I was considering doing this as a poll, but honestly there are probably too many variables for that to be particularly reliable... Anyway, I was curious to see how common it is to get proper "craft items", "work a job", "build a base", real monitored and tracked downtime in your games.
I bring this up because I pretty much never have downtime in my game with my DM. We have a very narrative-focused adventure, and our characters are usually on the move, so each day is played out from beginning to end. Usually there's a few hours in the day where the characters are stuck in place for one reason or another (waiting to meet someone, resting after a long journey, etc.), but nothing that allows for something like crafting as described in the DMG or Xanathar's.
Conversely, when I DM'd and tried to give my players downtime, they didn't really know what to do with it. Everyone just wanted to continue with the story, and any kind of shopping or whatever they wanted to actively roleplay as a group... partially, I think, because I created a particularly annoying shopkeep that they all enjoyed antagonizing.
But that aside... I think it's no surprise to learn that basically no actual-play series I watch or listen to uses downtime either. I think that might be more by virtue of the fact that these shows are trying to entertain an audience, possibly even moreso than focusing on playing the game optimally. It's hard to make spending a week working on a breastplate compelling for an audience. In the rare times where downtime does occur, if often ends up being something that's sorted out by the performers off-line and they only show the results within the game itself.
Yes, but it's not been very eventful. It's usually a way to get some extra coin (that we really don't need), or to work on learning a new tool that we didn't have before. Sometimes it's just been a way to integrate a backstory or introduce a new NPC that will be important in the future.
As a DM, I don't track downtime, I just give it every so often when it makes sense. The players usually just perform trade skill functions (smithing, etc.) or (Druids) create an army of friendly bunnies and squirls to cuddle with. I also don't give more than a week or so because (like you said) players don't know what to do with it. I also really don't like RPing home base building/management. If I want them to have a base, they are either gifted it or pay for it and can easily hire NPCs to manage day to day. If someone really wanted to craft an item that takes a large chunk of time, I would make it happen, but nobody ever want to.
I do remember Critical Role (at leas the first campaign) used downtime to allow players to gain additional skills and such. It wasn't often though.
Not as much as I would like. Generally, it comes down to a moment when enough characters are asking questions about items they can obtain. But generally, it turns into finding master craftsmen to create the items and we end up going on quests in between. I am not sure if it is a lack of interest from the table or if the objectives for the adventure don't allow us take long enough breaks to pursue ventures.
I would like to try a campaign that offers defined breaks at certain levels to give the players these options. With technology now, we can can address most of the crafting elements out of session; and the session or two that leads to the discover of the next adventure book could server to complete work and close out loose ends. Especially if the goal is to make a long epic with characters growing to Level 20 the downtime element allows for creation of some nice items and establishing relationships that can come back to into play throughout the games.
The only struggles I have are players who are surprised they can take the time to make their own gear, simple magic items, etc. or turn some coin in a non-combat profession. Once they understand it's all on me to have slow moments in the story where they can do the downtime activities.
I love it becuase it makes time matter and spaces out the adventures in a non-crisis setting environment.
That is, the players decide when downtime will happen, and it is a bit more complex, perhaps, in some ways, so I feel a need to go back to the beginning.
Downtime is the "time between adventures". The easiest way to look at it is the space between adventures/modules -- so in between going from Phandeler to Baldur's Gate, while they rest and get ready to head out, but aren't actually in a gaming session, that's what downtime is supposed to be.
It is the parts that is skipped over in fiction, the montage sequences in films, the time between books in a series. The boring stuff.
While I am totally down for playing the wise old teacher who smacks their 8th level student on the head with a cane and says "again", my players are usually a lot less likely to enjoy such things. It is presumed in the game that in the early morning hours they get up and they exercise, they practice, they memorize, they do those boring, mundane things like take a dump in the woods and hope a bear isn't doing the same thing, and then the game begins (the session starts). This is all like that.
A lot of the normal stuff that is done as RP during downtime is stuff we will do some element of but most of it is solved in a few rolls during a round robin at the start of a session or end of a session.
Since I run an open world, where all the activities are done by the players, they drive when that happens. If they want to leave a dungeon or adventure or take a break in a town during a long journey, that's up to them -- and we may switch to downtime mode right then. But we do some odd stuff (leveling requires getting your Master's approval, so that's a couple minutes, checking on your business takes a couple rolls, crafting might be a few rolls).
THe big thing here is tracking time -- how many days does it take to do these things? For most games, that never seems to matter, I suppose. THere has to be a certain scale to things for it to matter, and most folks just go from one adventure to the next without a break.
FOr big ass campaigns where things are going on around the characters, well, then it becomes a different story. TIme is one of the factors from a DM's side of things. Seasonal changes, weather, stuff like that. The season determines where the Hyborian folks are going to be found, with winter meaning they all gather in Hearthka to settle internal disputes and celebrate and reconnect with folks who might be bitter rivals during the rest of the year but are friends during the winter season.
Winter travel may be harder than summer, and so forth. The plot of the BBEG may move forward while they are sitting on their butt, changing the nature of the hooks and the challenges they will face. Baron Halogen chuckled softly as he watched the last of the guards who could possibly stop him was cut down by his pets. All that stood between hi and the throne now was a forced marriage to that spoiled brat and the death of the King. Thank heavens no nosy kids and weird dog showed up to uncover his dastardly plot so far!
It is that "larger scale" game that downtime and all that goes with it begins to matter.
But if you aren't running that kind of thing, then it is simply what happens when folks aren't playing -- or doesn't happen at all. Some games are all push, all the time, no time for that fluffery, there is stuff to kill. They hop from one module ending on day 7 to the next module starting on day 8. It becomes a speed race, not a measured campaign, and there is nothign wrong with it, but it is something that knocks out the availability of downtime.
So if players want it, they get it. "I want to spend time and craft a special artificer thing". DM looks it up, gonna take 30 days. "I also want to head out and do the thing."
Well, DM has to inform the Player they have to choose -- they can make the thing or they can go do the thing. Or, they can make the thing and then do the thing. Or do the thing and then make the thing. That's pretty much how it plays out, but the whole thing might happen in about 5 minutes of table time -- "I wanna make the thing and then doo the thing".
"Okay, rest of the table, what do you do for the next 30 days?"
That's downtime. And if they split the party, well...
That's a different thread.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
It happens. We once had a couple of decades where two characters put two other characters in hibernation somehow and built a kingdom for the four of us - the two in hibernation were half orcs and the other two elves, so clearly operating on a different timescale in terms of longevity (that was many moons ago, playing 2e).
Our most recent campaign feels like there is a clock ticking, so although we have just implemented a homebrew crafting system (not on dndbeyond) we have not yet had the opportunity to do more than write down a few scrolls - to the immense frustration of the artificer/wizard who is built for the crafting...
I'll echo the sentiments above. Downtime depends on the players and the ticking of the campaign clock. If it feels like there is no overall time pressure and the group of players have ideas that do not involve slaying monsters it can (and likely will) happen
When we run premade campaigns from WoTC there tends to be little/no downtime. This is largely because some of these campaigns have ticking clocks (Tomb of Annihilation: I'm looking at you as the most egregious example), and because we use milestone leveling. The pace of events in those campaigns unless the DM does some real adjustments tends to be pretty darn fast. Using milestone leveling in those campaigns has the added impact of making all the level advancement be pretty linear (Level 2 to Level 3 happens about as quickly as Level 8 to 9 for example).
We have also been running a game where the DM is coming up with all the content. The pace is not so breakneck. We often have weeks of downtime here and there. We're in the middle of Tier 2, so we haven't been able to do any crazy stuff with that downtime yet but I enjoy feeling like our characters didn't go from "Hey we just arrived in this jungle a few weeks ago and had trouble with 2 zomibies, and now we're Demi-gods taking on Acerak" as well as "Nope can't stop and interact with the multitude of cool stuff here, have to stay on our quest to save the world before the clock runs out".
PS - I actually LOVE Tomb of Annihilation but putting a hard ticking clock on an otherwise really cool sandbox is a bummer. I ran it a second time with a different group and threw the clock dynamic out the window - it did WONDERS for the game.
We've not really used downtime, but I wish we did. I think the hard part is maintaining the narrative tension. If the BBEG is still out there, doing bad things, how can the party take a month off to just hang around town? They're heroes, they should be out thwarting evil plans.
I guess a solution would be to run it more like, maybe a TV show type model where each season has a villain. You play through levels 1-3 and defeat the bad guy, not realizing there's a slightly bigger bad guy on the horizon. Spend your time downtiming for a bit and then get the call to action for the next bad guy, who takes you up a couple more levels, and so on. So instead of a single bad guy, you've got a series of bad guys, one at a time. At that point, though, it gets a little metagamey and contrived, since the players know there's going to be a new bad guy, but the characters don't, so depending on party composition, they may not even have an in-game reason to stick together. Though that could also be useful, giving players a reason and fairly non-disruptive time to switch to a new character if they're not enjoying the current one. In that respect it could also make the world more lived in and less metagamey.
I have yet to use downtime in my games but i plan to use downtime as this is what happened in between sessions
So obviously session 1 jjst introduce your charicters and allow your dm to describe how they meet
Other sessions reintroduce if you have new players and say something like "after a hard trek to reach the mountain peak our adventuers set up camp for the night/week etc" then encourage time appropriate down time so your wizard may say "inbetween meals and sleep i studied the ancient temples we passed"
The best use of downtime i saw was when The grey Wizard Gandalf studied Bilbos magic ring
I have yet to use downtime in my games but i plan to use downtime as this is what happened in between sessions
So obviously session 1 jjst introduce your charicters and allow your dm to describe how they meet
Other sessions reintroduce if you have new players and say something like "after a hard trek to reach the mountain peak our adventuers set up camp for the night/week etc" then encourage time appropriate down time so your wizard may say "inbetween meals and sleep i studied the ancient temples we passed"
The best use of downtime i saw was when The grey Wizard Gandalf studied Bilbos magic ring
As a suggestion, rather than you describing how they meet, tell them where they all are, and then have them describe how they all meet and how they got there.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
I have yet to use downtime in my games but i plan to use downtime as this is what happened in between sessions
So obviously session 1 jjst introduce your charicters and allow your dm to describe how they meet
Other sessions reintroduce if you have new players and say something like "after a hard trek to reach the mountain peak our adventuers set up camp for the night/week etc" then encourage time appropriate down time so your wizard may say "inbetween meals and sleep i studied the ancient temples we passed"
The best use of downtime i saw was when The grey Wizard Gandalf studied Bilbos magic ring
As a suggestion, rather than you describing how they meet, tell them where they all are, and then have them describe how they all meet and how they got there.
this could work yes as long as it's something like a chance meeting at the inn or a call to arms from a muteral pal but if they say we all went to halfling school together 266 years ago as youngling halflings that make the dms job harder lol plus i find unless thet are pre establiched pcs it's better for devolopment to be strangers
I allow my players to accomplish some crafting while travelling. At a normal pace a party travels eight hours a day, long rests another eight hours and then has a total of eight hours of "breaks" while travelling. They can work on common or uncommon items during that time period. Anything more complex requires actual downtime. And if they use actual downtime they can craft more quickly than doing it while travelling. They can also hire helpers to speed most tasks up.
But yes, my players' parties do get downtime. Whether or not they want to do anything during that downtime is up to them. If nothing, we simply skip past it. If something, we make some rolls using Xanathar's rules or something I've homebrewed and narrate the results. The thing about downtime is it's done outside of the active scenes the player characters are involved in. That's why you don't actually see any parties doing it.
Nope. Last time I used downtime was in a campaign that had a Divination Wizard. Portent does strange things to downtime. It basically shifts the long-view focus back to a short-view by suggesting you're sort of cheating the player out of their class features if you don't. But either way, I found the same issues as others have mentioned already: why are we goofing off when there's a plot happening out there?
I got around it very slightly by 1) introducing downtime activities that theoretically help with the plot and 2) keeping the plot fuzzy and vague when possible. Also I think they were stuck in a town for a little while due to weather.
But yeah. I think players want to goof off. They want to build a house. Mine ran a combination flower shop and brothel. But they don't want to play characters who goof off when there's important work to be done. They want to save the world!
So I really think DMs need to rethink their plot arcs. Give them breaks. Let the evil be unambiguously defeated in act 1. Come up with another way to thematically carry on the adventure after some downtime.
But also, downtime kinda sucks. I do think it would be improved somewhat if you removed any options that result in magic items, because obviously those are the only ones worth pursuing if they exist. The ones that give cash payouts are next on the chopping block (because money buys magic items), but I think there are a lot more of those, and it's harder to justify cutting them, so eh. I think a new system is needed tbh.
The point of downtime, in my opinion, is to express character in a new way. You don't open a coffee shop because your character needs the money, or because the Dark Prince is vulnerable to latte damage. You do it because you want to name it, you want to describe how it's different from your average coffee shop, you want to invent a fantasy espresso drink. You want to do a scene where the Blackstaff comes in and orders your new Dragon Breath Frappe and then burns the beard off her assistant. The fact that it can generate, like, 15 dollars of profit in a workweek is just not the point.
The advantage of the magic item ones is that they’re a way to facilitate the spending of post-adventure loot between arcs, particularly if the group uses Discord or another online chat option to run the downtime behind the black between sessions.
And, conversely, magic item activities are only worth pursuing if the players have enough gold for the items. At early levels, making some more gold or going after soft benefits like Carousing can be more attractive, and that’s assuming people make their picks purely based on gameplay benefits rather than roleplay.
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I was considering doing this as a poll, but honestly there are probably too many variables for that to be particularly reliable... Anyway, I was curious to see how common it is to get proper "craft items", "work a job", "build a base", real monitored and tracked downtime in your games.
I bring this up because I pretty much never have downtime in my game with my DM. We have a very narrative-focused adventure, and our characters are usually on the move, so each day is played out from beginning to end. Usually there's a few hours in the day where the characters are stuck in place for one reason or another (waiting to meet someone, resting after a long journey, etc.), but nothing that allows for something like crafting as described in the DMG or Xanathar's.
Conversely, when I DM'd and tried to give my players downtime, they didn't really know what to do with it. Everyone just wanted to continue with the story, and any kind of shopping or whatever they wanted to actively roleplay as a group... partially, I think, because I created a particularly annoying shopkeep that they all enjoyed antagonizing.
But that aside... I think it's no surprise to learn that basically no actual-play series I watch or listen to uses downtime either. I think that might be more by virtue of the fact that these shows are trying to entertain an audience, possibly even moreso than focusing on playing the game optimally. It's hard to make spending a week working on a breastplate compelling for an audience. In the rare times where downtime does occur, if often ends up being something that's sorted out by the performers off-line and they only show the results within the game itself.
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Yes, but it's not been very eventful. It's usually a way to get some extra coin (that we really don't need), or to work on learning a new tool that we didn't have before. Sometimes it's just been a way to integrate a backstory or introduce a new NPC that will be important in the future.
As a DM, I don't track downtime, I just give it every so often when it makes sense. The players usually just perform trade skill functions (smithing, etc.) or (Druids) create an army of friendly bunnies and squirls to cuddle with. I also don't give more than a week or so because (like you said) players don't know what to do with it. I also really don't like RPing home base building/management. If I want them to have a base, they are either gifted it or pay for it and can easily hire NPCs to manage day to day. If someone really wanted to craft an item that takes a large chunk of time, I would make it happen, but nobody ever want to.
I do remember Critical Role (at leas the first campaign) used downtime to allow players to gain additional skills and such. It wasn't often though.
Not as much as I would like. Generally, it comes down to a moment when enough characters are asking questions about items they can obtain. But generally, it turns into finding master craftsmen to create the items and we end up going on quests in between. I am not sure if it is a lack of interest from the table or if the objectives for the adventure don't allow us take long enough breaks to pursue ventures.
I would like to try a campaign that offers defined breaks at certain levels to give the players these options. With technology now, we can can address most of the crafting elements out of session; and the session or two that leads to the discover of the next adventure book could server to complete work and close out loose ends. Especially if the goal is to make a long epic with characters growing to Level 20 the downtime element allows for creation of some nice items and establishing relationships that can come back to into play throughout the games.
I integrate downtime into all of my games.
The only struggles I have are players who are surprised they can take the time to make their own gear, simple magic items, etc. or turn some coin in a non-combat profession. Once they understand it's all on me to have slow moments in the story where they can do the downtime activities.
I love it becuase it makes time matter and spaces out the adventures in a non-crisis setting environment.
For my stuff, downtime is player driven.
That is, the players decide when downtime will happen, and it is a bit more complex, perhaps, in some ways, so I feel a need to go back to the beginning.
Downtime is the "time between adventures". The easiest way to look at it is the space between adventures/modules -- so in between going from Phandeler to Baldur's Gate, while they rest and get ready to head out, but aren't actually in a gaming session, that's what downtime is supposed to be.
It is the parts that is skipped over in fiction, the montage sequences in films, the time between books in a series. The boring stuff.
While I am totally down for playing the wise old teacher who smacks their 8th level student on the head with a cane and says "again", my players are usually a lot less likely to enjoy such things. It is presumed in the game that in the early morning hours they get up and they exercise, they practice, they memorize, they do those boring, mundane things like take a dump in the woods and hope a bear isn't doing the same thing, and then the game begins (the session starts). This is all like that.
A lot of the normal stuff that is done as RP during downtime is stuff we will do some element of but most of it is solved in a few rolls during a round robin at the start of a session or end of a session.
Since I run an open world, where all the activities are done by the players, they drive when that happens. If they want to leave a dungeon or adventure or take a break in a town during a long journey, that's up to them -- and we may switch to downtime mode right then. But we do some odd stuff (leveling requires getting your Master's approval, so that's a couple minutes, checking on your business takes a couple rolls, crafting might be a few rolls).
THe big thing here is tracking time -- how many days does it take to do these things? For most games, that never seems to matter, I suppose. THere has to be a certain scale to things for it to matter, and most folks just go from one adventure to the next without a break.
FOr big ass campaigns where things are going on around the characters, well, then it becomes a different story. TIme is one of the factors from a DM's side of things. Seasonal changes, weather, stuff like that. The season determines where the Hyborian folks are going to be found, with winter meaning they all gather in Hearthka to settle internal disputes and celebrate and reconnect with folks who might be bitter rivals during the rest of the year but are friends during the winter season.
Winter travel may be harder than summer, and so forth. The plot of the BBEG may move forward while they are sitting on their butt, changing the nature of the hooks and the challenges they will face. Baron Halogen chuckled softly as he watched the last of the guards who could possibly stop him was cut down by his pets. All that stood between hi and the throne now was a forced marriage to that spoiled brat and the death of the King. Thank heavens no nosy kids and weird dog showed up to uncover his dastardly plot so far!
It is that "larger scale" game that downtime and all that goes with it begins to matter.
But if you aren't running that kind of thing, then it is simply what happens when folks aren't playing -- or doesn't happen at all. Some games are all push, all the time, no time for that fluffery, there is stuff to kill. They hop from one module ending on day 7 to the next module starting on day 8. It becomes a speed race, not a measured campaign, and there is nothign wrong with it, but it is something that knocks out the availability of downtime.
So if players want it, they get it. "I want to spend time and craft a special artificer thing". DM looks it up, gonna take 30 days. "I also want to head out and do the thing."
Well, DM has to inform the Player they have to choose -- they can make the thing or they can go do the thing. Or, they can make the thing and then do the thing. Or do the thing and then make the thing. That's pretty much how it plays out, but the whole thing might happen in about 5 minutes of table time -- "I wanna make the thing and then doo the thing".
"Okay, rest of the table, what do you do for the next 30 days?"
That's downtime. And if they split the party, well...
That's a different thread.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
It happens. We once had a couple of decades where two characters put two other characters in hibernation somehow and built a kingdom for the four of us - the two in hibernation were half orcs and the other two elves, so clearly operating on a different timescale in terms of longevity (that was many moons ago, playing 2e).
Our most recent campaign feels like there is a clock ticking, so although we have just implemented a homebrew crafting system (not on dndbeyond) we have not yet had the opportunity to do more than write down a few scrolls - to the immense frustration of the artificer/wizard who is built for the crafting...
I'll echo the sentiments above. Downtime depends on the players and the ticking of the campaign clock. If it feels like there is no overall time pressure and the group of players have ideas that do not involve slaying monsters it can (and likely will) happen
While i like Downtime partly in concept, i have rarely used it in most campaigns i ran since 5E launch after concluding alpha playtest for it.
When we run premade campaigns from WoTC there tends to be little/no downtime. This is largely because some of these campaigns have ticking clocks (Tomb of Annihilation: I'm looking at you as the most egregious example), and because we use milestone leveling. The pace of events in those campaigns unless the DM does some real adjustments tends to be pretty darn fast. Using milestone leveling in those campaigns has the added impact of making all the level advancement be pretty linear (Level 2 to Level 3 happens about as quickly as Level 8 to 9 for example).
We have also been running a game where the DM is coming up with all the content. The pace is not so breakneck. We often have weeks of downtime here and there. We're in the middle of Tier 2, so we haven't been able to do any crazy stuff with that downtime yet but I enjoy feeling like our characters didn't go from "Hey we just arrived in this jungle a few weeks ago and had trouble with 2 zomibies, and now we're Demi-gods taking on Acerak" as well as "Nope can't stop and interact with the multitude of cool stuff here, have to stay on our quest to save the world before the clock runs out".
PS - I actually LOVE Tomb of Annihilation but putting a hard ticking clock on an otherwise really cool sandbox is a bummer. I ran it a second time with a different group and threw the clock dynamic out the window - it did WONDERS for the game.
We've not really used downtime, but I wish we did. I think the hard part is maintaining the narrative tension. If the BBEG is still out there, doing bad things, how can the party take a month off to just hang around town? They're heroes, they should be out thwarting evil plans.
I guess a solution would be to run it more like, maybe a TV show type model where each season has a villain. You play through levels 1-3 and defeat the bad guy, not realizing there's a slightly bigger bad guy on the horizon. Spend your time downtiming for a bit and then get the call to action for the next bad guy, who takes you up a couple more levels, and so on. So instead of a single bad guy, you've got a series of bad guys, one at a time. At that point, though, it gets a little metagamey and contrived, since the players know there's going to be a new bad guy, but the characters don't, so depending on party composition, they may not even have an in-game reason to stick together. Though that could also be useful, giving players a reason and fairly non-disruptive time to switch to a new character if they're not enjoying the current one. In that respect it could also make the world more lived in and less metagamey.
I have yet to use downtime in my games but i plan to use downtime as this is what happened in between sessions
So obviously session 1 jjst introduce your charicters and allow your dm to describe how they meet
Other sessions reintroduce if you have new players and say something like "after a hard trek to reach the mountain peak our adventuers set up camp for the night/week etc" then encourage time appropriate down time so your wizard may say "inbetween meals and sleep i studied the ancient temples we passed"
The best use of downtime i saw was when The grey Wizard Gandalf studied Bilbos magic ring
in a hole in the ground you notice a halfling
As a suggestion, rather than you describing how they meet, tell them where they all are, and then have them describe how they all meet and how they got there.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
this could work yes as long as it's something like a chance meeting at the inn or a call to arms from a muteral pal but if they say we all went to halfling school together 266 years ago as youngling halflings that make the dms job harder lol plus i find unless thet are pre establiched pcs it's better for devolopment to be strangers
in a hole in the ground you notice a halfling
I allow my players to accomplish some crafting while travelling. At a normal pace a party travels eight hours a day, long rests another eight hours and then has a total of eight hours of "breaks" while travelling. They can work on common or uncommon items during that time period. Anything more complex requires actual downtime. And if they use actual downtime they can craft more quickly than doing it while travelling. They can also hire helpers to speed most tasks up.
But yes, my players' parties do get downtime. Whether or not they want to do anything during that downtime is up to them. If nothing, we simply skip past it. If something, we make some rolls using Xanathar's rules or something I've homebrewed and narrate the results. The thing about downtime is it's done outside of the active scenes the player characters are involved in. That's why you don't actually see any parties doing it.
Nope. Last time I used downtime was in a campaign that had a Divination Wizard. Portent does strange things to downtime. It basically shifts the long-view focus back to a short-view by suggesting you're sort of cheating the player out of their class features if you don't. But either way, I found the same issues as others have mentioned already: why are we goofing off when there's a plot happening out there?
I got around it very slightly by 1) introducing downtime activities that theoretically help with the plot and 2) keeping the plot fuzzy and vague when possible. Also I think they were stuck in a town for a little while due to weather.
But yeah. I think players want to goof off. They want to build a house. Mine ran a combination flower shop and brothel. But they don't want to play characters who goof off when there's important work to be done. They want to save the world!
So I really think DMs need to rethink their plot arcs. Give them breaks. Let the evil be unambiguously defeated in act 1. Come up with another way to thematically carry on the adventure after some downtime.
But also, downtime kinda sucks. I do think it would be improved somewhat if you removed any options that result in magic items, because obviously those are the only ones worth pursuing if they exist. The ones that give cash payouts are next on the chopping block (because money buys magic items), but I think there are a lot more of those, and it's harder to justify cutting them, so eh. I think a new system is needed tbh.
The point of downtime, in my opinion, is to express character in a new way. You don't open a coffee shop because your character needs the money, or because the Dark Prince is vulnerable to latte damage. You do it because you want to name it, you want to describe how it's different from your average coffee shop, you want to invent a fantasy espresso drink. You want to do a scene where the Blackstaff comes in and orders your new Dragon Breath Frappe and then burns the beard off her assistant. The fact that it can generate, like, 15 dollars of profit in a workweek is just not the point.
The advantage of the magic item ones is that they’re a way to facilitate the spending of post-adventure loot between arcs, particularly if the group uses Discord or another online chat option to run the downtime behind the black between sessions.
And, conversely, magic item activities are only worth pursuing if the players have enough gold for the items. At early levels, making some more gold or going after soft benefits like Carousing can be more attractive, and that’s assuming people make their picks purely based on gameplay benefits rather than roleplay.