Recovering XP, GP

[moritheil]

I'm curious as to how many DMs allow voluntary down time, and what they allow in that time. For example, if a party has artificers or other characters that use up wealth quickly, would you allow them to keep taking voluntary down time during which they work at jobs to bring their wealth back to (or above) recommended wealth levels before each new story arc?

On a related note, if a player falls behind one or more levels due to continually burning XP (whether on item creation or spells), do you give out more XP due to his or her lower level, or do you use uniform XP?

 

[ThirdWizard]

About every other level, I do gp wealth audits. I then base future treasure values on these figures.

I reward XP as per the 3.5 DMG method. That means that a lower level character gets more XP than their higher level companions for the same CR challenge.

 

[FrostedMini1337]

I start DMing a campaign thursday, and I allow for all the downtime the players want to accumulate wealth, as long as we can glean something out of it: I get plot hooks because other merchants in town don't like your price cuts, the orphanage loves/depends on your now
etc. And if the PCs work up to much wealth that they spend on gear I tell them that I'm going to buff the stuff their fighting accordingly.

As for the XP: totally give out extra XP to lower levels kids, espesically if he's lower from casting/crafting for the good of the party.

P.S. W00T I get to DM again!

 

[KarinsDad]

I'm curious as to how many DMs allow voluntary down time

Allow?

How do you disallow it? By preventing them from getting components to craft items with?

Aren't the decisions of the PCs made by the players, not the DM?

I must be misunderstanding you.

 

[Infiniti2000]

I'm with KD. I don't understand the concept of "no voluntary downtime" either. I suppose to select one of those options, either there is never any downtime or it's not voluntary. In either case, it sucks.

 

[Darren Ravenshaw]

I think what the Op means is that once all the item creation, spell scribing, supply restocking is done instead of looking for a new adventure the PC's decide to use their Craft/Profession/Preform/etc. skills to earn some money doing 9-5 work to cover the above costs.

 

[FrostedMini1337]

I think the 2 things that he's considering understood are as follows:

#1 No need to roleplay out how you make the cash. Some DM's would just let the players work out an agreement with the the DM
"I wanna make 100 gold a week."
"Ok you find X job."
"Ok I do it for X amount of time."

Or something along the lines of

"Ok I spend 40 gold on materials and make this craft check, what's the result worth"
"X"
"Ok, I re-invest and repeat times X"

Or the more general
"I wanna make Profession checks for 4 years so I can muster up a lot of cash/muster back the cash I just lost" without some drawback such as ability damage from inactivity, gaining a level in expert invoulantairily, etc.

Basically anything that has no risk and no downside other than timeline progessing, and would allow characcter to inflate their wealth values outside of what they have "earned".

 

[moritheil]

Basically anything that has no risk and no downside other than timeline progessing, and would allow characcter to inflate their wealth values outside of what they have "earned".

Bingo. The point is that if you allow that, there's no downside to using up tons of wealth while adventuring (and burning wealth or XP is supposed to be something that gives characters pause.)

 

[moritheil]

Allow?

How do you disallow it? By preventing them from getting components to craft items with?

Aren't the decisions of the PCs made by the players, not the DM?

I must be misunderstanding you.

Do you allow your characters to begin with a starting balance determined by the wealth table, or do you say, "You have whatever gear you want, regardless of how much it costs?" I suspect that your players are limited with regard to the amount of treasure they have.

Downtime can change that. Simply put, allowing the characters an unlimited amount of downtime results in potentially unlimited resources. Unlimited resources generally ruin campaign balance. Accepting these two postulates, then, it is foolhardy for a DM to encourage voluntary downtime.

IMC I allow as much voluntary downtime as the party wants. The campaign story arcs keep progressing, with or without the PCs' involvement. Amongst other things, this means that the world is now being invaded by fiends, because the party never did get around to going over to a certain place and sealing off a certain portal (other, NPC adventuring parties learned of the portal later, but by then, it was too late - the minions of evil had bolstered their defenses. And no, the party did not make any special effort to spread word of this portal amongst NPCs.)

It seems to me that there should be some means of restricting how much money players earn working at no-risk jobs. In the language of the survey above, banning such jobs would be equivalent to disallowing voluntary downtime.

 

[Aust Diamondew]

I give XP as per DMG more or less. So I assume that qualifies as more XP.
PCs can pretty much do whatever they want IMC so if they want to take a break they can, usually for long periods down time we mutually agree on a good couple year in game down time point.

The world still spins though, villains still plot, nations fight wars etc.

It's difficult to accumulate much wealth in 'down time'. Adventuring is by far the most lucrative field to be in. Most jobs don't pay too much, look at the DMG, you'll be lucky to make +20gp per week.

If a caster wanted he could make a lot of items and sell them and quickly recoup the XP once he drops back a level and starts adventuring (because of how the XP system works) but this is an issue with item creation rules.
On the other hand its not as if except among the wealthy there is a big market for magic items so what people want will limit how much one can make on item creation.

As a side note I generally give out a small amount of XP during down time equal to 1 XP per day.