D&D 5E Downtime: When, How, and How Much?

[Jd Smith1]

I would love to use downtime, but when my players arrive at a town with no pressing mater, they always, always look at me with a blank stare and say: ''what are we supposed to do now?''.

People likes to complain about ''railroads'', but it seems I have fallen upon the only table that loves being told where to go and who to talk to with large glowing signs like in modern video games.

Probably a situation due to young-ish age (from 24 yo to me at 29 yo as the DM) and a good mix of ADDH, short time to play etc etc. Anyway, to them time not adventuring = time wasted.

Well, they're happy, and it would seem to be an easy group to cater to.

I think it has to do with people who come through CRPGs to the hobby.

 

[billd91]

I usually allow quite a bit of leeway on downtime depending on how much the players want to spend compared with how urgent events they have stakes in are advancing in the background. In my classic modules campaign, the characters wintered after defeating the slavelords before heading off to other adventures.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Well, they're happy, and it would seem to be an easy group to cater to.

I think it has to do with people who come through CRPGs to the hobby.

It became easier once I accepted that this is a legitimate style of play. I used to over prepare my games in advance, often finishing the night with a feeling of being incompetent or angry because my stuff was only used at like 15%. But when once I decided to just create a basic path a let them have fun following it, I became way less stressed out.

No open sandboxes for those ones

 

[Jd Smith1]

It became easier once I accepted that this is a legitimate style of play. I used to over prepare my games in advance, often finishing the night with a feeling of being incompetent or angry because my stuff was only used at like 15%. But when once I decided to just create a basic path a let them have fun following it, I became way less stressed out.

No open sandboxes for those ones

Different strokes for different folks.

The odd thing is that you found an entire group geared that way.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Different strokes for different folks.

The odd thing is that you found an entire group geared that way.

Well they are all a bunch of friends from 20+ years ago, so I guess that old friends tends to have similar tastes. I the error in this equation it seems as I'm a hardcore storyteller: 3 games of just characters sitting aroung a campfire sharing tales and speaking about their hope for the future in a low-magic setting would be awesome to me, but probably push my friends in a boredom-filled near catatonic state.

 

[Charlaquin]

In my upcoming hexcrawl with megadungeon, downtime is tied to long resting which is 1 week long. So if you take a long rest, you get a work week of downtime. There are three towns on the hexmap and each one offers different downtime activities which increases the incentive to travel outside of the main hub. The PCs can opt to spend additional weeks on downtime if they want, but the megadungeon has a restocking mechanic and there's a "season" for going there (the terrain is impassable in the winter). Spend too much time in town and the dungeon repopulates and resets. This makes it a meaningful choice.

This sounds incredibly cool.

 

[Maestrino]

I just started running an Acquisitions Inc. campaign. The party cleared out the first big dungeon and hit level two. They're about to go report back in to head office, and they'll have a few free days (they can go identify and sell off / trade some of the magic items they found, or whatever). They also have a new goblin sidekick and young dragon friend that wants to meet up with them in a week or so.

When they get to head office, they'll be officially assigned franchise duties, but Head Office will need a few days to requisition their supplies. In the meantime, they need to take care of HR's paperwork, and they'll probably want to research some other strange artifacts they found, as well as some old cult ruins they stumbled through.

Normally we'd just waive the HR stuff, but you do NOT mess with HR when there's a lich in charge. No one else wanted to run HR and Bob volunteered... To be fair, he HAS cut down the intern turnover rate, and our insurance premiums are lower than ever, but his methodology is maybe questionable.

So the party will go through the Intern Selection, Testing, And Ranking facility, which is going to become a ridiculous Portal-style madhouse. After that, they'll finally be sent on to their new franchise location for "chapter 2" of their campaign.

Who says downtime has to be boring?

 

[Charlaquin]

I would love to use downtime, but when my players arrive at a town with no pressing mater, they always, always look at me with a blank stare and say: ''what are we supposed to do now?''.

People likes to complain about ''railroads'', but it seems I have fallen upon the only table that loves being told where to go and who to talk to with large glowing signs like in modern video games.

Probably a situation due to young-ish age (from 24 yo to me at 29 yo as the DM) and a good mix of ADDH, short time to play etc etc. Anyway, to them time not adventuring = time wasted.

They’re certainly not the only group like this. A railroad is only a railroad if you don’t want to go where it takes you, and a lot of players are perfectly content just to enjoy the ride.

 

[Prakriti]

I decouple downtime and campaign time. Downtime is a resource that players earn for attending games, usually 5 downtime days per game. So after 5 games, a player has 25 days that they can spend at any time (between sessions) to craft, research, etc. The assumption is that the work involved was done during rest periods.

Crafting can be done just about anywhere, but some things, such as investigating and gathering information, have to be done in town.

 

[Hriston]

I don't use it. We typically dive headlong into the next scenario/quest/fight without any downtime. I too would be curious how other groups implement it though.

A complete lack of downtime would indicate that the DM provides lots of adventure hooks that are available for the PCs to pursue like the items on a check-list. When they’re done with one adventure, they tell the DM which adventure they’re going on next. Is that about right?