Adventurers and Nonadventurers, Wandering and Downtime

[Minigiant]

I heard many of the descriptions of adventurers, retired adventurers, and newbies in training by many fans. Fighters becoming nobles, wizards studying in towers, rogues setting up networks of contacts, and clerics running churches.

Then it hit me.

What if there was a real mechanical difference between a dungeon delving wizards and tower bookworm wizard? A difference between a king's bodyguards or the knights holding back the orc invasions? The official guild thief and the trap disarming treasure hunter? The ranger guarding the forest and the ranger traveling with the famed Heroes of Ramer.

Certain class, background, and racial features could be downtime only or be easier for characters who have not adventured in a while.

A wizard might only get one chance to learn that scroll he found unless he spends X time in a library or tower to earn himself another character of inspiration.

The travelling fighter might be stuck with those rolled HP. Until he goes into the mountains and does a 80s training montage to maximize all his HD.

The monk and cleric, after a successful crusade, meditate in and manage the Temple of Thor for a couple of years. For their service, Thor adds Chain Lightning to the cleric's spell list and the monk gains proficiency with hammers and his fist deals bonus electric damage.

Basically characters would have certain abilities and feature that adventurers don't have access to unless they temporary stop adventuring to train, study, work, or socialize.

What do you think?

 

[Lanefan]

What if there was a real mechanical difference between a dungeon delving wizards and tower bookworm wizard? A difference between a king's bodyguards or the knights holding back the orc invasions? The official guild thief and the trap disarming treasure hunter? The ranger guarding the forest and the ranger traveling with the famed Heroes of Ramer.

Certain class, background, and racial features could be downtime only or be easier for characters who have not adventured in a while.

A wizard might only get one chance to learn that scroll he found unless he spends X time in a library or tower to earn himself another character of inspiration.

The travelling fighter might be stuck with those rolled HP. Until he goes into the mountains and does a 80s training montage to maximize all his HD.

The monk and cleric, after a successful crusade, meditate in and manage the Temple of Thor for a couple of years. For their service, Thor adds Chain Lightning to the cleric's spell list and the monk gains proficiency with hammers and his fist deals bonus electric damage.

Basically characters would have certain abilities and feature that adventurers don't have access to unless they temporary stop adventuring to train, study, work, or socialize.

What do you think?

My first concern is that players will just build that downtime into their characters' backgrounds in order to get the extra powers/abilities, resulting in simply feeding the power creep.

Now if it was a hard-and-fast either-or; you can have *these* downtime powers or *those* field adventuring powers - but NEVER both, then you're on to something very interesting indeed.

I've often thought about mechanics for non-adventuring level advancement, to reflect how stay-at-home types can still get better at what they do, and have yet to come up with anything beyond what amounts to a hand-wave.

I'll give this some thought.

Lanefan

 

[Minigiant]

My first concern is that players will just build that downtime into their characters' backgrounds in order to get the extra powers/abilities, resulting in simply feeding the power creep.

Now if it was a hard-and-fast either-or; you can have *these* downtime powers or *those* field adventuring powers - but NEVER both, then you're on to something very interesting indeed.

I've often thought about mechanics for non-adventuring level advancement, to reflect how stay-at-home types can still get better at what they do, and have yet to come up with anything beyond what amounts to a hand-wave.

I'll give this some thought.

Lanefan

I was thinking about that to. I think a this OR that choice for character creation. Fore example a stay-at-home wizard gets average HP and 1 new spell known per level of their choice.. An adventuring wizard gets rolled HP, 1 new spell per 2 levels, and magic items per level stated by your campaign's magic item level.

The though came from my thoughts on the stereotypical wizard master and the stereotypical BBEG wizard in a tower. That and a comic strip.

Perhaps the stay-at home spellcasters could be the ultra-versatile casters while adventurers are the big prowess powerhouses. Then the opposite for noncasters, the stay-at-home warriors are big simple specialist brutes while the field adventurers are versatile adapters with magic items.

 

[Nagol]

This is one of the ways I put prestige classes to use. Prestige classes offer a real either/or choice.

For example, theΝοσοκομείο Guard is a martial organisation dedicated to the defence of the first public hospital and site of piligrimage for those seeking the God of Healing's favour.

It is modeled as a prestige class open to pious martial characters that grants curative spellcasting with severe restrictions on action (can't travel more than a day's ride from the hospital) and initial time requirement (6-month initiation into the group's mysteries).

 

[arscott]

Ars Magica had some cool mechanics to that effect. You had two PCs, and you picked one of them to go out on an adventure. The other stayed at home and trained--and usually learned more than the adventuring one.

 

[BobTheNob]

Generally, character growth is always upwards through play.

This raises an interesting concept in that we allow player to have character advance, not though adventuring, but through "off game" study. If this was relegated to forms of character growth that wasn't available through adventuring, we suddenly have a very interesting scenario, as players are encouraged to put vertical growth (i.e. level gain) on hold for lateral growth.

This can also be in the form of RP gains (building spy networks, ataining lands and retainers).

Players can then have multiple characters on the go and (with DM veto) cycle them. You wont end up with the highest level character this way, but you will end up with a series of toons with a bit more depth. Hopefully with flatter math the lessened level gain wont be that much of a hit.

Its interesting. Whilst I have traditionally discouraged this sort of behaviour (as it reeks more of unjustified power grab) with proper controls and mechanics it might just have some merit. Maybe...

 

[Li Shenron]

What do you think?

That you are practically calling for training rules.

1st - Earn your XP by adventuring (which includes any kind of quest or challenge, not just killing stuff... social interaction and exploration grant XP too when you successfully overcome a challenge or complete a quest)

2nd - Spend your XP i.e. turn them into character abilities and numbers increases by training in your downtime

I don't know if D&D had training rules in some supplements, but they are used in other RPG. The most basic implementation of training rules is just to define times associated to each thing to learn (e.g. a spell, a feat etc.) and then just handle the XP->levels normally.

 

[Tony Vargas]

What if there was a real mechanical difference between a dungeon delving wizards and tower bookworm wizard? A difference between a king's bodyguards or the knights holding back the orc invasions? The official guild thief and the trap disarming treasure hunter? The ranger guarding the forest and the ranger traveling with the famed Heroes of Ramer?

Well, in some editions, there have been. In 4e, NPCs are statted out using the 'monster' blocks instead of built as PCs, 3e had NPC-specific classes for non-adventuring archetypes, the pages of early Dragon magazines were often graced with "NPC Classes," as well, including the 'Cloistered Cleric,' a non-adventuring version of that class, IIRC.

Basically characters would have certain abilities and feature that adventurers don't have access to unless they temporary stop adventuring to train, study, work, or socialize.

What do you think?

If those abilities seem appropriate to the non-adventuring life, sure. HD or combat skills/spells don't seem like good candidates, but handy rituals, sagacious research, politicking, and the like might be reasonable things for an adventurer to have to slow down to deal with as well as a non-adventurer.

 

[Crazy Jerome]

I like the way Dragon Quest handles this, though the exact mechanics wouldn't translate to D&D. In more generic terms, it boils down to this choice:

• Staying at home - slow XP gain, money being spent like water, learn whatever you can find a teacher for, with practically no risk.
• Adventuring - fast XP gain, money coming in pretty decent (as well as the DM provides and the players take advantage of), minimal need for teachers, lots of risk.

In DQ, it's not quite that cut and dried, because characters don't actually improve during adventuring. It's merely that if they have a ton of XP and money gained during an adventure, they can use time very efficiently to gain abilities as long as the XP and money holds out (and they are improving things they used on the adventure).

It's that last bit that ties in most clearly to the OP. Because DQ skills can be risky to learn, you can most take advantage of staying at home when learning something new--especially if you happened to succeed in an adventure that paid better in silver than XP. So the mechanics have a mild encouragement to use adventuring to improve what you know, but staying at home to spread out.

To make something similar work out in Next along the lines of the OP, you'd like for your either/or abilities to be extensions or variations on the main abilities. For example, consider fireball. The adventuring guy might get the option to enlarge the blast or change the range--extend the power of the spell. The stay at home guy might get the option to change the shape.

That might be too fine-grained, but it does suggest the possibility of unlocking such abilities over time, with each successive unlocking widening the differences, while still allowing a balanced character to do some of each. Alternately, you can also cap it by level--i.e. every level, you get to do one or two of these unlockings, with the mix allowed being somewhat of a DM judgment. If you home for a couple of years (off screen), then you can only pick those options.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Sounds like a throwback to 1E training rules to me. You may have earned the XP, but needed to spend some time and gold with a mentor or studying/training in order to gain a level.