D&D 5E Training and Downtime

[Wik]

This is an excellent way of organically generating downtime just through an aspect of the game world...until the party get access to teleport, planeshift, or anything else that lets them go where and-or when they want; after which downtime can become a lost concept unless something else generates it.

Thanks.

The thing is, teleport is a ways away. But, when they get there - teleport don't work so well when you haven't been to the destination you're going to. So, the party has to teleport to the closest place they've been... and then risk the same travel problems.

Lan-"I assume you have something in mind should they try to travel overland in winter instead of across the stormy water"-efan

Yyup. A homebrewed idea I came up with last winter when I was working in the december heat. I call it "snow".

 

[dmnqwk]

One way to approach it is to break it down from days to hours, and keep track of the hours achieved over the course of his adventuring time.

I would insist that the first 50 hours of every quarter be spent with a tutor, while the remainder can be done on the road, alone time study or simply practicing with other people.

Example: Grubbins the Half Orc is trying to learn to speak Elven. Overall it will take him 1000 hours of study to do so. He finds a tutor and spends a week learning the basics of the language, purchasing a nice book to help him learn.

Grubbins' group then set off to track down a Dragon, wreaking havoc on the local countryside. Each day they spend 8 hours marching, a couple of hours hunting for food and 2 hours taking short rests. With 8 hours of sleep that leaves Grubbins 4 hours a day to study Elven. Because he is active, he rolls an Intelligence check DC 10 to ensure he can benefit from the day's session. He rolls a 12 and manages to retain the knowledge he read, adding 4 hours to his total time spent learning.

Amrien, the party's Elven Wizard, was an archivist and is a trained linguist. She offers to assist Grubbins learning Elven. Thanks to her assistance, she is able to double the benefit of the time spent studying. Therefore when Amrien assists, Grubbins can benefit from 8 hours for every 4 he spends.

Over the next fortnight they find, engage and slaughter the poor dragon. The next 10 days they spend returning for their reward. Grubbins succeds on 14 of the 24 Intelligence checks, with Amrien capable of assisting 10 of those, for a total of 100 hours towards learning a language (in the month he has spent on the road, including the initial day for those concerned the maths doesnt add up!)

Now up to 150 hours of study, Grubbins pays an Elven tutor an spends the next week studying 4 hours a day, for the benefit of double (thanks to the tutor). He is now up to 200 hours. After an additional 50 hours of training he would require a tutor to ensure his progress.

In total, it takes him 6-8 weeks per quarter to learn, through a mixture of Intelligence Checks adventuring, to double time when in a town, and overall it takes him just over 6 months to learn the language. Quite a lot of that was thanks to Amrien's assistance!

So to summarise:
The first 50 hours of each quarter requires a Tutor to ensure good practice.
Each day you can spend up to 4 hours learning a tool/language.
To accomplish it while adventuring requires an Intelligence DC 10 check to ensure you retain the knowledge.
If you are assisted by a tutor, you receive double the number of hours as credit towards your goal.
You must have a source of training available, such as materials available for practice or an instruction book/manual.

If the character spent all their time working on a tool/language under the tutelage of a trained individual (think of the gold cost this would entail!) then the 1000 hours could be accomplished within 3 1/2 months.
If they only had tutors for the bare minimum, while adventuring the rest of the time (assuming a 50% success rate on the intelligence checks) you'd be looking at 1 month for the mandatory training sessions, and about 15 months in the wild. Which would put it in a sensible time frame I feel.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I love the downtime training rules. I don't approach it as "Where on earth are the PCs going to get all this downtime?" but rather as "Oh, boy, an excellent incentive for the PCs to take downtime!" I even let the PCs pick up new skill proficiencies, because one of the few ways in which 5E is weaker than 3E is in not having an easy way for characters to expand their skills beyond what they picked at 1st level. They have a ceiling on bonus skills equal to their natural class skill number (i.e., two for fighters, four for rogues) plus their Intelligence modifier, so there's still value in picking a high-skill class, and so that Intelligence once again matters without being cripplingly restrictive.

One way to approach it is to break it down from days to hours, and keep track of the hours achieved over the course of his adventuring time.

I would insist that the first 50 hours of every quarter be spent with a tutor, while the remainder can be done on the road, alone time study or simply practicing with other people.

Example: Grubbins the Half Orc is trying to learn to speak Elven. Overall it will take him 1000 hours of study to do so. He finds a tutor and spends a week learning the basics of the language, purchasing a nice book to help him learn.

Grubbins' group then set off to track down a Dragon, wreaking havoc on the local countryside. Each day they spend 8 hours marching, a couple of hours hunting for food and 2 hours taking short rests. With 8 hours of sleep that leaves Grubbins 4 hours a day to study Elven. Because he is active, he rolls an Intelligence check DC 10 to ensure he can benefit from the day's session. He rolls a 12 and manages to retain the knowledge he read, adding 4 hours to his total time spent learning.

Amrien, the party's Elven Wizard, was an archivist and is a trained linguist. She offers to assist Grubbins learning Elven. Thanks to her assistance, she is able to double the benefit of the time spent studying. Therefore when Amrien assists, Grubbins can benefit from 8 hours for every 4 he spends.

Over the next fortnight they find, engage and slaughter the poor dragon. The next 10 days they spend returning for their reward. Grubbins succeds on 14 of the 24 Intelligence checks, with Amrien capable of assisting 10 of those, for a total of 100 hours towards learning a language (in the month he has spent on the road, including the initial day for those concerned the maths doesnt add up!)

I'm not concerned the maths doesn't add up. I'm concerned that you're doing the maths. If twenty-four separate Intelligence checks doesn't seem excessive to you -- well, whatever floats your boat, I guess, but I can't help but doubt that your suggested rules will be eagerly embraced by most D&D groups.

Me? Tracking hours seems crazy to me; I don't even track the days. Two hundred fifty days is about eight months. Part-time training (including campfire lessons by a comrade, or immersion in a language without taking lessons) counts for half or a quarter, depending on circumstances. Boom. Done.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

250 days looks to me like it's meant to represent about 1 year with breaks and holidays taken into account. Most medieval societies weren't workaholic and got plenty of days off, so it works well that way.

What I plan to do is to allow characters to shorten the time by making Intelligence checks. I might even grant advantage or proficiency if a high intelligence character who already knew a lot of languages were trying to learn a new one.

I also wouldn't automatically require the gp cost. That assumes you are paying for a private tutor. There are other ways to learn that might let you trade labor instead of cash.

One thing to keep in mind is that learning new proficiencies isn't a given. While one character is doing that, another might be trying to make money starting a business, or acquiring social contacts, or just gallivanting around on a private yachte. I think the assumption ought to be that, even for adventurers, learning new languages and tool proficiencies is generally done on a necessity basis. Some people love to learn just to learn, but most adventures might never learn a language beyond their starting languages.

 

[MechaPilot]

What I plan to do is to allow characters to shorten the time by making Intelligence checks. I might even grant advantage or proficiency if a high intelligence character who already knew a lot of languages were trying to learn a new one.

One realistic element you might throw in there is to reduce the time if the two languages use the same script.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

One realistic element you might throw in there is to reduce the time if the two languages use the same script.

Yeah, I would probably take into account how closely related the languages are.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, I would probably take into account how closely related the languages are.

I also account for how complex the language is. Learning Elvish or Dwarvish, for example, takes a lot more time and brains than learning Ogrish or Goblin; I have it that many monster languages are quite simplistic.

You might also want to consider whether a given language - particularly a monster language - even has a written form at all. If it doesn't, and you're building literacy into the training time, the training time should come down somewhat.

Lan-"about half the total words in the language of Ogres are synonyms for one (or more) of kill, eat, drink, fight, sleep, or sex"-efan

 

[Bennet Hoenheim]

I actually use downtime, retroactively, so that players get to use it "behind the screen" in a way that kinda fits the narrative--I also allow this, IF they have allies, cohorts, or followers that may help them to actually occur somehow. Importantly, we do keep the game going with some "jumps" into a point in the future to move the tale forward: for these events (downtime activity) to take place, or adjust some :flasbacks: whereas the "retroactive" usage makes more sense.

Additionally, if they work together; downtime can be done in half the time it actually takes, so it kinda works pretty fine.

Keeps it simple and fun tho!

 

[LostSoul]

Number of adventures...now that's an excellent measure to use right there, and common across all campaigns just about no matter what else is going on.

Not necessarily in a sandbox.

How time is used in RPGs is an interesting question, one I'd like to see covered.

 

[Lanefan]

Not necessarily in a sandbox.

Even in a full-on sandbox there's almost certainly going to be discrete definable adventures or missions or whatevers and discrete definable breaks between them, particularly if the game has training rules or the party likes to divide or sell off its treasury now and then.

One of these days I'd like to put together a character log for Lord of the Rings as if the Fellowship were a standard adventuring party - it might seem like one long continuous story (though focusing on multiple parties at once) but there's actually a series of discrete adventures in there.

Lan-"over the long run short and long adventures tend to balance out, so using 'adventures' as a measure of time still holds up"-efan