons and bonuses to adventuring, while out-of-combat stuff you do (including downtime) gets you out-of-combat (ie social) bonuses. It would also be a good time to earn all of those interesting feats and treasures that nobody takes because their cost usually represents losing out on combat effectiveness.

K wrote:And then there is the wanderer Gerald of Rivia, who spends his downtime having sex with sorceresses, and he gets social bonuses vs sorceresses.
Yes, but he famously gets a large malus to finding treasure in a gangster's vault.
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