What you’re about to read might best be called Supplemental Bulls$&%. At least, that’s how I’m going to classify it. It’s related to my currently-on-hold-but-definitely-coming-back-very-soon series on Town Mode. Specifically, it pre-answers some questions I know I’m gonna get asked once I reveal how to actually run your game in Town Mode. But it also helps explain why I’m gonna tell you to run Town Mode the way I’m gonna. It explains the thought process. Because some people — apparently — find the ramblings of my disordered mind to be somehow useful. Whatever.

But this article’s also likely to change how you dole out adventure hooks. At least, I hope it will. Because to get the most out of Town Mode — to turn it into a game of tradeoffs and strategic resource management — you’ve got to run the rest of your game right. Otherwise, you might as well not bother.

At the very end of this article, I’m going to hint at a random, dice-based way of creating and doling out adventure hooks. Seriously. It ain’t a system I’ve actually invented. Yet. It’s just that a random, dice-based way to create and dole out adventure hooks is the logical conclusion to all the s$&% I’m about to say. And if you’re really nice to me, maybe I can be convinced to actually write the system someday.

But today…

The In-Between Time

Today’s topic is the time between adventures. Literally. I’m not talking today about what PCs do between adventures — how they fill their time with training and healing and s$&% like that — but rather the actual time itself. The hours or days or whatever that fill the gap between the end of one adventure and the start of the next.

Why? Because I’ve got this series — which is on hold but coming back — because I’ve got this series about running Town right in RPGs. And really, that’s all about the space between adventures. And that space is something D&D — and other TTRPGs — do not handle well. Which is why I have to do it.

In a sense, Town Mode’s just a fancy of handling what other gamers call Downtime, right? The s$&% PCs get up to when there’s no adventure afoot. When you bring up Downtime — whatever you call it — when you bring up Downtime — when you start writing rules about how to handle Downtime activities and their costs and s$&% — when you bring up Downtime, there’s one thing every GM will always ask you…

How do the players know how much Downtime they have between adventures?

When I get around to telling you how to actually run Town Mode, you’re going to find out my answer is…

You don’t.

You don’t tell the players how long their characters have got to dick around in Town. They don’t get to know that answer.

Really, it’s a dumb f$&%ing question anyway. Why should the players know how much time their characters will have between adventures? The question is an artifact of the crap way Downtime’s traditionally been handled in TTRPGS. It’s like this: if you want to let your players participate in different Downtime activities between adventures and if you want to limit their options by cost or time or resources and if you want the players to handle this downtime s$&% on their own time, at home, away from the table, then you must tell your players how much time passes between the end of one session — the end of one adventure — and the start of the next session — the start of the next adventure.

That makes sense, right? That’s why at best you’ve got to say something like…

Your character will have six days in Town, so figure out what your PC does for six days before we meet next week and send it to me.

… and at worst, you’ve got to come up with some bulls$&% abstraction involving Downtime Points the way the Adventure League does. Or did. I don’t know if they still do. I haven’t run AL s$&% in years.

The problem is, that’s become the norm. So when I tell you to handle Downtime at the table in Town Mode and to do it on a day-to-day basis — “it’s Monday, what does your character do Monday… okay, now it’s Tuesday, what does your character do Tuesday…” — when I tell you to handle Downtime on a day-by-day basis, you’re still gonna want to say s$&% like, “you’ve got six days, what do you do for six days.” Because it’s quicker and easier. And it’s only fair. Especially when it comes to activities that require multiple days of effort to pay off. Activities like training and crafting.

Well, I’m going to tell you to not f$&%ing do that. And you’re going to ask me why.

Today, I’m pre-answering that question. I’m telling you why the players shouldn’t know much time they’ve got in Town. And the good news is I can explain it in something like six paragraphs. The bad news is I can’t explain why the players shouldn’t know how much time they’ve got in Town without first discussing how you, the GM, even know how much time they’ve got in Town.

That is, when does Downtime — and Town Mode — actually end?

Inciting Exciting Adventure

Downtime fills the space between adventures, right? So it starts when the last adventure ends and it ends when the next adventure starts, right? I f$&%ing hope that makes sense. Because that’s how between works, right? A thing that comes between other things starts where one thing ends and ends where the other begins.

We GMs, though, don’t really think about how that between time comes to be. Because, while we think a lot about how our adventures start, we don’t think about when our adventures start. And we don’t think about the fact that how our adventures start determines when they start. Which determines when Downtime actually ends.

I know that sounds like a lot of semantical bulls$%&. Just hear me out.

An adventure starts with a hook, right? An inciting incident? That just means you — the GM — show the players a goal, give them a reason to achieve it, and point them in the right direction. That’s the start of an adventure.

Yes, I know that’s wrong. I’ll come back to it. But right now, pretend it’s right. Because it’s mostly right. Close enough to right.

The point is you — the GM — control when adventures start. Because you decide when to present the next adventure’s hook. And that means you — the GM — decide when Downtime ends. And that ain’t a trivial decision. End Downtime too soon and maybe the PCs didn’t have enough Downtime to train up and level up or recover from their last adventure. And they’ll definitely piss and moan about that. If you end Downtime later, you give the PCs a lot of extra time to empower themselves. Craft equipment, seek out magical items to buy, earn buffs, do research, all that crap. If you give the PCs too much Downtime, they’ll run out of money for lifestyle costs. Or they might just get bored.

The point is the amount of Downtime the players have affects the feel and pace of the game. It also affects the challenge level of the game. Plenty of Downtime makes the game easy. Not enough Downtime makes the game hard.

It’s something you, the GM, should definitely think about when you’re writing your adventure hooks. How do they affect Downtime? Because it’s the nature of the hook that determines the end of Downtime.

Consider the different broad kinds of hooks you might present…

”I’ve Got a Job for Heroes Like You”

Many adventures start when a hook wanders up to the PCs and makes itself known. A stranger approaches with a job, the king summons the PCs to his court, the cleric’s church asks for a favor, s$&% like that. When the stranger approaches or the king’s summons arrives, the adventure starts. And you — the GM — decide when that happens.

”Help! Someone Help!”

Similarly, lots of adventures start because something happens that demands action. Orc savages attack the Town, for example, or the PCs hear a mother screaming for help. From a timing standpoint, this is basically the same as the one above. You — the GM — decide when the emergency happens and thus you decide when the adventure starts.

Except, for reasons, it’s actually different. But I’ll circle back to that.

“In the Hoard, You Find a Treasure Map”

Lots of adventures start with the PCs finding some kind of hook hidden in the previous adventure. Maybe in the form of a treasure map or an old journal or a vital clue that starts the next chapter of the adventure path or campaign plot. Technically, as soon as the previous adventure ends, the PCs are already on the next adventure because they’ve already got the hook.

Technically…

And now you’re probably seeing some cracks in the idea that adventures start — and Downtime ends — the moment you — the GM — hand the players a hook.

“Single White Female Seeks Party for Adventure”

Finally, some adventures start when the players go looking for them. And find them. You know what I mean. There’s a job board or a guild house or a town square full of quest givers or whatever. When the players take a specific action — visiting the Adventurer’s Local 202 or logging onto to KuraigsList or just plugging into the local rumor mill — they get a hook.

The funny thing here is that, except insofar as you — the GM — control the outcome of every action, this is a case where it’s the players that decide when Downtime ends and the next adventure begins.

Except, guess what? It’s actually the players who always decide when Downtime ends and the next adventure begins. It’s just they usually do so indirectly.

Pack Your Bags, Kids! We’re Off on an Adventure!

Turns out that adventures really don’t start when you — the GM — reveal the hook. Adventures really start whenever the players — or their characters — start pursuing the adventure. If they do so at all. Until the heroes step out on the Road to Adventure, the adventure hasn’t started. And that means Downtime hasn’t really ended.

Truth is, there’s usually a bit of lag between the incitement — the moment when you present the hook — and the actual start of the adventure. And often, the players use that time to prepare for the next adventure. To finish up any ongoing Downtime tasks, to buy supplies, to do some research, whatever. If you want to, you can call that Preptime. But it’s just a subdivision of Downtime.

Now, it might seem like this Preptime s$&%’s totally in the players’ control. And it is. Except when it isn’t. And, probably unsurprisingly, that’s down to how you build the adventure too.

”Being Your Own Boss Means Never Missing a Deadline”

Important Disclaimer: That subheading is a damned, dirty lie. Trust me. I’m my own boss.

Some adventures just ain’t that urgent. Once the heroes take the job, they can take their sweet-a$& time doing it. And they can even decide when to start. In cases like those, it’s the players who decide when Preptime’s over and when Adventuretime starts.

”The Caravan Leaves in Three Days”

Some adventures have a hard start date and time. If the PCs are escorting an NPC or protecting a caravan or taking a ship, the adventure starts when the NPC or caravan or ship says it does. Doesn’t really matter why there’s a hard start to the adventure. Just that there is. And that means, you — the GM — tell the players when they’re out of Preptime.

”The Caravan Leaves at Oh-Dark-Thirty”

Some adventures have really hard, really tight start dates and times. The kind of dates and times that leave no Preptime at all. Once the players accept the job, they’ve got minutes — maybe hours — to start, not days. And if they ain’t ready to go, the party’s already failed the adventure.

That lack of Preptime, by the way, is what differentiates job-offer-type hooks from emergency-type hooks. Emergencies demand an immediate response. Job offers usually don’t. And that just goes to show how this s$&% interacts to change the dynamic.

”With the Rising of the Full Moon, the World Will be Remade”

Some adventures don’t have hard start times, but they’ve got deadlines. Rituals that’ll be completed, dungeons that’ll seal themselves back up for another century, ticking time bombs, or even just a crime boss who needs the job done by some exact date, they’re all examples of that kind of deadline. On adventures like these, the PCs can take all the Preptime they want. Technically. But if they take too much, they might not leave themselves enough time to actually finish the job.

”Every Day We Delay, More People Die”

Some adventures don’t have hard start times, but they’re still urgent. Either because s$&%’s getting more dangerous every day or because s$&% gets worse every day the adventure’s not done. If the villain is raising more undead every day — which means more skellies and zombonies to fight through — the sooner the party starts, the easier a time they’ll have. If a plague’s spreading, the sooner the party gets it cured, the fewer corpses they’ll have to bury. And the less likely that the people they care about the most will be leasing space in the graveyard.

As a GM, you’re probably thinking that those sorts of adventure setups make for some of the most exciting, most tense, most challenging adventures. They do.

More importantly, you probably also noticed that my first lie wasn’t really a lie, and the truth I replaced it with wasn’t really true. What the f$&% does that mean? It means that you — the GM — don’t actually control when adventures actually start. And neither do the players. Neither of you is really in total control. Like everything else in the game, you create situations and the players decide how their characters respond. Some situations demand certain responses, sure, but the players still ultimately decide how to respond. Even if that response is to walk away and take an F on their adventure report card.

At least, that’s how it should be…

The Case for Not Knowing

If your GMing brain’s working even a tiny, little f$&%ing bit, it should be clear that how you structure and introduce an adventure’s hook has a lot of impact on how the adventure feels. How it’s paced. How challenging it is. And that feeling reverberates backward to affect how Downtime feels. How Downtime’s paced.

Imagine that every adventure starts with an Emergency that Demands Immediate Attention. Your players’ll feel frantic. They’ll never get a chance to spend Downtime on anything that ain’t one hundred thousand percent required to succeed.

Now, imagine that every adventure starts when the players decide to check the Bulletin Board at the Homlett Community Center and they can take as much Preptime as they want for each job they take. If the players can take all the time in the world between every adventure, the only limit on Downtime’s how many months of lifestyle costs they can pay. And that’s how you end up with players running noodle shops instead of actually f$&%ing playing Dungeons & Dragons.

Neither of those extremes is ideal. Or rather, either of those extremes are fine if that’s the game you want to play. If you’re running an epic, save-the-world campaign, the frantic sense of never getting rest is just de rigueur. If you’re running a silly dick-around-town stream for your Twitch audience, noodle shops are par for the crappy course. They just make better watching than actual Dungeons & Dragons.

But, in those cases, all the Town Mode s$&% I’ve been blathering about just doesn’t fit the game you’re running. Forget it. Dump it.

But if you want something between those extremes — and you want Town Mode to fit your game — then this time between adventures s$&% has to matter. It’s got to be a game. A partly strategic game. And that’s why the players can’t know how much time they’ve got in town. Until they do know how much time they’ve got. Which they sometimes won’t.

Basically, imperfect, incomplete information’s your friend.

The players shouldn’t know what kind of hook’s coming next until it comes. If it comes. Sometimes, they’ll find treasure maps in dragon hoards. Sometimes, alarm bells will start ringing in Town. Sometimes, strangers will offer them jobs in taverns. And sometimes, they’ll have to go looking for work because nothing’s turning up on its own. The same goes for Preptime. Sometimes, dungeons only appear for one day a century. Sometimes, caravans are leaving tomorrow. Sometimes, no one gives a s$&% when the job gets done as long as it gets done.

The point is — and this is going to sound very f$&%ing obvious when I say it — the players shouldn’t know anything about their Downtime that their characters don’t know.

First, if players don’t know how much Downtime they’ve got, they’ve got to strategize and prioritize. There’s s$&% that needs to doing between adventures, right? Training and selling loot and resupplying and repairing equipment and recovering from injuries. If the players skip any one of those things, they’ll be at a disadvantage. Some of that s$&%’s quick and easy to do. Some of it takes days and days. So it’s down to each player to decide which strategy’s best. Do they focus on the quick, easy stuff first to ensure it’s done? Do they focus on the higher payoff stuff that takes longer first? And if they’re really hurting or some vital equipment’s busted, do they put off less important stuff to make sure they’re in tip-top shape?

This s$&% opens the possibility of seeking quicker — but more expensive or more risky — solutions. If you’ve got all the time in the world, it ain’t worth paying a priest a few hundred gold to heal you up. But if you’re really beat up and you’re worried about getting caught off guard and bloodied, maybe it’s worth it. If you even have the cash. Even if it means you can’t afford to level up.

Moreover, the state of the world — assuming the players pay attention to it — can — and should — affect the players’ Downtime choices. If they’re in the nice, safe capital city where emergencies are rare, then they’ll handle s$&% differently than they would in a frontier town that’s under attack by monsters every other week.

This is strategic gameplay s$&% right here. And the more information the players have got, the less strategic they’ve got to be. If they know they’ve got ten days in town before the next emergency, they can do a math problem and just optimize their downtime. If they don’t know how much time they’ve actually got, then it’s a matter of risk-taking and luck-pushing. There’s no math answer. So everyone’s personal preferences and risk tolerances come into play and any given pair of players might make radically different decisions.

Of course, none of this s$&% matters if the players notice they always have enough time to do everything they need to do. If you never, ever push the players into an emergency adventure before they’ve finished training or recovering or repairing their gear, then they’ll notice.

If you never know how many resources you’ve got, but you always have enough and you never run out, you stop strategizing. Because why bother? Enough is as good as too much.

Second, if the players don’t know much Downtime they’ve actually got and they know they rarely have as much as they want, inefficient adventuring is a big f$&%ing deal. If the party comes back from every adventure so wrecked it takes them days to get back on their feet, they’ll rarely have time to train. Let alone craft or make connections or do any of the other really fun Town Mode s$&%. You can bet your a$& they’re going to up their game. They’ll have to.

Third, if the players don’t know how much Downtime they’ve got and they rarely have as much as they want, they maybe have to make some hard choices about whether they can handle a given next adventure. If the party’s wrecked when the dragon attacks, are they going to fight it at the city walls — and probably die slowing it down — or will they join the evacuation? Or just hide and hope no one realizes they were back in Town. And when they emerge from their hidey holes and see half the town destroyed and piles of charred corpses, how are they going to feel? How’s the world going to feel about them?

That, kids, is roleplaying. Making choices, then making more choices, then dealing with the fallout.

If the players don’t know how much Downtime they’ve got — most of the time — if they never know what kind of hook’s going to hook them next — and if they never know how much Preptime it’ll give them and if they know that sometimes, they ain’t gonna have enough Downtime, Town Mode becomes a strategic game. A very interesting strategic game. One about risks, rewards, and priorities. One in which the s$&% that’s available in Town matters. And one in which the players who pay attention to the world and play well excel.

Town Mode — Angry’s Town Mode — is designed to be that strategic game. But you’ll wreck it if you don’t structure your hooks to keep the players guessing.

Keep Them Guessing

Do you want Town Mode to be a game changer? Do you want to get every last drop of awesome out of it? Then you can’t ever let your players know how much Downtime they’ve really got. Which means structuring your adventures, hooks, and incitements to keep your players guessing.

How? Well, here’s a few ways to make it happen, cap’n.

Let the Players Say No

First things first: you can’t pull this s$&% off if your players can’t say no. That is, you’ve got to accept — and your players have to know — that the PCs don’t have to say yes to every adventure. Seriously. I know that sounds f$&%ing crazy. Though, it’s the second craziest thing I’m going to say in the next few paragraphs. Just wait until I suggest you let the dice write your hooks.

If you’re ever going to drop an emergency on the heroes when they don’t have enough recovery Downtime to survive the emergency, then you’re just murdering your party if you don’t let them say no. That’s s$&% GMing. That’s like telling your players they can’t leave the dungeon to rest and forcing them to die instead.

Saying no doesn’t have to be easy. It shouldn’t. This is an RPG. Every choice has consequences. Sometimes there’s fallout. Sometimes there’s a lot of fallout. A churchy who refuses a job from the church might be demoted. Excommunicated even. Hiding while orc savages pillage the town ain’t going to earn you any friends. And if you have a conscience, it ain’t going to leave you alone. And it’s those consequences that’ll drive the players to figure out how to handle things without the resources to do it. Maybe they can’t fight the orcs, but they can sure as hell help the evacuation. Or join the reserves and hold the last line. Or act as scouts and saboteurs and do with stealth what they can’t risk doing on the battlefield.

Or maybe they take the stand because it’s the right thing to do and hope their contribution turns the tide. Or buys time for the evacuees to escape.

The point is the players have to know they can always say no. To anything. As long as the characters are willing to live with the consequences. But that also means the players have to know that, if they turn down an adventure, there’s still going to be a game.

That means the players must also know they can always drum up work on their own initiative. They’ve got to know that if they don’t take the king up on his job, they can still head down to the Adventurer’s Union and find something to do. Some way to pay the bills.

Keep a Pocketful of Hooks

How do you make sure there’s always work to find? Look, this ain’t rocket surgery. This ain’t galaxy-brain s$&%. It’s easy. Just make sure you’ve always got a few adventure hooks you can hand the players when they start digging around the guild halls, taverns, markets, or whatever. Basically, keep a list of three to five adventure hooks handy.

Keep in mind, I ain’t telling you to write three to five entire adventures. Just hooks. Just the little blurb that starts the job. This is actually one of the super-secret reasons why you want to make sure Town Mode fills a session between every adventure. That guarantees you’ll always have the time between one session and the next to turn a hook into an adventure.

Thus, all you need is a list of short, simple adventure hooks that you can turn into an adventure with a week of work. With enough detail that you can present the hook in play. Depending on how you want to handle s$&%, you can either just keep a running list and replace hooks as they get used or you can write a new list every time the game hits Town Mode. And you can change the list of potential hooks depending on what’s going on in the world.

Keep a Few Caltrops Too

The standby hooks you’ve got in your pocket? They’re there if your party goes looking for trouble. Or they need some trouble to replace an adventure they refused. But you also need to keep one or two barbed hooks you can drop in your players’ paths. Those are the hooks you come up with as the party is finishing one adventure to serve as the start of the next adventure. And they’re the hooks you control. Job offers. Summons. Treasure maps. Whatever.

Ninety-nine times out of ten, the party’s going to take whatever hooks they find stuck in their bare feet. Trust me. Players don’t refuse adventures often. So you’ll usually end up turning these hooks into next adventures. But, every so often you won’t. And every so often, you want to leave the players without any deliberate hook at all. Let them dick around in Town Mode waiting for something to happen until they remember they can go find work for themselves sometimes.

That way they’ll remember they have the option.

Mix ‘Em, Match ‘Em, and Collect Them All

Your hooks and caltrops both must provide a good mix of emergencies and job offers, of urgent tasks and s$&% to do whenever. The players can’t know whether they’ll be in Town for a week before the king summons them to do a job or whether an emergency will interrupt their training two days in.

And maybe you shouldn’t either…

The Case for Randomized Hooks

Crazy as this s$&% sounds — and I know it sounds pretty f$&%ing crazy — I’m thinking it’s probably worth randomizing this hook stuff. At least, randomizing a lot of it. In fact, I’m thinking it’s so worth it that I’m working on how to do it. Seriously.

I don’t have a system yet. But that’s only because this conclusion only hit me as I was writing this crap. But think about it. Random’s the way to go here. Why? Because you want incomplete, unknowable, unpredictable information. At least, you want the players working with incomplete, unknowable, unpredictable information. So it doesn’t technically have to be random. But it probably should be.

Why? Two reasons. First, because GMs aren’t great at actually making things random. Especially when random things hurt their players. And, make no mistake, this s$&% hurts your players sometimes. The first time you interrupt your players’ 3rd-level training to fight a 4th-level dragon, you’re going to find your resolve tested. So, you’ll fudge and say s$&% like, “I’ll just let the players have enough time to train up.” And that’s how you end up with players who never know how much time they have but always know they have enough. The players have to get screwed at least once or they’ll never think they can get screwed.

This brings me to the second reason. Second, if its dice that screw the players, the players are much less likely to get mad at you. Seriously. Dice present an illusion of fairness. A very useful awareness. If you make a secret die roll before you spring some terrible thing on your players, the players tend to think it was totally fair. Because it wasn’t the mean ole GM doing it. It was just dice. The system. The rules.

So, letting the dice handle this s$&% means sometimes screwing your players while also keeping your hands totally clean.

The idea that I’m working on is simply this. Before you come up with a hook, you roll to see what kind of hook to come up with. A discovered lead in an adventure, a job offer, an emergency, or no hook at all so the players have to find their own work. You use a bell curve roll so the most challenging kinds of hooks to deal with are rare. You also roll to determine when the hook presents itself. If that’s relevant. The king’s summons, say, arrives 2d4 days after the party returns to town. And you also roll to see what kind of Preptime the adventure allows. Does the adventure start immediately, does it start 2d4 days after the job’s offered, or is there no limit at all? That kind of thing.

I know some of you will think this s$%&’s crazy, but I think it’s got real promise to help manage hooks in an open-world-type game where Town Mode Downtime actually matters. And if you agree, let me know. Maybe I’ll share what I come up with.