Experience Point: Downtime

In the past week I've seen not one but two brilliant blog posts about the same concept: Downtime. The idea is: we are just too damn busy and it is not making our lives better. Cramming every available minute with stuff to do is not only keeping us stressed out but it's actually not doing us any favors in terms of productivity either.

A lot of people seem to think being busy all the time is a good thing. If they are constantly in motion they must be important or getting a lot done, right? Maybe folks are afraid if they are ever perceived as having free time, they won't be thought of as valuable. This seems especially true of people who work in an organization. Lots of employers these days (bad ones) convey that employees are just lucky to have a job at all. If they are going to keep their job they had better have their nose to the grindstone every minute.

This is a terrible way to keep folks productive. It leads to fatigue, mistakes, and burnout. It makes people resent their employer as a merciless task master. It actually causes them to look for ways they can slack off just so they don't feel so pressed all the time.

This isn't only a problem at work. Sometimes leaving the office is very much an "out of the frying pan..." type of situation. You leave and run by the bank on the way to get the kids on the way to the library on the way to soccer practice on the way to pick up dinner on the way home now hurry and eat and get their homework done and brush their teeth so they can get to bed so you can collapse and get up early to get them to school and go back to work. I'm exhausted just typing that sentence and I'll bet it's no picnic to read either! Is anybody there having a fun time or feeling like they are giving enough attention to what is really important?

Allowing yourself ample time to finish your tasks is an important element to doing quality work. You might still cut corners if you have enough time. But you'll almost certainly have to cut corners if you don't.

Perhaps more importantly, having more than enough time gives you the opportunity to notice patterns within what you're doing that might spark ideas. Ideas about how to do things better or differently. Perhaps ideas about how to do new things. Of course, coming up with new things to do might be how you got in this mess in the first place.

My mantra for starting new projects is, "If it's not a 'Hell yes!' then it's a 'No thanks.'" I don't start stuff about which I'm not VERY enthusiastic. And I'm constantly evaluating whether there are projects I've taken on which are bogging me down.

So reviewing all of these practices this week has given me pause to evaluate the sorts of games I tend to run. I think I am too often the sort of taskmaster that I decry above. The PC’s in my campaigns seldom have a moment to catch their breath before they are off on the next adventure packed with danger and action. Granted, most of those adventures are a little bit more riveting than the average trip to the bank or grocery store.

But too much constant motion means that the PC’s aren't really putting down roots or connecting with the little pleasures that breathe life into the game. It makes the fantastical character more relatable to the player. Spiderman is a lot more interesting and relatable when he has the occasional quiet dinner with Aunt Mae or romantic evening out with MJ.

I remember one time I did this really well. It was years ago and the PC’s had journeyed through dangers untold to arrive at this Druid Grove. When they got there, certain that some new danger awaited them, they were shocked to discover the place quiet and serene, under the protection of a massive Treant guardian. The Treant basically said, "Relax. It's safe here. The water is clean and fresh. The ground is soft and covered with moss. There is food in abundance. Your wounds will be tended and you may sleep without posting a watch." I've never seen a more paranoid group of players in my over 30 years of gaming.

Just as importantly, I've never seen a group more willing to take on any danger when that place was later threatened. It became a sort of home base for them to return to, and they weren't about to let anything threaten it. They would have shed their last drop of blood to protect it.

I try to remember to have these moments in my games where, amid all the fighting, scheming, and mayhem, the PC’s can simply have a hot bath at the inn. And when they step out there are fluffy towels to greet them, not a demon disguised as a bar of soap.

If nothing else, it keeps them completely off guard.

Are you taking time out to relax and remember the important things? Are you getting these moments into your games?

 

[Kingreaper]

We rarely/never actually play them out as full sessions, but often a storyline will begin or end with a bit of downtime. It helps fill out the end when a storyline finishes early, and fill in the beginning when we're waiting for someone to turn up.

And it does add a lot, because the places that are, at first, just downtime locations gradually become more important: even if they're never threatened.
The town of Middleton started out as a no-where stop along the path: but when a retiring PC set up shop there, and the PCs sent loads of refugees there, it became a bustling, if somewhat run-down, metropolis. The only great city to have been founded since the Gods Plague millenia prior.

 

[Radiating Gnome]

I've tinkered with all kinds of downtime rules in the past. In our 3.5 days, I wrote out an elaborate system that never got any traction in our home game -- my players put up with it for a little while to humor me, but it was clearly not a big hit.

I think the most interesting potential worth exploring during downtime is intra-party relationships. I brought this up in my column last week about the Walking Dead -- the down time the group has in the Prison (3rd season) is when they're safe enough for the problems they have with each other to come to the surface -- while the party is out taking on the walkers and the bad guys, they all have to pull together. So, there's an opportunity during down time for very different sorts of action -- but how you play that out, if at all, is pretty tricky because it pits PCs against each other (even if those conflicts never devolve into swordplay).

An idea for a sort of light touch that gets close to this would be the Interlude system from Savage Worlds. The idea there is that when there's a quiet moment in the game -- PCs around a campfire, etc -- one of the PCs is selected to tell a story from their past. This could be adapted to handle what happened in the down-time between sessions pretty easily -- and might even borrow a little from Fiasco to combine PCs into some downtime scenes you can play out quickly between sessions.

-rg

 

[Thotas]

Ages ago, I read somewhere that a study had been done that showed we at our best when our workload is at about 80 per cent of our capacity. Less than that, at a protracted time span, leads to boredom and the kind of listless performance that goes with. Exceeding it leads to burnout and fatigue, which slows you down and leads to mistakes requiring do-overs, which may be even more inefficient than too light of a docket. When I look at the way things go in the world around me, I sometimes think this could be the one single bit of wisdom we most need to learn right now.

 

[Rel]

Kingreaper: We often handle parts of the downtime via email so that it doesn't eat up much of the session. I think you still get most of the benefit that way if you at least take a few minutes to touch on it during the session.

Radiating Gnome: I'm a huge Savage Worlds fan and I used Interludes pretty successfully in my last campaign. I like how the car drawn gives you a little guidance for what sort of story they should tell.

Thotas: I think that 80% seems like a pretty good guideline. It's a bit hard to measure depending on the task in question, but I think it's a reasonable target to shoot for.