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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6482474" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, first of all, downtime activities are part of the story.  It's just not part of the story we spend a lot of time playing out, though its possible that the consequences of downtime very much is something we'd play out.You'll note I did not say I wanted to make an adventure about inn keeping.  I only suggested that I could if I wanted to, use the rules for downtown to run a contest between a PC innkeeper and an NPC innkeeper.  I'm supposing here that for whatever reason, the contest has become important to the story but the details of it are not so interesting that we want to run it as an adventure with day to day events, IC role play, and so forth.  (Possibly because it is happening while another player is doing down time with his character.)  One particular attraction in doing so compared to your skill contest suggestion is that we would expect that the side effects of this challenge - how much money the PC gained or lost - would be handled by the rules without need to a fiat declaration or calculation.  And equally, if the PC wants to do something to influence the challenge, we could just as easily invent rulings for this platform as another.   The ability to invent rules is not a feature of rules, and in fact, the more rules you need to invent whole cloth, the more likely it is that there is a problem with the rules.I propose that challenge as a test of the durability of the rules.  Since 5e rules are pretty darn durable and well considered most of the time, I'd bet (an XP point, since I have nothing else to offer), that even without the book in front of me, they'll pass the test fairly well.   If they don't, then it suggests that the rules are flawed because equally strong and serviceable rules that wouldn't fail this test could occupy the same amount of space.  Among other ways in which this hypothetical rule set would be superior to the hypothetical one that couldn't pass the 'playoff' challenge, is that it is more intuitive.  It makes sense to run a contest between two characters that involves how much income they earn over time using the rules for how much income a character earns over time, and equally, it makes sense that the same basic rules should apply to the PC running an inn whether or not across town there is another inn (especially if we don't want economic simulation that is so detailed we are modeling supply and demand in great detail).  Also if they pass this test, they are more versatile and offer DMs a way to handle this situation with less recourse to rulings.  So, yes, better.A second stress test of the down time rules is suppose we for whatever reason find ourselves using the downtime rules in place of the campaign.   Maybe, for whatever reason, the table agrees to advance the timeline by 10 years and decides to run those 10 years (520 weeks) entirely using the down time rules.  If the rules are solid and well thought out, this should produce no difficulty and while the process of playing through 520 steps of down time might not be fun (depending on your taste), if the rules are solid then the net result should be 'believable' in some fashion and describe a career or trajectory that makes some degree of sense for the choices the player made and skills that they have.  Now, I've even given this less thought than I've given the other test, and without buying the 5e DMG couldn't even begin to guess how such a test would work out.   However, I propose that if this test doesn't work, what it actually suggests is that there are subtle weaknesses in the down time rules which are largely ignored purely because the downtime rules aren't that important to most games.  They are in fact difficulties we live with - small flaws we can ignore because of the low influence they have on the average game.   However, I equally propose that just because the flaws are small, wouldn't mean that the rules weren't weakened by them or that they had no impact on play in the short run.  Moreover, any such flaws could be presumably fixed in the same amount of space since it would probably be in odds, numbers, and averages that the problems cropped up.</blockquote>

Verification