D&D 5E Downtime Mechanics?

[cjr88]

Well the reason for this problem is that DMs now are less creative and the rule and mechanics have been stream lined. Originally in D&D you where handed a rule book and told have fun. You sat down the the world you play in and the adventure you go on sprung forth from the DM's imagination, and was fine tuned and made even more real by the players' imagination. So, the big difference between that and now is that is that all these premade adventures have to push you forward or else it risks boring the players because the a lot of players are used to this constant adventuring and get bored in downtime. But, have the the world made by you and your players it makes the game much more intractable. I still run homemade campaigns in a homemade world and my players love it and take all the downtime they want. They actually have spent about two weeks in a city hardly doing anything productive before, they just spent tons of money on booze. I mean they spent so much on booze they didn't have money for proper equipment... I don't even know how they thought that one was a good idea. But in my game clerics can get followings and even start a church, rouges and join a thieves guild, ect... players have even bult houses before. When I DM my players can literally do anything they want to within reason. Our sorcerer landed himself in jail for burning down a food cart and the only person willing to help was our drunk rouge. It was quite the situation...

 

[TerraDave]

Hmm. This is an issue I have seen for many, many years over just about all editions and have experimented with different ways of dealing with it.

I do agree it does depend on the players. More relaxed players, or ones who want to elaborate on their out of dungeon life, such as it is, will be easier to encourage to take down time. More focused players may need some more explicit carrots or sticks.

 

[cmbarona]

I'm wary of codifying this because I think it will lead to some campaign restraint on the part of GMs. If it is included, I would much prefer an optional module. Some campaigns are quite long, and intend to be so.

But some will try to keep the action going as the team follows the trail of the Big Bad from start to finish with very little rest aside from travel time. I'm not going to try and draw a parallel to specific mechanics here, but consider the narrative in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Even when the heroes got a chance to rest, they didn't ever dawdle or have time to focus on retirement plans. That all came in the denouement, AFTER Sauron had been defeated. Plenty of other stories show heroes starting their journey with very little time set aside for things like retirement plans. Plenty more stories like those can be crafted by DMs.

I think rules about downtime assume a less active evil that the heroes are facing, or at least assume that there ISN'T a single, malevolent force which the heroes must face. Which is fine, but not what everyone is looking for. And anyway, if the heroes have time to build, then surely their enemies do as well... Which sounds like it has a lot of potential, actually. Wanna take the time to plan your wedding and get married? Great! Just beware some familiar-looking party crashers...

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

My first thought was that all you needed was a simple option to require some time off from adventuring to study and train in order to get the benefits of a level increase, during which time you could also do other things.

But, I could see great benefit in a framework for those other things. Something along the lines of, "You get 1 effort point for each weak you spend not adventuring." Then you could tie various mechanics into those effort points. Crafting an item, running a business, building a kingdom, etc.

This is just a hypothetical example. The point is that it frames time as a resource a player can use to attempt things.

 

[Zaukrie]

Why not just level characters when you want? Why do we need rules for this at all? Imo, all levelling rules should be optional.

 

[LostSoul]

Downtime is nice for sandboxes because it assigns a value to how you can spend your time, making it a choice.

In an "all adventure, all the time" game you only have one way to spend your time - adventure. There's no choice to be made there, so a module for downtime is counter-productive.

I think a downtime module would be a nice option to have but they should make this distinction clear.

 

[Warbringer]

Back in the bad old days (1e/2e) we used the following

Training 1 week per level gained at cost in gp equal to the xp needed to obtain the level.

Slow leveling game (I think we got to 8th (7/7) after 2 years), we were always broke (actually in debt most of the time to the dwarven money guild, and geased to pay our debts)...

One of the best campaigns ever played in

 

[Quickleaf]

Downtime is nice for sandboxes because it assigns a value to how you can spend your time, making it a choice.

In an "all adventure, all the time" game you only have one way to spend your time - adventure. There's no choice to be made there, so a module for downtime is counter-productive.

I think a downtime module would be a nice option to have but they should make this distinction clear.

You've pretty much nailed it on the head.

 

[Li Shenron]

But, I could see great benefit in a framework for those other things. Something along the lines of, "You get 1 effort point for each weak you spend not adventuring." Then you could tie various mechanics into those effort points. Crafting an item, running a business, building a kingdom, etc.

This makes me think that when a DM proposes a framework for downtime, is it often training rules, which are a series of "negative" rules, i.e. house rules that take away something that standard rules normally give you automatically, and then say "if you take downtime, and declare you use downtime doing this, then you can have that back".

E.g. the framework may say something along the line: "you need to spend one week of training per level, in order to level up and get all the benefits", or alternatively be more details like "one week of training required for each skill rank increas, one month required for each feat, two weeks for each new arcane spells etc."

I am not against this approach, but clearly it requires everybody to accept it in the first place, and it does not allow players to make their choice individually. I don't think it ultimately adds much to the game, you just end up making your next level choices, calculate how much time you need to be off and declare it, get pissed off if the DM decides you're interrupted. Some character classes might be penalized but this will probably just set the minimum downtime for the whole group (assuming they level up together, which is often not the case).

The opposite approach of having "positive" downtime rules is much better, but doesn't apply to levelling up, it apply to something in addition.

And here are two routes to follow (although both can coexist). You can allow downtime activity to grant additional benefits at the cost of only the time spent, or you can require some additional cost (typically money).

The latter is the approach used by the crafting rules in 3ed. This makes it a conscious choice: you spend something to get something in addition. Ultimately, these are supposed to even out, so it's really possible for one player to take advantage of all downtime and for another to totally ignore the option. However, the downtime spent itself tends to become secondary to the other cost, and even annoying to some players, in fact later 3ed material spawned rules for splitting up or totally ignore (e.g. craft points) the time required (these are rules for those who don't like dealing with downtime!).

The former carries the danger of unbalancing characters if one player uses downtime as much as possible while the other is not interested. Would you allow the first player to get better and better at some skills just because he says "I spend all my downtime climbing trees", while the other player doesn't?

However, I am actually very interested in this approach, as long as it is allowed for benefits that are themselves mostly confined to downtime. That is, don't let a player build equipment, learn spells, or add any other character "feature" just by spending downtime (unless she has an additional cost), if those features be used in the exploration and combat phases. But allow it, if the features gained are usable in the interaction phase (or any other downtime) and are strictly non-mechanical.

Examples can include developing contacts with NPCs, working towards memberships in restricted groups, or even gathering some specific knowledge, as long as you don't just treat it like granting a +1 to a lore skill, but perhaps in the form of answering specific questions, e.g. "I want to learn more about the Kingdom of XYZ" then next session hand out a page of written information that the player can read on the subject. Also learning new "recipes" for alchemical items or herbalist potions can still fall within the scope, since anyway the PC will need to pay to craft them.

Investing money in a merchant business or building a castle can also fall in this framework fine, but only if the campaign is at a stage where money doesn't matter anymore (which would be impossible in 3ed), otherwise you have to make the investment balance out to a zero monetary benefit.

How does this all make sense? Well it does for some players, on the ground that maybe if player X is interested in spending downtime to build a castle, the reason has to be because he is interested in building a castle, not because he is interested in multiplying his gp stash or getting a +1 somewhere. That player is going to be rewarded just by the DM providing simple rules on how to design a castle, and then after a few session hand out a picture or a map for the finished work. Of course other players aren't interested, but this way they aren't penalized if they ignore the downtime optinoal "rules". IOW, make the player rewards herself without a net benefit, make the castle, the contacts, the membership or the merchant business spawn a quest later ("your castle is under attack!", "your spy in Candlekeep was arrested and you're afraid he might name you") as well as occasional non-monetary, non-combat related benefits ("you can retreat to safety in your castle during the undead invasion", "your spy in Candlekeep will let you have a key for the library").

 

[LostSoul]

E.g. the framework may say something along the line: "you need to spend one week of training per level, in order to level up and get all the benefits", or alternatively be more details like "one week of training required for each skill rank increas, one month required for each feat, two weeks for each new arcane spells etc."

I am not against this approach, but clearly it requires everybody to accept it in the first place, and it does not allow players to make their choice individually. I don't think it ultimately adds much to the game, you just end up making your next level choices, calculate how much time you need to be off and declare it, get pissed off if the DM decides you're interrupted. Some character classes might be penalized but this will probably just set the minimum downtime for the whole group (assuming they level up together, which is often not the case).

This approach requires some other variable in order to work. If you train to level up as soon as you can, that's not much of a choice. It's just a time tax. You want the player to think, "Should I level up now or use my time in some other way?" Then the player has a meaningful choice to make. e.g. "I heard a rumour that an orc tribe has moved into the Grime Hills. If they take the bridge over Grime Gorge then we won't have any easy route to the west and they can pillage the valley easily. Maybe I should push them back at least a little before I level up; then again, if I level up, it'll be easier to deal with anything else I have to face."

In a way the DM is deciding to interrupt the PCs, but only so far as it's the DM's job to create opportunities for adventure.

I think the addition of a cost to downtime options makes time a PC resource; since the players decide how they want to spend their resources, I think that makes it a "positive" rule. Players can spend their resources any way they want so you don't have to worry about downtime only adding to other downtime options.

What you do have to worry about is balancing the options and costs over the course of a campaign; you don't want (for example) levelling up to be the best choice in almost every situation, since then the player isn't actually making a choice. They're just spending the time tax.

I guess I think that downtime rules require some kind of DM-side campaign management rules/guidelines as well, in order to introduce the cost that makes time a real resource to be spent. These rules have to not only be balanced (to create real choices, as above) but they need to be better than what the DM could come up without them (at least for the same amount of real prep-time spent).

You could drop the "downtime module" and still use the DM-side campaign management module.