Unearthed Arcana Unearthed Arcana Explores Downtime Activities

This is EXACTLY what I wanted and EXACTLY what the game needed.

Then there's this: "For more information, see “Brewing Potions of Healing” in this section on crafting and “Scribing a Spell Scroll” on page Error! Bookmark not defined." (p. 7)

 

[thethain]

"All Hail....wait, wut?"

He doesn't really know that much about the original ideas of Azuth, his cult has him indoctrinated fairly well so that any discrepancies he views as "Lost true knowledge our members have rediscovered" He would definitely be using the charisma Persuade version as opposed to intelligence Religion sermons. And should be pretty good at spreading the word since hes at like +10 persuade.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I think this will help in turning my next PotA campaign into something more than an epic dungeon-crawl. With this, I can use the different cults/prophets/elemental effects as foils during downtime activities, giving life and purpose to them rather than having wait in their respective node to be killed. All in all, good stuff.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Well, we got more options for making, selling, and buying magic items. I happen to like how they tied those mechanics to in-game flavor, but I am willing to bet that the folks who have been demanding rules for magic item creation will not be happy at all.

"You mean it takes me a YEAR to make one rare item? That's BS!"

 

[phantomK9]

Well, we got more options for making, selling, and buying magic items. I happen to like how they tied those mechanics to in-game flavor, but I am willing to bet that the folks who have been demanding rules for magic item creation will not be happy at all.

"You mean it takes me a YEAR to make one rare item? That's BS!"

Yeah, I am of the same opinion. To me the real work should be done in gathering the required rare ingredients and in doing the research. Once you have all that together, it should not take much longer than creating a standard version of the item (say a sword) but you are just adding in the complication of needing special items and possibly magic rituals....a few days at most....

It seems quite counter intuitive if the group decides that in order to slay the red dragon that is rampaging the countryside that in order to craft that Sword of Dragon Slaying, that they should wait 2 years or so in order to complete the sword. What is that, one hammer swing a day?

I'm probably going to either heavily modify the days required or just get rid of it completely, especially when the Magic Item Ingredients chart really helps set up the adventure of going out and getting the ingredients needed.

 

[Osgood]

I've used Downtime quite a bit in some of my campaigns, and I've felt is was lacking. This looks like a really good improvement, and I'll give this a shot the next time downtime comes up. I do wonder about some things that were dropped, like Building a Stronghold and Running a Business (which have come up in my group).

I'm not crazy about the whole "workweek" thing, it seems a little confusing to have multiple time standards (day, workweek, week).

I always thought the magic item bases prices from the DMG felt odd, but these changes make absolutely no sense... it costs more to make an item than sell it?! You can craft a single scroll of wish for a quarter million, or shell out 100,000 to make a ring of wishes (sure it takes way longer)... but why, when you can buy that ring for for an average of twice that. They really need to look at their math!

 

[Jeff Carlsen]

I like it a lot, though I need to be pedantic again. "Foil" has a explicit literary meaning that is not synonymous with "antagonist", which is what this document is talking about.

A foil is a character who is quite similar to the protagonist so that the differences are put into stark contrast. If a PC is a thief with a heart of gold, than the foil might be a sadistic rival thief or cold-hearted assassin. Most foils are antagonists, but few antagonists are foils.

That said, tying the plots and machinations of antagonists to the downtime rules is an interesting idea.

 

[aco175]

I only casually looked at the rules right now, but I thought it was broken down into workweeks. I thought if something took 50 workweeks I could use 50 people and have it dome in 1 week, or 2 weeks if I only had 25 people. I may be wrong, but I like what I see so far with this.

 

[thanson02]

I got some really interesting concepts in it. A lot of this stuff you can pretty much make up on the fly though.

I do like the idea of having random events pop up in between Adventures that the players may or may not have to deal with such as somebody getting the wrong idea about their activities while adventuring for introducing a new bed that might play into your adventure later down the road.

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[Gladius Legis]

The PHB example of a suit of plate armor (1,500 gp) now takes 210 days to craft (1,500 gp/50 = 30 weeks X 7 days) instead of 300.

So ... bleh. Crafting sucks a little bit less, but still sucks. Character level, ability scores, and/or proficiency bonus should factor in somehow, but I don't quite know how, just yet ...

 

[Savage Wombat]

I am confused by the discrepancies between the manufacturing and purchasing costs of magic items.