What do you do between adventures?

[Keeper of Secrets]

My players enjoy creating their own plot threads - seeing old freinds, following up on rumors and attending parties, bars, etc. I usually have my hands full as much as when there is 'down time' as when there is not.

 

[Maliki]

As a Dm I usually allow downtime between adventures, if the players take the time to roleplay mundane things like restocking supplies etc, fine if not I summerise what takes place and we move on to the next adventure.

 

[beaver1024]

But the adventure never ends...

As playing time tends to be limited for my groups I try and do as much of this stuff away from the table as possible using email to communicate with the GM and other players so that face time is largely spent on adventuring, after all I play D&D not Accountants and Bookeeping.

Well said!

 

[Wombat]

Spend time with family and friends, maintain a job and home, take care of small repairs, loaf, read a book, all the normal things -- adventures only take up a very tiny portion of the adventurers' lives in our world. There is also time to learn new spells, craft masterwork items, make magic items, etc. But for the most part, the characters just get on with life.

Which creates some great background hooks

And, yes, all but one character in our game has a fuller family. Three are married, two with children; all have other relatives and have to deal with them.

We like that "lived in" feel to our world

 

[Doug McCrae]

You gotta have downtime to spend all the money you made from killing behirs (or whatever).

 

[KB9JMQ]

There's potentially lots of things to do, most of which probably don't affect adventures directly, but several do (buying equipment, crafting items, learning/researching spells, identifying magic loot...).

My favourite way is to let players think on their own what their PC are doing, so when we gather up for the next adventure, each can tell the others what he/she has done in the downtime. Some characters have near to nothing to do except a generic "training", so if we were to do this part always at the gaming table, those players may be bored and push the others to begin the next adventure ASAP.

This is how I do it also.

 

[howandwhy99]

Life

EDIT: When I'm not preparing for the next adventure.

 

[werk]

I always left it up to the players. We always had a little bit of downtime, and a few times had years. But this eventually caused some issues because the paladin didn't want any down time at all (there is much to be done!) and the wizard wanted months and months of down time (just one more item, then we can go...I mean it...this time). This escalated and exacerbated, so I started having the players write down a time-line of what they want to do for downtime, with task and time required, in order of completion. I would collect all of these and draw a line...you are able to do THIS much, after this point you miss the next adventure because the party leaves without you (allowing you as much time as you want).


A couple of times the people that wanted extra downtime weren't willing to leave with the party, allowing for a small side-adventure for the rest of the group and a little 'don't separate the group' lesson for the player left behind. "Your friends aren't here to protect you now, wizard!"

 

[dreaded_beast]

Thanks for all the responses!

Next question.

If you do other things between the adventure, does this happen during your actual gaming session, outside of the gaming session, an acutal gaming session is spent just on downtime stuff, etc.?

How do you handle it from a meta-gaming (don't know if this is the right word) point of view?

 

[Crothian]

Thanks for all the responses!

Next question.

If you do other things between the adventure, does this happen during your actual gaming session, outside of the gaming session, an acutal gaming session is spent just on downtime stuff, etc.?

How do you handle it from a meta-gaming (don't know if this is the right word) point of view?

In one game I'm in, a bi weekly game, we have a message board to do in between things so they don't take too much time at the session. For instance selling things, getting things appraised, minor encounter, etc we do or try to do on the message board.

In a weekly game I run, we do things at the gaming table but I've been doing this sort of thing for years so I can get it by pretty fast so people aren;t sitting around why I deal with one guy for an hour.