Carousing: Roll dice to earn money or have an automatically resolved romance. Neither has the player a say in what happens during carousing, nor does it matter who the PC is and what he can do.
I agree with [MENTION=2374]Wyvern[/MENTION]'s reply to this.
why does it even matter if the PC is present? It is automatically assumed the PC is in some way competent and necessary for the construction to complete.
The reason it matters that the PC is present is because this is a rule for the heroic characters in a game of heroic fantasy spending their downtime. If the PC didn't have to be present, it wouldn't be a
downtime system.
If, in your game, you don't want to treat stronghold construction as a downtime system, then you're free not to.
I was originally thinking they were talking about three times the original time. After looking at other people's posts, I think they were right and the intention was 4 times the original time. The easiest way to calculate how far along construction is would be for each day without the PC to only count for 1/4 day. Alternatively, you could multiply the original time by 4 and have each day with the PC equal to 4 days. Either of these methods seems to be the best way to keep track of how far along the construction is and keeping the intent of what is written in the DMG.
You have to put the effort in. There's a minimum amount of effort you have to put in, to complete the project. To get a fort built, you have to put in a minimum of 100 days of personal effort (= downtime days) supervising the construction. Okay, it's not very heroic and you'd rather be doing something more exciting but how badly do you want this fort?
<snip>
You can't just order a fort and come back when it's finished. You have to be there all the time making sure it's done right, otherwise it won't be.
It seems to me that these are the best two competing interpretations of the "+3 days" rule. There is the simulationist interpretation: that the presence of the PC speeds up what otherwise would happen anyway. And there is the gameplay interpretation: that building is a downtime activity which requires the player to commit his/her PC's downtime, and the +3 days rule is part of the rules structure for enforcing that.
Which interpretation a table goes with should probably depend on whether they prefer the sim approach or the game approach.
this only matters when the PC is better qualified to make a functional building than the builders or when building luxury buildings which only have the single purpose of pleasing the owner.
every time I (real me) tries to do anything to build or improve a home I make HUGE errors I find that idea funny... If I want to complete the project I have to hire people who know what they are doing
<snip>
why is my theif in anyway able to supervie construction?
<snip>
Imagine if the real world worked like this?
Look at [MENTION=6777052]BoldItalic[/MENTION]'s posts in this thread. These rules aren't (or, at least, needn't be interpreted as) an attempt to work out what happens in the real world. I mean, imagine if, in the real world, every time I walked out my door Elminster and his friends kept asking me to help them save the world! The reason the PCs keep getting sent on ludicrously dangerous missions is because they are protagonists in a fantasy adventure; similarly, one way of making sense of the downtime rules it that they are rules for how protagonists in a fantasy RPG spend their downtime. If the PC doesn't personally spend the time, things go wrong -
because the PC is the protagonist. Ordinary people in the Forgotten Realms don't have so much trouble getting things built, but then they don't save the world very often either.
