There is a bard out there somewhere, who is on a SnarfQuest.Killing Bards > Finding Bards > Talking to NPCs to discover the locations of Bards.
Q.
E.
to the D(ead Bard).
Eh, we don't care about his attempts to kill us. We just alter him up a nice memory of killing us and send him on his way.There is a bard out there somewhere, who is on a SnarfQuest.
You can't mean... Snarf is already dead!!!??Eh, we don't care about his attempts to kill us. We just alter him up a nice memory of killing us and send him on his way.
Theory: amount of control is proportional to the amount of satisfaction.
In my experience, players tend to have more control over the Combat pillar and the least amount of control over Exploration...so players tend to enjoy combat scenes quite a bit, and really hate having to 'waste time' disarming traps, solving riddles, and searching for secret doors.
Dungeon Masters are the inverse: they have the least amount of control over Combat and the most control over Exploration...so DMs tend to enjoy hiding things and inventing stuff for the players to solve, and see combat as something that slows (or even prevents) the party from 'making progress.'
And both sides of the table seem to have about the same amount of control over the Social pillar, so they tend to shrug at it. "Sure, we can talk to those guards, maybe try to bribe them...but if I get bored, I'm going to start stabbing them."
I know some people care for this, but I can totally leave it. I don't care about crafting, slow healing, shopping, building a house, training level ups, etc... Lets get to the action already!The concept of a Downtime pillar came up tangentially during a massive thread in here a year or so back around the relevance/importance of the Exploration pillar. Some of us realized that most if not all downtime activities don't fit at all well into the three existing pillars, and that a fourth pillar might make sense; I thought this was a great idea and have been advocating for it ever since.
I know some people care for this, but I can totally leave it. I don't care about crafting, slow healing, shopping, building a house, training level ups, etc... Lets get to the action already!
I could probably live with that.I'm into all that but I want it to take 5 minutes.
One game I had a downtime action that could be taken during level up. Choose an action, roll dice, and then get a bonus. That added 5 minutes onto downtime. Wouldn't want more than that.
I moved to milestone leveling so it never happens mid-session anymore when I run the game.Levelling up does tend to take more time than I want it to. Ideally players would do it between sessions but in practice they don't.