That’s a scary title, right? Coming from a crowdfunded content creator? That’s the sort of title that precedes things like “I just lost my job” and “my personal life is a shambles” and “up your support” and “Venmo me” and “check out my Amazon wishlist” and “thanks for the views, you worthless humans.” But don’t worry, I’m not selling my dirty shower water just yet. I’m talking about what adventurers do between jobs. I’m talking about downtime.

Not that that’s what I really want to talk about. I really want to talk about towns in role-playing games. And how to handle them. Except what I really, really want to talk about is gameplay loops. But we’ll get to all of that s$&% in future articles.

Yeah. I know this is a f$&%ing mess. Ultimately, my goal is to talk about how GMs present towns in role-playing games. Well, towns, cities, strongholds, and all the other places where the characters hang out between adventures. Because the way they’re presented right now is kind of s$%&. And that’s to do with the fact that D&D—and other RPGs like it—only offers one way to present anything in the game. Which is part of a bigger issue about gameplay loops.

I alluded to this town crap back in my article about exploration. Remember how I was trying to work out new ways to handle exploration? Specifically when it comes to the non-explorable parts of the game? Like towns? Yeah. Well, months and months ago, I was tinkering with the presentation of civilized areas in my home game. And I tinkered so hard, I broke my game.

That’s how it goes, though. You can’t make the world’s greatest omelet without throwing out a lot of ruined eggs and accidentally breeding the occasional mutant murder-chicken. But this article isn’t about the failures of my Prometheus Breakfast Initiative. It’s about downtime. More specifically, it’s about downtime as an idea. Not downtime as a system. Because personally, I think ideas are more powerful than systems. GMs who understand ideas can use the game’s tools to do anything. GMs who understand the game’s systems can only do exactly what the systems tell them they can do.

The reason I need to cover downtime as an idea, though, is that the Angry Way of Handling Towns is a middle-tier game structure. That means that it’s both a piece of a bigger puzzle—which is where gameplay loops come in—and that it’s made up of a bunch of smaller pieces. Like how to handle exploration of non-hostile environments where mapping and navigating aren’t the core challenge. This is what I started talking about last time. And like how to handle downtime activities. Which is what I’m going to start talking about this time.

I’m sorry this is a slow-boil kind of thing, but I’ve been the way I am for twelve f$&%ing years now. So you should know what you’re in for.

Not Adventuring

Gamers love to piss and moan about all the things they think the D&D rules are missing. And all the things that they wish the D&D rules handled better. And if you made a list of all those complaints, you’d notice a funny pattern. Of all the s$%& that gamers piss and moan about D&D not doing or not doing well, about two-thirds of them have nothing to do with adventuring. Beyond calling for better exploration and mass combat rules, people are always looking for crafting systems and rules for building strongholds and managing business and other s$&% the adventurers do when they’re loafing around not adventuring.

Today, I’m going to talk about downtime activities. Because they figure into that new way of presenting towns that I mentioned in my previous article. Rethinking towns forced me to think about the things PCs do in towns. Which required a rudimentary system for handling downtime activities. Coming up with that required me to think about what this ‘downtime’ bulls$&% actually means and why it’s a useful thing in a fantasy adventure role-playing game even though it’s not fantasy adventure.

So, let’s look at downtime as a concept.

Downtime: A Stupid Name for a Useful Concept

I hate the word ‘downtime’ for reasons I can’t really explain. Not without explaining a whole bunch of other s$&%. So, I’m going to keep using the word for a while, and then I’m suddenly going to change it on you in two months. That way, people will have something new to complain about and can stop b$&%ing about how I changed the definition of ‘scene.’

Fun side note: the reason I redefined the word ‘scene’ is totally related to the reason why ‘downtime’ is really useful in RPGs even if you never use it. And why ‘downtime’ is a stupid name.

Anyway…

Definition time. Downtime activities are things the PCs do in the game that aren’t part of an actual adventure. It’s the s$&% they do between adventures. And I’m using the word downtime to refer to the system by which such activities are adjudicated.

Now, I just know there are a lot of obnoxious pedants who won’t like that definition because it’s not definitive or objective enough. Maybe you’re one of them. I hear what you’re saying. And it sounds like this:

WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

So, downtime rules tell you how to handle the s$&% PCs do when they’re not adventuring. And you might wonder why you’d want rules for not adventuring in a game of fantasy role-playing adventure. That’s a very good question. And I’m being serious when I say that. It’s a completely fair question. One the designers of D&D didn’t even think to ask. Because, if they did, the anemic and optional downtime rules they squirted out would have been a lot of different.

Why Cactus is Not the Opposite of Chair

That’s an obscure reference. I doubt it’ll make sense you to at all unless you recognize it. Even after you read this entire section.

On the surface, it seems like downtime is the exact opposite of everything a fantasy adventure game like D&D is about. What the characters do in their downtime isn’t adventuring. But that doesn’t necessarily make it the opposite of adventuring. See, it’s okay to include something in a game that’s not quite what that game’s about. It’s just that the something in question has to be related to what the game’s about in some way.

To illustrate my point, let’s talk about three downtime activities described in the D&D DMG. And yes, I know Xanadu’s Guide to Whatever Random Crap the WotC Designers Had on Their Desks at the Time expands on the DMG’s downtime rules. It just doesn’t expand them in a way that makes them any less wrong.

First, there’s crafting magic items. The DMG says you can do that between adventures (DMG 129). Crafting magic items is not adventuring. But the main reason adventurers craft magic items is to have magic items available during their adventures. They don’t craft magic items for fun. Or resale. And if they do, they’re playing the wrong game. Crafting items isn’t adventure, but it is preparing for adventure.

Next, there’s also selling magic items. The DMG says you can do that too (DMG 129). If you end up with a magic item you don’t want, you can follow this little rigamarole involving ability checks and die rolling to see if you can find someone who will buy it from you. And how long it takes to find a buyer. And how much the buyer is willing to pay. Now, that’s not adventuring either. It might at least seem like an encounter because dice get rolled, but it’s not. There’s no decisions to make. No risks to take. You just randomly determine how much time gets wasted and how much money you’re allowed to have for your item. But, while it’s not adventuring, it is about adventure. Players do it to liquidate the treasures they found during their adventures. And to convert items they don’t want into gold so that, ultimately, they can be converted into s$&% they do want. Thus, it’s about cleaning up after an adventure and preparing for the next adventure.

And then there’s carousing. F$&%ing carousing. If I got twenty dollars from everyone who talked about how amazing and wonderful the idea of going on a drunken bender and then rolling on a random table to see what happens is, I’d still want to punch each and every one of them in the throat. If you decide to go carousing (DMG 128), you spend a bunch of money and then roll some percentile dice to see what zany antics you got up to. You might end up losing money, waking up in a strange place, going to jail and losing money, getting laid, losing money, winning money, or losing money. The sheer f$&%ing role-playing of it all, am I right? Now, this isn’t adventuring. There are some risks involved. You might lose money. But there’s no choices. No interactions. It’s mostly just randomly generated personal narrative crap. And while some of it is the sort of stuff a GM could build an adventure from, most GMs won’t. Because there’s usually just one carouser and the rest of the players don’t want to follow that idiot around for an entire session playing Dude, Where’s My Horse or going on a road trip to the white castle to retrieve a sending stone with a recording of the idiot’s sexual escapades before his girlfriend can find it.

Carousing is the equivalent of that one a$&%hole in the Dead Alewives Dungeons & Dragons skit who spent the entire game ignoring the adventure and yelling “am I at the tavern” and “roll to see if I’m getting drunk” and “if there’s any girls there, I want to do them!”

Carousing is not adventuring. And, as it’s presented, it’s also not about adventuring. Unlike crafting and selling magical items, it’s just insubstantial narrative crap that has no impact on the game once it’s over. The monetary gains and losses aren’t even significant enough to affect the average 2nd level PC. It refers to 4d6 x 10 gp as a small fortune for f$&%’s sake!

I’m not saying that random adventure hooks generated randomly from random PCs antics don’t have some value. I’m saying the value is pretty small. Ancillary. Its value is highly dependent on the GM and the game. If my players are resting in town in the middle of Rhyme of the Ancient Frostmariner or whatever, I’m not going to put that whole adventure on hold to deal with the fallout from Adalbard the Annoying’s latest bit of downtime debauchery. Nor will I put on hold the adventure I prepared to pull a random game out of my a$& based on his latest sexcapades.

My point is that it’s okay to have non-adventuring activities in an adventure game. But they’ve got to serve a purpose in the adventure cycle. Useful downtime activities let the players prepare and plan for future adventures. Those include activities like crafting magical items, buying equipment, doing research, and gaining temporary boons and benefits. Useful downtime activities also let the players clean up after, recover from, or mitigate the consequences of a completed adventure. That includes s$&% like resting, treating illnesses, lifting curses, replenishing supplies, repairing equipment, selling off non-monetary treasure, and spending XP on advancement. Note, by the way, how few of those ideas are parts of the D&D system. Missed opportunity, thy name is WotC.

This s$&%’s kind of like one of those collectible card games. Those games usually have a specific gameplay flow. A turn order. Most of what the game’s actually about takes place in one specific part of the turn order. It’s usually called the main phase. That’s the phase when the players play cards and use them to hurt each other. But there’s phases before and after that involve drawing cards, discarding cards, readying and refreshing resources, that kind of thing. Those phases are important parts of gameplay and strategic choices made during those phases—like what flavor of mana to play or which card to discard or which spell to stash in face-down defense position—strategic choices made during those phases affect the game as a whole. And that’s what downtime in TTRPGs should accomplish too.

S$&% like carousing, building strongholds, and running businesses in D&D? They could affect adventures, but they don’t. Not by default. Not unless the GM invents the effects. And there’s no mechanical hooks to hang them on or levers to pull. So, they’re like if Yu-Gé-Mon: the Hearthening included a phase of play in which you were allowed to swap all your cards into different-colored card sleeves.

That said, D&D isn’t just a fantasy adventure game, it’s a fantasy adventure role-playing game. Creative expression and personal narrative do have places. I’m not dismissing that s$&%. The game should provide opportunities for them. But those things are about choice. Nothing about rolling up random events on the carousing table or the business events table involves any kind of choice. The player just does a random activity and then the dice decide what happens. Much role-playing! So expression!

Implemented properly, downtime has value. Non-adventure stuff has value. But it’s got to impact the adventure stuff. Because the adventure stuff is the game. If D&D had rules for contacts and reputation, like other games, or if it had better systems for companions and followers, and if those rules had an impact during gameplay, then those downtime activities would actually fit the bill. But it doesn’t, so they don’t.

To put this more succinctly, there’s got to be a feedback system between the adventure part and the not adventure parts of the game. What the players do while they’re adventuring has to impact what they can do between adventures. And what they do between adventures has to affect how their adventures go. You might call it a feedback loop. Or a gameplay loop.

But all the downtime stuff has to fit into the game in another way too.

Free Will Ain’t Free

Adventure games are about adventures. And role-playing games are about choices. Everything in the game’s got to involve a choice. And there’s more to offering choices than just presenting a pile of options. Real choices involve dilemmas. They involve internal conflicts. You have to choose between multiple, exclusive things that you want. Or want to avoid.

Remember, nothing says more about you than what you’re willing to give up for something.

If you had all the time and money in the world and you could do anything you wanted to do at any time, you wouldn’t be an interesting person. You’d just be doing whatever seemed like the most fun at the time, so you’d just be a list of preferences. But if you don’t have all the time and money in the world, if you can either spend the holidays with some casual friends on a luxury ski vacation or spend the holidays visiting your ailing mother, then what you choose says something about you. What you prioritize. Who you prioritize. It says something about your character.

Even if the choice is a purely strategic one, not an emotional or personal one, there’s still an element of self-expression. Do you choose the safer battle plan that’s not likely to cost a lot of lives but only promises an incremental gain or the risky plan that’s going to get a lot of people killed by could end the war decisively. And no matter how much people think they make choices based on the odds when situations are hypothetical, in real life, they don’t. And, in real life, no one ever really knows the odds anyway.

Point is, if something’s going to be part of a role-playing game—a significant part—then it’s got to be about choices. And that means, there’s got to be risks and costs. Otherwise, choices are just optimization problems or meaningless preferences.

In D&D, there’s two costs associated with downtime activities. First, there’s money costs. Crafting requires materials and carousing requires beer money. Second, there’s time costs. Crafting items takes days or weeks or half-weeks or whatever. Carousing takes however long it takes. Monetary costs in D&D don’t really mean much, though, because the PCs are usually so rich they can afford anything they want. And anything they can’t have is so ridiculously inflated in price as to make it unattainable until they’re at the right level. And then it’s suddenly affordable. Notice how all the costs and all the treasure yields increase by factors of ten each tier?

Meanwhile, time costs are just f$&%ing weird in tabletop role-playing games. When things aren’t urgent—when an adventure isn’t breaking down the gates of town—the players can take as much time as they want to do whatever they want. If the players have enough money and Satan’s not about to destroy the world, there’s nothing that says the PCs can’t spend weeks and weeks carousing and building palaces and running noodle shops and crafting magical items for sale.

Meanwhile, when things are urgent—because Satan is at the gates—the players can’t engage in any activities that aren’t strictly necessary to stop Satan. If the heroes aren’t crafting a +1 sword of Satan slaying or an amulet of proof against hellfire, they’re wasting their time. Even spending a day at the local spa to start each adventuring day with 10 temporary HP for the next week might be nice, but it’s hard to justify so small a gain when, you know, Satan.

How many old video games have we made fun of because we could just ignore the extinction-level meteor hanging in the sky while selectively breeding ostriches and hoping for the right color.

The issue though isn’t urgency. Or rather, it’s not just urgency. It’s about how urgency determines who’s making the choices. If the GM gets bored with the players’ endless carousing and noodle shopping and wants to move the game along, he can send Satan a-knocking, but that just shuts down the players’ choices altogether. Letting your business fail while you stop the Big, Red Source of All Things Evil from destroying the world that has your noodle shop in it isn’t a f$&%ing choice. The players are ultimately only fighting Satan because the GM said Satan had to be fought.

On top of that, RPG players don’t actually feel the passage of time. Hours, days, and weeks can pass in the blink of a sentence. You can run a noodle shop for an entire year in five minutes. Weirder still, the PCs are basically independent contractors and temp workers. They never know when the next job’s going to come or how long it’s going to take or how urgent it’s going to be. So, they never know how much actual time they have between one job and the next. But, because that makes planning hard, most GMs either let them have all the time they want before starting the next plot point or they tell the players exactly how much time they have. Which is a shame because the unpredictable nature of downtime could—and should—be a useful mechanic.

By itself, time’s a crappy cost for anything in an RPG. Hell, even in the real world where we’re keenly aware of the passage of time as a consequence of our own mortality, our stupid monkey brains still waste vast wodges of the stuff reading social media posts written by millionaire celebrities who take their valuable time between sex scandals to tell us what s$&%y people we all are. See, time doesn’t have much inherent value.

But time that can’t be spent doing something else is another story. Time’s actual value comes from the fact that we can’t be in two places or do two different things at once. So time is just an exchange rate. A way of pricing activities. And, by the way, that’s also where the value of money actually derives. Which is why time can be exchanged for money and vice versa.

If you understand that, you know exactly how much time the players should have to do between-adventure stuff. Never quite enough. Imagine the PCs have just three days in town before the ship they’re traveling out on weighs anchor. Two of them are badly wounded and need two days of bed rest to recover fully. They have a bunch of treasures to sell off from their last adventure. They have to resupply and repair their stuff. The bard’s reputation is flagging and the bardic college has been threatening to drop their patronage unless he gives at least a two-day lecture and performance. The party has a bunch of magical crap to turn into potions. And none of them knows anything about their next port of call, Kraken Point, and their ultimate destination, the Village Where the Drowned Roam Every Night, so they’d like to do some research so they know what kinds of things they might face there. What are the priorities? How does the party spend their time?

Now, imagine the same situation except the party doesn’t even know when the ship’s leaving. Imagine they’re just going to get word one day that they have to report to the captain the following morning. What’s a priority then? What do they do first?

The key to making downtime choices meaningful is to build constraints and opportunity costs and risks and surprises into it. Constraints and opportunity costs add meaning to choices. Risks and surprises make the choices hard to compare. Hard to optimize. It’s hard to optimize your downtime if you don’t know how much of it you’ll have. And if the outcome is subject to the whims of unpredictable plastic polyhedrons.

But It’s Still Not Adventure

Downtime activities must involve feedback loops. They must be fed by and feed into adventures. And they must involve meaningful choices. They must involve opportunity costs and constraints and they must involve hidden information and random outcomes. But downtime activities still aren’t adventure. They aren’t the game. They’re the prep phase. The cleanup phase. So, they have to do everything they have to do without wasting too much time or involving too much cognitive load. If a game takes more time to set up and breakdown than it does to play—*cough* Arkham Horror *cough*—then most people won’t want to play it. And the people who will play it actually want to play something else.

Downtime’s got to be easy to manage. Streamlined. Easy to present to players; quick and easy to adjudicate. And because sometimes personal narrative crap and surprise consequences enhance the gameplay experience, it’d be nice if the GM had some advance warning regarding how the downtime was going to play out so they could prep for it between sessions. That way, when some player’s noodle shop attracts the attention of the local mafia don, dealing with it isn’t putting aside the prepared adventure. It is the prepared adventure.

And that way the pain-in-the-a$& GMs in my comment section who actually want to run a Cheech and Chong stoner flick can be happy too. And then, maybe, they’ll stop trying to convince the rest of us that that’s what a game called Dungeons and Dragons is supposed to be about.