D&D 5E (2014) Downtime: When, How, and How Much?

[Hriston]

In the current campaign they're trying to find Wave Echo Cave so they can put a stop to the Black Spider. Every session since the first one is leading up to the conclusion of that plot thread. There's no resting for weeks or months to train for levels or learn a new language or whatever happens in downtime. It is all one adventure with different components that make up the whole, interlocked like a jigsaw puzzle. There's no checklist of plot hooks.

Okay, got it. I can see that if the campaign is all one big adventure, there wouldn’t be any downtime. Although I do wonder what happens after the party stops the black spider?

 

[Nebulous]

It is very campaign dependent. My current campaign has some downtime, but not a lot. My first campaign had one winter, but that's all. I have an idea for a Game of Thrones style game that will likely have a lot of downtime.

My suggestion on downtime rules would be to use days, rather than the "workweeks" from XGtE. Sometimes players only have a few days of downtime available, and requiring an entire week makes things awkward.

Yes, they will use a day or two to rest and mingle with NPCs, but that's about it.

Okay, got it. I can see that if the campaign is all one big adventure, there wouldn’t be any downtime. Although I do wonder what happens after the party stops the black spider?

Move to Curse of Strahd, which again is a very self contained adventure in a pocket dimension, which should take them from 5th to 10th level No downtime there either.

 

[Hriston]

It is very campaign dependent. My current campaign has some downtime, but not a lot. My first campaign had one winter, but that's all. I have an idea for a Game of Thrones style game that will likely have a lot of downtime.

My suggestion on downtime rules would be to use days, rather than the "workweeks" from XGtE. Sometimes players only have a few days of downtime available, and requiring an entire week makes things awkward.

I’m not too familiar with XGtE. My impression of the workweek, however, was that it could be split up into non-consecutive days. Is that not the case?

I do like that it groups days of downtime into multiples of five. It’s something I’m following loosely in the rules module on which I’m working, but the downtime required for the activities in it is given in days because I think that’s the most straightforward in terms of presentation.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I’m not too familiar with XGtE. My impression of the workweek, however, was that it could be split up into non-consecutive days. Is that not the case?

It is. On page 125 a workweek is defined as 5 days, and "The days of an activity don't need to be consecutive [...] but that period of time should be no more than twice as long as the required time".

 

[Hriston]

In my current campaign its a mission driven type of game (think Mission Impossible style). So the party has a big mission which is several sessions, and then they have 2 weeks to 1 month of downtime.

I have some questions about this:

Is the regularity of downtime part of the premise agreed on by the group, or is it something the DM decided in setting up the campaign (could be both)?

Do the players know how much downtime they’re going to have each time, or does the DM sometimes cut it short with a new mission or other complications?

 

[Hriston]

Everything is handled in increments of weeks and hopefully resolved as quickly as possible so we can get back to the traveling and delving. I do use complications for some downtime activities.

Okay, I imagine the play loop going something like this:

DM: The town is a peaceful place to rest for a week. What do you do during that time?

Players: [declare various activities]

DM: Okay, you do that. <OR> Make a [ability] check to see if you’re successful. <AND/OR> [insert complication] happens.

Is that close?

I think of complications as the wandering monsters of downtime, but I remember disliking the way they were carried out in XGtE when I read it, so I’ve been trying to think of ways to improve them. Do you have any insights?

 

[iserith]

Pretty close. I do tend to spotlight each character individually and we resolve it with some amount of flavor, but we aren't spending much time playing out haggling with merchants or interviewing cagey, quirky NPCs if you know what I mean.

I tend to only make the sketchy downtime activities have complications and I adjust the percentage chance of complication based on the location. I'm very careful to make sure the complications are something that don't assume action on the part of the character that the player hasn't established. Personally, I like random complications because it's a moment for fun improvisation on my part and often the players will add to it to make it even better. It keeps things interesting.

 

[tetrasodium]

downtime is pretty unfinished as a system within 5e IMO, but this has a training cost/downtime requirement option you can add to leveling that helps give you some ballpark of what's reasonable if you use that part of what targets you should aim for.

 

[Li Shenron]

Hi All!

As per the title, please describe how your table implements downtime (if at all). I’m currently in the process of writing a rules module that heavily relies on downtime and would like to get an idea of the play processes involved with downtime at various tables. I’m primarily interested in how downtime interacts with the play loop. For example, does the DM of your group describe an amount of downtime for the players to use, or is it more player-initiated?

Thanks in advance for your reply!

Currently, we focus on one adventure at a time, during which there is essentially no downtime (but that's because we've played mostly dungeon-based or location-based classics). Between two adventures there is instead practically as much downtime as you wish, usually in the order of months.

Ideally, I would want to run a campaign with plenty of side quests and narrative threads intersecting, making downtime a lot more variable, but that's not an option at the moment.

 

[Horwath]

Personally I've never liked tying downtime training to leveling. I assume people are "training" all the time. A fighter may have learned a new technique and simply doesn't use it until they're comfortable with it. In order to get comfortable the new technique becomes part of their nightly exercises. A wizard studies continue even on the road.

I know that when I'm learning something new as a software developer, it takes both study and application before I feel like I've actually gotten better. It's kind of foreign to me to think that my skills could not improve incrementally simply because I haven't had a class or taken a week off just to study. In fact, that week of study could easily just be the starting point of mastering a new technology.

In other words, D&D isn't particularly granular. New skills don't just happen overnight, it's a gradual improvement. Gaining concrete levels is used for simplicity, but people are incrementally getting better all the time.

That is how I see it also. You improve with any action or training session you do.

In martial arts, you get better with every training day, but it just small improvement so you need many to get the next "belt", or in D&D terms an increase in monks unarmed damage dice or attack bonus.

In archery you get better with basically every arrow shot, but you need lots of arrow before you are comfortable to move you target from 10 meters to 20 meters, to 30 meters, etc...

"Level-up" is just an amalgam of small increases that happen every time you use some skill or do mostly anything summed up to a point when it affect game in hard coded game statinstic increase.