What do your heroes do when they're not adventuring?

[seasong]

Varies from campaign to campaign.

My AO campaign started out with the PCs as 15-16 year old farm kids who were drafted into a war for a distant city. We roleplayed through the march to training camp, two months of winter training (the city was drafting them in preparation for a war it had not yet declared), the march to the first battle, and then their virginal battle experience. After that, we skipped (with a few descriptive passages) all but a few major battles before we reached the turning point of the war (the major battles saw some of the characters getting promoted for heroism and/or sharp thinking). Then we reached the turning point, and every battle counted... until the PCs were captured alive by the enemy, and sold into slavery upriver. We skipped a lot of time then...

You get the idea.

My Ell'jaret campaign, on the other hand, was action, action, action, occasionally punctuated with a week or two breather during which the PCs mostly prepared for the coming storm, or tried to get into bed with this or that NPC. Very action hero-ey .

 

[mmadsen]

Yes and yes

Feel free to expand on that, arwink...

 

[Sanackranib]

raiding the PC's

This is an old and excelent DM tactic. If you have Access to the Dongeon Mag. adventure "Inheritance" it show how this can easily be addapted into your game multiple times or create additional adventure hooks.

 

[Wolfspirit]

As a player, I haven't really had that many opportunities for extended downtime, mostly it's been "what do you do with the rest of the day before you go and do your next adventure?" This time has been used up performing, "performing" ("DM: Ok, you've got the girl back up to your room, roll a perform check. Me: Natural 20!), drinking, praying, whatever.

As a DM, I didn't really give my players a ton of down time, since we ended up having to change campaigns too often (so far I've had 5 different campaigns just die from players not showing up), but they tended to do similar stuff in downtime too.

 

[arwink]

Feel free to expand on that, arwink...

oh, all right.

I love it when PC's build keeps, towers, etc, because it means the bad guys always know where to go if they want to find them. The PC's have relaised this too, so they now see half the fun of building a keep as making it as defensible as possible.

My crossover campaign that started in 2e and ended in 3e was entirely based around a castle the PC's picked up from a dungeon adventure (khest keep in "Keep for Sale"). They petitioned for ownership, started rebuilding and slowly became the local lords. Small time lords, barely responsible for more than they could see from the highest tower, but lords non the lest (everyone really dug adding that to the character sheet).

The campaign itself involved a lot of armies and evil forces floating around. Banites (psuedo realmsian setting) came chasing after a young boy the party had adopted who happened to be carrying a powerful artifact. The local pirate population objected to the PC's idea to start patrolling the waters an act of goodwill, hoping to attract merchants to their small province. A powerful devil with lord aspirations decided that the surrounding countryside would have been perfect as the tenth layer of hell and started corrupting animals, ogres and people into a demonic army (got some good use out of the diablo conversion for the first time ever). The local giant population was unhappy with the sudden appearance of powerful adventurers, the orc hordes to the east were pissed to find their raiding routes suddenly fortified and the force of mercenary ogre warriors and their near divine ogre magi leader weren't impressed that the PC's had taken up camp not three days travel from their secret lair.

All of these people had a go at tearing the caste down around the PC's ears, and the castle wasn't in great shape to begin with. Some tried large scale warfare, sending in armed hordes, but just as many favored adventurer like surgical strikes.

At least once, the PC's were responsible for large scale destruction of their own lands (cutting down the divine ogre magi with an artifact caused a sizable explosion), and twice the stronghold and surrounding town was actually torn apart (both times by the demon lords forces - one involved a horde of demons, the other involved a dozen pit-fiends using precision meteor swarms).

This sort of stuff happens in most of my games, but that was the most long term. The players held the castle from 4th level right up until the point where they retired at 18th or 19th.

 

[s/LaSH]

Downtime?

Here's the three closest things to downtime the PCs have had in my campaign:

That time on the camels (racing to find a necromancer on the other side of the desert).

That time after the full-scale battle (full of scrying to find a major enemy; largest casualty was a tree, however).

That time in Duke Thomas' realm, in which the PCs actually had time to stop and watch an orcish street dancer. Hehe... I never get tired of that.

Generally, they've been pretty flat-out, either killing things or finding fresh things to kill. And they're pretty sophisticated, so they will only kill major villain types, which takes more and more searching as they go along...

 

[Silver Moon]

Off-time

Off-time is usually taken care of in the first night of a new campaign. It is run as free-form, with the players initiating what their characters are doing. This often means that the group never gets to the mission until the 2nd or 3rd game night.

The characters have a 20-mile diameter island as their base of operations. This island includes a large school, a town, a fleet of four ships, farmlands, and a mountaintop city built upon some ancient ruins. There are now around 30 PC's and 300 NPC's living there, so there is always a lot going on.

In the year 2000 I did a long campaign where the team's major nemesis attacked the Island when the high-level party was away, simultaneous to the hurricane of the century hitting it. The players are still picking up the pieces from that one.