D&D 5E New L&L When Adventurers Aren’t Adventuring

[Blackwarder]

New L&L When Adventurers Aren’t Adventuring

Downtime mechanics

http://wizards.com/dnd/Article.aspx?x=dnd/4ll/20130610

Warder

 

[Blackwarder]

So after thinking about it some more I came to the conclusion that I really like this week column, I would like to rename it campaign mechanics instead of downtime mechanics because downtown sounds unimportant, another thing I would like is for some of those activities to give XP, managing a marchent house competently should give experience so does magical research, managing a domain or even managing to become the most liked person in the area. I'd like to give my sandbox players incentives to do those activities.

Warder

 

[delericho]

Nice. I like it.

 

[gweinel]

Sounds very good. Reminds me kind of the Fellowship Phase from The One Ring rpg from Cubicle 7.

 

[GX.Sigma]

To repeat my comment from the mothership, it sounds great, but it doesn't answer WHY adventurers aren't adventuring. In my current campaign, the party is about to finish up an adventure, and they have a bunch of hooks for other adventures. It would be cool for them to chill in Waterdeep and do downtime stuff for a bit, but why would they not immediately go and do another adventure? The game needs to encourage this kind of downtime, and two-day rests isn't the way.

 

[pemerton]

I would say that this is the most interesting L&L for a long time - perhaps ever! There are a lot of RPGs out there with interesting downtime/community/"transiation scene" mechanics - Burning Wheel, Marvel Heroic, HeroWars/Quest, etc - and it's nice to see this sort of territory being explored for D&D and linked in to the background mechanics.

 

[Zustiur]

Re: New L&L When Adventurers Aren’t Adventuring

I have been wishing for something exactly like this. Depending upon your desired story type you can either ignore this whole thing, have it as a sort of side comment between adventures, have it as your training Mechanic or treat it as the entire point behind the campaign. I love it.

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[Ichneumon]

Previous versions of D&D, especially the first two, have included activities that required a chunk of downtime. Typically these have been magic item creation or researching spells, and when only one character was involved, it gave rise to the question: What does everyone else do? The polite answer was "Wait two months until Falzsa the Mighty has built her +5 sickle of doom." and the impolite one was "Go adventuring. Falzsa's player can run the pet wolf." This system promises to grant a raft of nonadventuring opportunities to those other players. Yes, Falzsa's party can still go adventuring without her, but they'll no longer have the excuse of nothing to do.

I suspect downtime activities will be used sparingly by low-level characters, as they always have some adventure or the other to run off to. High level characters are likely to invest more time in them. Whether players bother to partake will depend largely on how useful those rewards are in the campaign. If adventure isn't just something that happens off in the dungeon, and is liable to come to town as well, the PCs may appreciate having a standing army, acquired knowledge or a friendly thieves' guild. The outline of this system looks great and I'm keenly awaiting to see how they flesh it out.

 

[MortalPlague]

This seems like a great foundation. I can't wait to see how this gets fleshed out.

One of the best parts of this is that characters will have something to spend their gold on aside from magic items or gear.

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

I am a massive fan of downtime mechanics, thought most of the time I've had to come up with or expand on existing rules myself. What Mike's laid out here sounds interesting - in particular the idea that you can train skills outside of the level system. I wonder exactly how that will work - could it be that skills won't be tied in with your class levels at all? That might be cool, after all, there's only so much you can learn whilst out adventuring. Maybe a tick system (Call of Cthulhu style) could be implemented so that those skills specifically adventuring related will level up with you, and others require downtime. Ooh, or maybe finally we can make better use of the XP system! Each skill can have it's own XP track and level up accordingly - one tick for level 1, 2 for level 2, etc. Ticks could be earned by downtime spending (for things that require practise), or item acquisition (for knowledge), or use in a stressful sitation (in combat).