NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="overgeeked" data-source="post: 9090793" data-attributes="member: 86653">I get what people are reaching for with "downtime" but it seems like an odd catch all rather than a distinct category. It's also an odd framing as it implies that combat, exploration, and social would be the opposite of downtime, so "uptime." But what would uptime be, actively playing your character? Most of the listed downtime activities involve actively playing your character. Is downtime then "not out adventuring"? But depending on how involved the systems and subsystems and how invested in those activities, they would be the uptime of certain campaigns while the fighting of monsters and delving of dungeons would be the less emphasized and therefore downtime activities.I get where you're going, but I'm not sure that they have to be governed by different subsystems to be distinct. Combat is clearly a separate minigame, but exploration and social are basically skill checks, so governed by the same subsystem. But exploration and social interaction are clearly different activities.Further, imagine everything you could do in the game was handled by the combat rules. That wouldn't make exploration and social interaction into combat, they'd simply share a subsystem. Or go the other way and imagine combat handled by simple skill checks without the extra rules. That wouldn't suddenly make combat into exploration or social. Maybe it's a fiction-first vs mechanics-first distinction.Pillars or modes, I don't think the name matters that much. It's the idea behind it. Broad categories of play that are typical for the game. I'm not convinced that breakdown works. I'm not saying pillars is better. Just that how the player interacts with the fiction isn't really the place I'd think to mark the differences. For example, all modes of play are governed by the conversation between the player and referee. That's literally the basis of the game. You can't really play a traditional RPG without that.And that does show the question of granularity. How granular should the distinctions be? If puzzles and riddles are their own thing, separate from exploration, then shouldn't wilderness travel, dungeon delving, and urban exploration be separated too?</blockquote>

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