So I am trying to figure out my next campaign. I would like downtime to be a part of that. However, I tend to make adventures where PCs find clues that lead them to other adventures. If they know where the possible adventures are, most of the players aren't going to want to do downtime. How do other GMs handle getting players from adventure to adventure with downtime in between?
- Do they get clues during the downtime?
- Do they need downtime to research the clues?
- Do you force downtime somehow?
- Do you have other ways to make the players aware of possible adventures?
- Do you just avoid downtime since it doesn't seem to be what the players want?
- Something else?
And please explain your answer so I can maybe get a clue. And note that I haven't got players yet. I'm planning on doing a sandbox (but not so much a hexcrawl) in a small town in the wilderness between two nations on the edge of war, with another nation across some dangerous mountains. But none of that is set in stone.
From a later post I see you're using 5e, so...
You can hard-force downtime by making them have to train in order to level up. With 5e's stupid-fast level advancement, though, this might not be as workable as it is in a slower-advancing system.
You can soft-force downtime by not having any clues appear until after they've been in town a while.
Or, you can have it that the clues appear whenever but the event they point to won't happen for x-amount of in-game time e.g. they find out "The answer lies behind the Thanguil Door"; but when they research the Door, they learn it only opens at the darkest hour of midwinter; it's now early October and it's less than two weeks travel to get to the Door's location. The risk here is that they'll decide to spend the intervening time adventuring; not much you can do about that other than conveniently not have there be any adventuring for them to do.
Another thing you can do, but there's no guarantee it'll work, is to encourage downtime activities such as building a home base by having them find items in their adventures that would be very useful at a home base but aren't much good in the field. Examples: a big heavy scrying and-or long-range travel device; or something big and useful but unique enough they'll want to keep it hidden so nobody tries to steal it (or the monarch doesn't try to claim it); or magic items specifically geared toward home-base use e.g. a flag that when flown above a structure provides some sort of always-on defense or protection to that structure, and so on.
Or, you can have a character (or whole party, even) somehow get the same effect as if they'd pulled the "Throne" card from a Deck of Many Things: they gain a keep and maybe a title to go with it. This could be a magical effect, or a reward from a grateful patron or noble, or whatever; but the character(s) have to be tied to the keep somehow lest they just sell it or give it away. And bang - now they have a home base that they have to keep up, staff, and can expand or alter as desired.
However, a caution: 5e as a system fights against all of this by a) not having any useful rules for things like stronghold building (though one of the expansion books may have waved at such, I'm not sure) and b) not featuring downtime activities in the PH as things characters can do.