Very disappointing.
Strongholds: Apart from the badly worded rules (but hey, its just downtime. No one cares about that...), why does it even matter if the PC is present? It is automatically assumed the PC is in some way competent and necessary for the construction to complete.
And what do those strongholds do? What do they represent in the game world? I hope the DMG talks a bit more about what it means to own a stronghold somewhere else. But I have my doubts that it does.
Carousing: Roll dice to earn money or have an automatically resolved romance. Neither has the player a say in what happens during carousing, nor does it matter who the PC is and what he can do.
In the end all this "downtime activities" boil down to "some tables to roll dice on before you get back to the real game". But what about downtime as game itself? As session not involving hacking through hordes of generic monsters for loot? Such things are apparently missing.
Strongholds: Apart from the badly worded rules (but hey, its just downtime. No one cares about that...), why does it even matter if the PC is present? It is automatically assumed the PC is in some way competent and necessary for the construction to complete.
And what do those strongholds do? What do they represent in the game world? I hope the DMG talks a bit more about what it means to own a stronghold somewhere else. But I have my doubts that it does.
Carousing: Roll dice to earn money or have an automatically resolved romance. Neither has the player a say in what happens during carousing, nor does it matter who the PC is and what he can do.
In the end all this "downtime activities" boil down to "some tables to roll dice on before you get back to the real game". But what about downtime as game itself? As session not involving hacking through hordes of generic monsters for loot? Such things are apparently missing.
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