D&D 5E DMG excerpt: Carousing!


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MechaPilot

Explorer
There's also the BoEF, which is a pretty decent book on handling the topic (though the mechanical bits are really where the book stumbles), despite WotC's overreaction to the book.

Some of my favorite immature games used that book... I really want to transfer some of the spells...

[sblock=enter at own risk] grope would be a funny cantrip, and the one that forced an orgasm was a funny SoS effect, but Kiss of life was a good spell for any book[/sblock]

I think the part where the book excels is the part where it gives advice on handling that type of content, and not the actual rules that it introduced. Although, I did find the rules for alternate magic items slots particularly helpful given that I was running a courtly intrigue campaign at the time, and it wouldn't have made any sense for the PCs to walk around armed and armored to wreck all while striding through the halls of a palace or gracefully swirling across the floor of a ballroom.
 

LostSoul

Adventurer
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.

That's a nice take on it, I like it.

No, downtime is not just "rolling on a table and cross off some days". Downtime is the time the PCs are not spend adventuring. Thus what I expect from Downtime rules are rules and guidelines on how to spend the time not crawling on a dungeon like social standing in a fantasy(FR) world, how the world reacts to fame, what the strongholds the players can have mean in the greater context of the world (are they noble now? What does that even mean?) or how "Carousing" affects the social standing of the player. Not just a Roll for Romance.

I agree with you here - I'd like to see the downtime rules interact with the standard game more than they do.

Something simple like clearing hexes (fight some number of random monsters), allowing you to build the stronghold, which then attracts settlers from whom you can collect a tax, and some of those settlers have interesting jobs/backgrounds (roll on this table, pump some GP into it to get extra rolls with higher modifiers).
 

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