I'm not saying this to say your style is bad, so don't take it that way. But no one I have ever played with in closing in on 15 years of DnD has ever played this way. None of them.
15 years means you started with...3.5e? 4e?
Either way, your starting expectations as to how the game is played would of course have been largely set by the environment you started in, and the 3.5e/4e environment and generally expected playstyle was vastly different than that of early 80's 1e.
Are they going to get bored? They might. But while Aloysius is just sitting in a room waiting for a broom, maybe they get approached by a noble asking about Xana as a person. Or maybe while Jelessa is doing general research, she stays with Xana and her family and has some interactions with the kids.
And maybe we don't get the entirety of Xana putting herself out there in politics, and only get some highlights, but frankly going very in-depth on that is basically running a second campaign anyways. However, there are two things I always see not mentioned in these discussions about downtime.
1) Some players are invested in other player's stories. If you get bored any time you aren't in the spotlight... I don't know, I'm not that way. I love watching my friends complete their stories. Same as I would enjoy watching them RP with the BBEG
Perhaps. There's also the issue of player knowledge vs character knowledge; if I'm off in [faux-Rome] doing stuff while most everyone else is either at our base or in the field, those characters might not know what I'm doing and thus neither should their players.
But yes, I'm willing to bet that most if not all of the other players aren't interested in sitting through X going through all sorts of political machinations. Can't say I blame 'em.
2) One advantage of everyone having a single character and investing in them is that you aren't playing "this group of people who happen to work together" you are playing a band of brothers, a found family. You trust these people with your life on a regular basis. And, as such, they are dear friends.
Hoo boy, are you reading a different set of tea leaves!
Dear friends? Well, sometimes, yes; even progressing to lovers on occasion and spouses on rarer occasion; but they're also sometimes rivals, enemies, or simply workmates who when the day (or adventure) is done go home to their other lives and forget about work until tomorrow.
But instead of treating downtime as more time for the party to interact and pursue non-adventuring goals, many people silo off and treat it as "this is when I get my solo work done". Which can be the case, but I feel misses something about how a group like this would treat each other.
Just because I play on a hockey team* doesn't mean I have to spend any time with the guys after the game or practice.
* - hypothetical only; my complete lack of skating prowess did any such thoughts in by the time I was 10.
I don't think it is nearly as open as you seem to want it to be. Note that the closest game design the DnD campaigns are Rogue-likes. They are decently popular, but niche. They are solo play. They prevent investment in the character, the entire goal is to just see how far you get.
Perhaps it will come as no surprise, then, that I'm a big fan of Rogue-likes; and in some ways see D&D - particularly at very low level - as being a multi-player version of the same thing.
Solo and with little investment in characters? That's anathema to DnD.
Without going into great anecdotal detail, I'll just say I've a long run of experience that begs to differ.
DnD melds these design parameters, adding in the team element as well, but there isn't a game out there that isn't trying to recapture 1e or 2e DnD that tries to have high character investment and easy character death. Because, as noted, once you TPK for most people who play the game... that's it.
Yes, TPKs are a different thing entirely. They're also damn hard to pull off if one is being fair about it - in nearly 40 years of DMing I've had exactly one - as parties are IME shockingly resilient beasts. All it takes is for there to be one survivor and the party can continue.
Missing the point. No one STARTS with writing the unreal engine and then backtracks.
New DMs start by making Pong and building up. They need the simple building blocks, and then the pieces they can add to that to make make it more complex and interesting. This is why the Monsters in the MM are simple and easy, with few complex abilities. Because they are the baseline that new DMs are supposed to build from. And yea, it sucks for those of us who want a bit more bite in our monsters. But we have the tools and the math and the skills to push the system. We have access to the 3PP stuff to give us more tools.
But I actually think it would harm the long-term health of DnD if we made the baseline MM much harder and much more complex. A little bit for the high level play? Sure, we can tweak, but I can't even understand a 3.X statblock half the time, because I need to go and look up a dozen features and then figure out how they interact. Going back to that would be bad.
What about the 1e MMs and their complexity level?
The only major flaw in RAW 1e monster design in general IMO is there's too many glass cannons - most of them need about half again as many hit points to keep up with the advances in damage-dealing given to PCs as time went on.
But most people don't want to play Game of Thrones style games, in the sense that their favorite characters will be killed off at the drop of a hat. Game of Thrones is a good drama, in some respects, because it keeps people guessing. But as a player? As a player about the second time my character was just unceremoniously killed off, I'd say "thanks for the game guys, but I'm not really invested any more". Because I know any story I try to craft is more than likely going to be "he had dreams, then he died with those dreams unfulfilled".
That's because your focus is (or appears to be) strictly on your own character at the time, rather than on the story of the party as a whole. If I start out with Falstaffe the Fighter who dies to an Orc three combats in, then come back with Jelessa the Mage who lasts until the adventure's 3/4 done then gets squashed by a trap, I'd want to come back with a third character just so I could see how the adventure turned out and what happened next.
And how is it that if the expectation was the party would likely survive that fight they were clearly in, that you would have known she succeeded at her goals? I mean, honestly, did the entire 8-man party think that they were going to die in this fight against the BBEG? Since most of them didn't, were they disappointed?
There was ve-ery little if any risk of a true TPK, if for no other reason than several characters have what I call "getaway cars" (means of fast long-distance escape e.g. teleport or flight devices) had things really turned south.
But my own character doesn't have a getaway car, is the lowest level member of the party, and in her very first session lost all her magic to a Deck card (she's been running on what she can borrow and-or nick since then). Sending her out there was, in my eyes going in, likely to end as a perhaps-heroic attempt followed by a quick death; and that she not only survived but succeeded beyond any hopes I-as-player had - yeah, there's an accomplishment there.
Which is odd, as she's not even that heroic of a character most of the time. Her background is a scavenger (think Rey at the start of Force Awakens) who goes into dungeons after other parties have cleared them out and scoops up whatever treasures or valuables they might have missed or ignored; and her alignment ain't exactly Good.
I am honestly struggling to look at what you wrote, and figure out how I could have reduced your enjoyment by giving you certainty that you would have succeeded. I just can't see it. That isn't the certainty. The certainty they may have is that IF they failed, they likely wouldn't have been immediately executed on the spot, and would have a chance to turn their loss into something else.
One against four with no real means of escape from foes who weren't there to take prisoners - yeah, failure pretty much meant death; with the only question being how long it would take.
But I have no interest in playing the part of a story that does not matter. And again, you keep saying, because of how you approach the game, that the individual character does not matter. But to most of us, it does. It is how we are interacting with the larger story. Sure, the story of the group is EQUALLY important, but each person sitting down wants their thread to matter. And the game has recognized that, and built to assisting that in happening.
The individual character matters for as long as it lasts, with how long it lasts being an unknown quantity.
After that, it's next Dwarf up.
