Hey kids, guess what time it is! That’s right! It’s BS TIME!
Yeah, I know you’re overjoyed. I know you’re already looking forward to slogging through an entire, long rambling article that doesn’t get to any sort of useful point rather than just three paragraphs of rambling you can skip. The thing is, though, that these BS articles are actually very important. For me. Yeah. Everything isn’t about you.
Seriously, though. The BS articles are useful for me because they help me organize my thoughts about a particular topic. Usually, a topic related to something I’ve recently written or something I’m in the process of writing. Or, increasingly, something to do with something I’m doing for current or eventual publication. And here’s the thing: I only really found my voice on this website once I realized that my role was primarily to teach GMs how to think about the game and how to solve problems and design content. In a practical way. There’s a thousand websites out there that will tell you how to “always say yes” and “fail forward” and “start small and build” and “be a fan of the players and their characters” and all of that well-intentioned but ultimately vapid and useless crap. But my website is the one where I will break a thought process down to individual atoms if necessary, so you can figure out a way that works for you.
So, I’m going to keep taking an article every month or two to just babble my way through a problem. But I am going to trying to keep my BS articles a little shorter to compensate. And if they don’t interest you, well, just treat them as very, VERY Long, Rambling Introductions™ for an article that will show up sometime in the future and skip them. After all, eventually, this BS usually finds its way into something I’m working on.
So, here’s the issue: downtime. Or rather: time. Or rather: time doesn’t exist in role-playing games. And how big a problem that is. Because if time doesn’t exist, downtime doesn’t mean anything. And if downtime doesn’t mean anything, it can’t involve meaningful choices. And if it doesn’t involve meaningful choices, then it might as well not even be a part of a role-playing game.
Let me start at the end. At downtime. And then work to beginning. Well, I guess downtime is the beginning. Because that’s what I started with when I ultimately got to time being an illusion. Because downtime is doubly so.
Now, when I say downtime, I’m referring to the crap that the players and their characters do between adventures. The boring stuff that isn’t worth taking up game time. Or much game time. Normally, when people here “downtime,” they think of things like using their Profession or Craft skill to make a living or carousing or running a business or building a castle or whatever. The stuff that the character fills their time with between adventures. And that’s a messy, crappy definition. Because none of that stuff is boring and any of it could be a part of any adventure. And because it leaves out some stuff.
After all, buying equipment is downtime. Leveling up your character is downtime. Healing from your injuries is downtime. These days, it involves a very short period of downtime. But it’s still downtime.
Now, I recently started reading the Pathfinder 2 Playtest. And it explicitly mentioned downtime as a “mode of play.” On the one hand, that gets me hopeful about finding a good system for doing non-adventure, life-of-a-character stuff that isn’t just a frigging afterthought. Like crafting and using professions and building castles. On the other hand, it gives me a stabbing headache on one side because, by definition, downtime is not a mode of play. It’s a mode of NOT play. And without that distinction, any system is likely going to suck. But I am open to being surprised. And, lately, I’ve learned that it was a mistake to ignore Pathfinder for as long as I did because there’s a lot of interesting fiddly bits and subsystems that got introduced in the steaming pile of supplements Paizo has crapped out onto the market over the years. So, I’m doing a lot of remedial reading.
But I digress.
Point is, it’s hard to pin down what people mean by downtime. And no two definitions quite match. And very few people give solid definitions that aren’t just lists of examples.
But the reason I’ve been thinking about downtime is that I’ve been thinking about crafting. And customizing equipment. And how it pertains to downtime. And here’s what happened in my brain.
Okay, so if you have customizable equipment, then you can build rules for crafting around it and those rules simply let people build their equipment rather than buy it. And there’s a lot to work out there. But let’s just suppose, for the moment, that crafting is a simple matter of spending time, money, and ingredients to acquire a piece of custom gear. Fine. Easy enough. Now, money comes from adventuring. And ingredients also come from adventuring. For the sake of argument. Because this is a game about adventuring. Right? So, you can’t just have players go out and earn money by not adventuring. Or earn ingredients by not adventuring. But how can I say that? This is a role-playing game. If a player has a skill that allows them to provide a useful good or service, they can just say “my character will go perform this useful skill for money for a few days to get the money I need.” As a GM, I can’t just say no. The character has a desired outcome, a valid approach, and there’s a chance of success and a chance of failure. And, realistically, they can keep trying until they succeed. So, I have to give them the money. And what about the ingredients? After all, every ingredient can’t be a frigging quest. Otherwise, every adventure will be about obtaining the “breath of a dragon” or “grave earth from a ghoul nest” or whatever. So, most ingredients have to be as mundane as gold. Easily acquired accidentally during the course of an adventure. But if that’s the case, what says the characters can’t just buy the ingredients. Or go out and forage for the ingredients in boring, non-adventuring ways. Like working in a mine or gathering mushrooms or whatever. Which is precisely what happens in most video game crafting systems. A lot of crafting is just grinding. And grinding, by my nondefinition, is downtime. So, if there’s a non-adventure way to acquire money and ingredients and the prize is powerful, custom equipment, what keeps the players from grinding out super powerful gear? What’s the limiting factor? Well, there’s time. It takes time to do that. But I’ve warned players about things taking time before. “We’d like to search every inch of this grand gallery for a secret door.” “Okay, but that’ll take hours.” “So? We’ll take hours.” “Okay… you take several long, tedious hours painstakingly going over every inch…” “Yeah, yeah, it’s really boring. We get it. Can we roll now?” Or what about that only camping once every 24 hours? “Wow, that fight took a lot out of us. We want to go back to camp and sleep it off.” “But you just woke up! You can’t rest again for at least fourteen hours.” “Okay. We’ll go back to camp and sit around reading and playing dice for fourteen hours and then go to sleep and then continue. And don’t try to waste any time describing the boredom. We don’t care. Just wave your magic GM wand and say ‘the next day, you wake up ready to adventure…’”
Well shit.
Time just doesn’t exist as a limiting factor in role-playing games the way it does in other games. And before I go any further, I have to establish an important rule. I know it’s been a few years since I brought it up. But if you want to have big boy game design conversations like an adult, there’s an important thing you’re not allowed to say. And that is:
Well, the GM can fix it by designing adventures the right way.
Take the problem of resting every time you expend a daily resource so that you always have your best resources to deal with a situation. It’s often said by stupid people that the GM shouldn’t let players rest, that he should build adventures that don’t allow the characters to retreat from danger to rest, or that time should always be a factor to counter that. Now, that is what a GM HAS TO do if the resting thing becomes a problem. I agree. And I also agree that resting doesn’t become a problem at every table. But that doesn’t mean the game design itself doesn’t have a problem. It just means there’s a way to work around the problem.
If time is so damned important, then the game designers have to make it important.
Here’s the thing: time is often used as a limiting factor in games. Board games use it to some extent. Video games use it a lot. In a board game, for example, you might get to choose between ending your turn early to earn a resource or continuing your turn. That choice works because you only have so many turns. And if you’re competing against the other players or the game, wasting part of a turn can be quite costly. Because if you don’t win fast enough, someone else will beat you to it. The same is true of combat in D&D. You get one turn per round. If you waste it or miss or fail to do what you’re trying to do, that turn is gone. And if you get killed before your turn comes around again, well, you never get another one. And every round you haven’t won the combat means you’re losing resources and risking death.
In video games, time is used as a limiting factor in a different way. See, rounds and turns are character resources. That is, if the character wastes their turn, they have lost the opportunity to act for six seconds. But, in a video game, time is a player resource. That is, if you take the long way around, sneaking stealthily around the opponents instead of engaging them, every encounter takes twice as long. And that’s in terms of seconds ticking off YOUR life as a player. And, when you’re playing a video game and you’re spending time moving at a snail’s pace through tall grace avoiding aggro, you’re not doing anything more fun or exciting. If you’re grinding for resources, you’re just clicking on ore outcrops. And clicking and clicking and clicking. And waiting for RNJesus to bestow upon you a chunk of Diamond Mithril Ore.
So, when you finally make the Diamond Mithril Armor of Nigh Invulnerability, you’ve paid for it. You’ve paid for it by spending valuable game time doing a boring, repetitive task instead of doing exciting things and having fun. But if it lets you do something you really want to do, like doing raids or PVPs or whatever the kids do in those sorts of games, you spent that time well. At least, to you.
It all comes down to opportunity cost. That’s an economic term. It means that the cost of something is whatever you gave up getting it, including the opportunity to have something else instead. Imagine that, on Tuesday night, there’s a movie playing you want to see. But it’s the last showing of that movie. If you miss it, you won’t be able to see the movie again for six months. Imagine, also, your childhood friend who lives way far away will be in town on Tuesday night. And your friend hates movies. If you don’t see your friend on Tuesday night, you won’t see her again for six months. The cost of going to see the movie is $20 PLUS the chance to see your friend. The cost of seeing your friend is $20 for overpriced pumpkin lattes at her favorite coffee shop PLUS the chance to see the movie.
Time is the ultimate resource. Because it is finite, and because it is always dwindling. You can’t get back lost or wasted time. It’s just gone. And every activity takes time. And every minute of time spent doing something is a minute that can’t be spent doing something else. That’s why it’s an effective cost and limiting factor in video games. Because video game time is precious. You only have so much of it. There’s always an opportunity cost when it comes to choosing how to use your time.
But that just doesn’t work in RPGs. At least, the approach of wasting the PLAYERS’ time to create an opportunity cost doesn’t work. Because any length of time can be covered by the GM simply saying, “several minutes/hours/days/months/years pass and then…” Any amount of time can be compressed to a single sentence. And any GM who refuses to do that to make the players pay for wasted time is an asshole. Pure and simple.
Now, in real life, there are all sorts of factors that keep us from spending as much time as we want on whatever we want. We can’t play video games 24 hours a day, every day. Every so often, we will have to stop to take care of urgent biological needs. And we can only stay awake so long before we pass out. So, we need to spend a chunk of every day in a state of terrifying unconsciousness broken by occasional, bizarre hallucinations. And we need to eat. And we need protection from the elements. Which means we have to hunt for food and maintain shelter. Or we have to pay for food and protection from the elements. And that means we have to spend some time earning money. The remaining time spent not eating and unconscious and working, we can spend that on video games. Unless there’s something better to do.
In RPGs, time is infinite and most games – and most GMs – don’t want to waste time tracking biological needs and living costs. And the games that do track that stuff – like D&D – they have a problem. Because money is trivial and adventuring is so lucrative, a PC could earn a year worth of living expenses with one third level adventure. And, in D&D 5E, there’s nothing else to spend your money on anyway since you can’t craft or buy magical items unless the GM decides to offer those options. And no one bothers to tell the GM how important it is to offer those options.
Now, I’m not arguing for creating a complex downtime minigame based on The Sims to manage the lives of the PCs. Because, I agree, that crap would be boring. I mean, some people would play it. But they are the same people who would prefer to spend their D&D time running business or grinding resources. They are same people who spend all their time in Skyrim hiking from resource node to resource node to craft a bunch of gear they will never get around to using because they spend all their time clicking on resources nodes.
Nor am I saying the problem of time being meaningless is one that every table has to deal with. At many tables, it won’t be a problem. Because most players would rather experience the excitement of playing an adventure than the dullness of managing living costs and hours spent crafting and all of that crap. But, many players will optimize the fun out of the game if you let them. It’s a known problem in game design and one that can’t be ignored. Because it could infect any game.
Suppose we have a system that allows the players to spend time grinding money and resources to make powerful magical items instead of adventuring. Most players don’t do it because it isn’t fun. Even the time spent on a couple of sentences of narration and some bookkeeping are too much opportunity cost. But all it takes is one player at the table who thinks it’s worth it to create a conflict. Or a high enough reward. Imagine a group that doesn’t engage with the grind because it’s boring. But they are going up against a really powerful red dragon. It’s the climax of an adventure arc. And the foe has been built up. It’s going to be an epic struggle. And then one of the players notices that they could spend just a few days grinding out the ingredients and money they need to equip their characters with fire resistant armor and frost weapons. Well, maybe… maybe that one time…
And once they see how it can be covered in a couple of quick, narrative sentences, they are more likely to do it again. And again. And again.
And remember: “the GM should have the dragon attack so they don’t have the time” is NOT a valid answer. That’s asking GMs to cover your shitty game design. Go back to kiddie table.
The point is, time is NOT a resource in RPGs. Not as they are currently written. But if you’re going to have rules for “downtime,” then time NEEDS to be a resource. It has to be limited and it has to be versatile. In other words, you can only have so much of it and there’s more than one thing you want to spend it on. Otherwise, it’s not a choice. And even though the downtime rules can’t draw more than a few minutes of time from the game – otherwise, that’s not downtime, it’s game – they have to have mechanical consequences in the game. Saving money by living a squalid lifestyle needs to impact the game because that saved money can be spent on magic swords that WILL impact the game.
Any game that allows the PCs to do ANYTHING that affects the game while off camera – whether it’s crafting or training or building contacts or earning money – any game that allows the PCs to affect the game while not actively adventuring NEEDS a robust, mechanical system that somehow governs time as a resource. And it cannot simply say “this much time is used up in the game world.” There must be a consequence or cost for wasting time. And, because RPGs are open-ended and – in some ways – mirror a living, breathing world, it can’t just put arbitrary limits on things and say “well, you can only spend so many downtime hours between adventures.” And it cannot be more lucrative than adventuring. It should not be possible for adventurers to make a living by NOT adventuring.
Oh, and it has to be simple enough to not put an undue burden on the game and it also has to be optional so that only the players who want to worry about what their characters are doing on their off hours have to use it. And it can’t allow players who do want to use it to tyrannize those who don’t. And it has to have a complexity dial so that GMs can decide how much or how little work to put into it.
And while I’m dreaming, I’d also like a winged pony. Made of diamonds. With eye lasers.
But at least I know now what I’m up against and why all these RPG downtime systems don’t work.
I’m sorry if this ending seems anticlimactic. I’ll have more to say on this, I’m sure. For now, I’m simply trying to outline the design problem. And I’m not going to try and build all of the solutions into my crafting system. In fact, in that system, I’m probably not even going to bother making time a limiting factor or build a downtime system. But if I were building my own RPG system, this is a nut I’d have to crack to pull off what I want.
Hey Angry, you are probably already aware of it but have you checked out the downtime system in the game Blades against the dark? It does break one of the requirements you set and puts an arbitrary limit on the number of downtime actions you can do between adventures (which makes more sense in the games setting as you are criminals paying up to tougher gangs so need to keep doing crimes). But other than that it works very well.
Seconding Blades in the Dark family. Nice ideas can also be found in Ice and Blades, and also Houses of the Blooded.
As a middle ground between “game mechanics make time important” and “GM makes time important”, game mechanics themselves might be helping GM to push the story forward. So it’s still ends up to be GM’s responsibility to deal with time, but GMs at least have tools that will create time constraints grounded in the story almost automatically, just by following rules as written.
This is such a central problem in 5E that whenever I run it, during session zero / initial prep sessions, I basically just spell it out directly.
“5E operates on a principle of the adventuring day. You absolutely can game it, and we can have an escalating war of how frequently you rest and when, or you can trust that I will do my best to fairly balance the encounters such that they are winnable with smart play, and give you ‘obvious’ resting places. Yes, it breaks immersion a bit, but the alternative is making every combat assume you have 100% of your resources at all times, and then there’s no various in fight difficulty, which is its own problem.”
I’m also in the process of learning 4E, so maybe that’ll solve some of the issues I have with 5E? But probably introduce a slew of its own issues…. Can’t wait for the Angry RPG.
The issue with 4e is that, as presented, there are few benefits to taking time off from adventuring. All healing occurs in a day and magic item creation takes very little time. I deal with this in a few ways:
1. I have slowed down healing surge recovery. You get a number of healing surges restored based on your Endurance check (or the party healer’s Heal check), modified by the conditions (ie penalties if you are sitting in the freezing rain with no tents and no fire).
2. Effectively, every monster can grant an “injury”, built as a disease using the disease mechanic. This kicks in if you fail death saves, and the starting severity depends on the number of saves failed. Both #1 and #2 create incentive to be more careful of combat and enforce a certain amount to down time.
3. Using the item rarity system, you can only create common items, but I allow the creation of uncommon and rare items if (a) you quest for materials/formulae and (b) you take downtime to do the crafting. They are also more expensive than common items.
4. When a character gains a level he/she needs to spend downtime to train new feats and powers. The hit points and level bonuses come right away, but the new power doesn’t come until you train. I use the Character Optimization boards to set the time it takes to train and the rarity of finding someone who knows the feat or power ie. sky blue = 5 weeks training, rare character options, red = 1 week training, very common options.
I also have been working on high level play for when you own a castle/church/thieves’ guild and want to build on that. It is partly based on treating these things like magic items (eg. Title of Nobility gives +4 to charisma based checks in social situations and allows you to clear land and build a castle as if it was a common item; troops built in the form of swarms of soldiers; land allows you to support a certain number of troops and a castle without spending cash and gives Nature bonuses relating to that land, etc) and using Haven Turn/Hazard die rules, but haven’t had a chance to put it into effect.
I think the answer to this dilemma is already written in your article: opportunity cost. You can spend a week crafting those items, or you can accept an alternative objective limited in time that occur only in that time frame. For Example, the week of downtime there is a festival in a nearby city with wonderful thing to discover, do you prefer make the item or discover unique and time limited things? It’s always a player choice to decide how to manage their time, and it is the gm role, to offer interesting choices about it.
I like this idea, but maybe it could go more along the lines of losing adventuring opportunities. Like, “Do you want to spend a week making the dildo of awesomeness, or do you want to clear out the goblins who just moved into the caves out of town and are going to leave right before you finish the weapon?”
The problem with that, though, is that the DM would either have to write out the goblin caves adventure, or, and I know this is a terrible idea, automate the goblin caves adventure. If the PCs are a high enough level that there is literally no chance they would die to a bunch of goblins, then they could essentially just swoop in and out real quick with the treasure, right? I mean, it would be low-level treasure, but it’d be treasure nontheless, right?
I understand your point of view, basically it’s not efficient to “skip” content the DM work on, but a solution could be pose the question at the end of a session, like “for the next session, you can have some adventure break to do crafting/downtime things, or you can instead explore this time limited event. This way the gm do not need to waste prep time in an event that players could possibly skip
The problem remains that time is not a limited resource in that example. What’s to stop the players doing both? Kill the goblins, then come back and craft the sword anyway.
If every time they try to craft, another opportunity appears, then “attempting to craft” is a way of generating opportunities with no cost, because they don’t actually lose the ability to craft the item, it just gets delayed by in-game time which moves at the speed of narrative.
Alternatively, if they choose to craft the item instead, what’s to stop them from attempting to craft another item immediately afterwards? Will that cause a second opportunity to appear? If not, then they can craft as much as they like for no further cost, but if so, then they can still craft as much as they like and then afterwards attempt one final unnecessary crafting to generate an opportunity they actually want instead.
Yeah but here’s the thing: “that town over there is running a festival” cannot apply to every situation. I think it would break the suspension of disbelief for most players if there was some sort of event happening any time they tried to make a magic sword.
More importantly, you’re leaving the problem up to the GM; they have to decide what the event entails and how to run it.
I guess the opportunity cost could be spend a week making magic items or spend a week earning political favors or some other kind of downtime activity, but then there’s no reason why they couldn’t just spend 2 weeks instead of 1 on downtime activities. Unless, of course, there’s some arbitrary limit on how much downtime you can spend, which breaks one of Angry’s rules.
“opportunity cost. ”
This is what Angry means when he says that time as a resource needs to be versatile.
The difficult part here is not identifying the need for conflicting, mutually exclusive choices, but outlining and balancing all those choices.
But–it could be very cool.
The issue is that many games answer the question by simply making the “opportunity cost” of such things to be “you’re not doing other, more fun things in the game and you only have so many hours in your life as a player.” In RPGs, the time you have as a player doesn’t translate in any way to the time your character has to spend on adventure because the narrative can shrink hours and days into seconds at the table.
I think it fits more the idea of designing around problem than solving it, because creating effective opportunity cost isn’t quite easy as it may seems.
Let’s take the example of goblin camp: in my opinion, such one-time opportunity can often be ineffective. Players assume that there will always be some interesting adventuring to do. It may well doesn’t matter that much if they don’t go on goblin hunting that in-game week, as they will probably can go chase gnolls the next one, once there crafting is done.
If the solution is just to counter that by adding the opportunity of one-time, unique and powerful loot, but only when the party has an occasion to take downtime activities, it may well quickly seems unfair if the campaign isn’t build around the idea of pressing the party to act. It can looks like a GM saying “Just because you want to make a powerful thing, lets give you an opportunity to acquire another powerful thing, but only for a limited time, so you have to chose.”
I don’t say it cannot be done, but in my opinion, the campaign to be achieved, the campaign has to be designed in a way appropriated for that goal. For example, if the campaign plot revolves around a prominent goblin invasion, that every week spent sitting idly makes goblins grow stronger, and the party has an opportunity to take down an outpost left poorly defended while some of its garrison went on patrol, then it’s an effective opportunity cost. But to make it feel fair, it has to almost always be so: every week spent come at a cost. But then, it’s about designing campaign around the issue of time.
You made a good point about real life time. I can’t see how you would have time to make a 5e crafting system while working on the angry rpg and finishing up all the other stuff you have planned.
Not a criticism just an observation from a mere mortal.
I guess I need to be efficient and do two things at once. For instance, what if all the tweaking and fiddling I did with current rule systems was also useful for some other project.
Yes, I guess that could help you figure out a lot of the initial problems.
Then when you plan your own system you’ll know what you hate and will avoid at all cost.
Hope it works out, im looking forward to a better foundation for mid to low magic fantasy games. I think crafting will be importaint in a lower magic setting.
I think so also. And I’m not necessarily about “low magic” so much as “restoring the fantastic to fantasy.” I think I’ve discussed that before. It comes to the same thing, though.
I’m an asshole. Two strategies that work well for me are 1: arbitrary time limits. ‘This town doesn’t like adventurers, but they like your money. You can stay in town for 7 days before they kick you out. Here’s the menu of activities.’ 2: ‘Ok, so you’re spending a week making the sword. What are the rest of you getting up to during that time? Oh, a bar fight, eh, well, let’s break out the minis’. This also includes ‘pursuing your own backstory plot’ and ‘I’m getting us all not welcome in town anymore by seducing the horses, burning the women, and stealing the houses’, which is inevitably what happens when players get bored. It’s a good use of game time, while still coming at a cost to the players engaged in the crafting.
What if XP decayed over time? Like, XP you’ve earned but that haven’t yet been “spent” to gain levels (or craft magic items or whatever) slowly gets lost? Ooh, like maybe every time you take a significant rest, e.g. enough to recover spells?
Now there’s a built-in ticking clock that encourages people to keep adventuring and earning XP and not recovering all of their abilities after every encounter. And players can do the cost-benefit analysis and have to decide “yes, it’s worth taking a week of downtime to do X even though it will in effect cost us 700 XP.”
It seems like this would encourage people to keep adventuring until they gain a level. Then they can take time to do other things because they’re not really risking very much XP. Of course, sometimes players will be at different places on the XP progression so the whole party may not be in the same situation. And note that if you do this at the point where you’ve just gained a level, you don’t have many ‘discretionary’ XP to spend on things like crafting gear (if that’s dependent on XP).
This might be on to something, though I’m not sure xp is the right thing to penalise.
Some sort of Rustiness mechanic would reflect the fact that time spent tinkering is time not spent keeping your adventuring skills sharp. In 5e that’s represented by the proficiency bonus.
So, something that gives you a temporary proficiency bonus penalty until you get back out there and get back to match fitness? Ties downtime to uptime, involves player choice, but doesn’t represent a permanent trade-off between spending time and playing the game? Best of all, nobbles the player who wants to go and grind out armour for a month before facing the big bad dragon, with absolute verisimilitude. “You build the armour and gain ten pounds. Ready to go fight?”
There is a carrot solution to 1-hour adventure day that I implemented in my game: every time my players overcome a significant obstacle or gain XP in other way, I stack a combo counter. Every encounter gives them additional XP equal to the counter. Long rest resets the counter. This almost removed the 1-hour adventuring day.
Now I consider extending this to incentivize downtime by putting a limit on a “combo counter”. The limit can be raised by spending a week of downtime. Every long rest lowers the limit of country. That puts players in a position where Long Rests are a resource gained through Downtime.
(Extend the limit to negative numbers so that it doesn’t degenerate into vanilla system)
Now we translated the game annoyance of grind (high player’s time expenditure to low xp gain) into to “if you play without downtime you are leveling slower). That means players will want downtime even asaa simple declaration we wait. Then we can give them something to do in this downtime.
To constrain the downtime I personally use ticking clocks, advancing threats and aggressive plot hooks. But that works in my game it is not universal.
There could be a some cost to downtime is expensive and after some time you have to go adventure to offset this cost.
GM could tweak the numbers (or just choose them from premades) to make their campaign high-intensity city intrigue over the time of few months or slow-burn west marshes campaign on scale of decades.
There is one game which does its downtime excellently
RedMarkets which IMO is very elegantly designed its themes are baked inseparably into mechanics. Them being harsh survival in postapocalypse. Their downtime is balanced with the need for adventuring. Great “encumbrance” and inventory system. My preferred muddle ground between abstraction (game-ism) and simulationism. Highly recommend it.
…That’s kind of the opposite of the point. This whole article was about giving downtime a cost that doesn’t rely on the GM creating a narrative – based constraint. You were just talking about using a GM-driven narrative device to keep players from taking lots of downtime in order to build mechanical advantages in addition to getting time to craft gear.
Yes and I admitted that. You may have missed it because my reply was atrocious in style.
“It works in my game” meant (under the assumption that I understood the article) that it is not a solution I am proposing. I wanted to propose a way to encourage downtime in your campaign. Then you will have to counterbalance it with some cost to downtime that will give you a nice cycle of downtime-adventuring-downtime…
In my campaign these are the clocks but it works mainly because one of them is “powerful organisation that wants to kill the PCs” which terminates downtime, when they find the PCs.
So you can see that I didn’t offer any solutions to the main problem, only some related problem.
I mention RedMarkets because it connects all the costs (downtime, character advancement, maintenance, objectives) to one currency (called bounty) and perfectly balances all of them so that you will have to make tough meaningful decisions on how to spend this currency.
I was thinking the same sort of thing. Adventurers who are not adventuring will be losing those skills they need to adventure, though they will be getting proficient in other things (you can consider the case where an adventurer who has been in the wilds for 6 years might not remember how to use blacksmithing tools effectively or makes some mistakes in the political realm because he hasn’t kept up with the latest modes of address in the Court of Merithan).
So a modification to your idea (albeit one that wouldn’t fit within the D&D 5e framework) would be some sort of proficiency pool distributed between (for example) adventuring (i.e., exploring dangerous situations/wandering across the country), crafting, and politics that redistributes based on the amount of time spent doing each of these things.
This problem came up in the comic, “Knights of the Dinner Table”. The player characters became incredibly wealthy with titles so they spent all their time in their mansions, throwing fancy parties and living the good life.
A few months of game time later some low level thugs crashed the party. The players couldn’t understand why they were getting their butts handed to them so readily. The GM pointed out that their skills had gotten rusty and they immediately left their mansions behind to go adventuring.
In pathfinder this could be represented as a temporary negative level per month (week if you want to be tough) of downtime that can only be removed by spending an equal time adventuring.
You could take it further and start replacing their class levels with NPC class levels appropriate to their downtime actions.
This allows you to use existing mechanics to make downtime meaningful.
Yeah, in a system with fixed XP-to-level, like in the PF playtest where each level takes 100 XP, this could work.
The players could trade like 5 XP to expend a day training, crafting, resting or working.
Training: you keep your current XP and heal normal rate
Resting: you expend 5 XP and heal double rate
Crafting: you expend 5 XP and produces 1 resource (for example, a level 1 scroll takes 1 resource, a level 2 takes 2 etc). You heal at half rate.
Working: you expend 5 XP and gets a sum in gold based on your level. You heal at half rate.
Of course, I would get ridden of the “long rest heal all your HP”. Maybe you could recover 1HD per tier a day, and no HP.
In say 3.5e, I’d probably start with something like “every day, you lose/spend your level x 10 XP, but never down to below your current level’s minimum XP.” That’s a flat 1% of the NFNL amount. In a system where you’re expected to level after about 4 adventuring days, that’s not a big tax. But if you’re significantly behind that curve, it will start to add up. (And you could always bump up XP awards by say 5% across the board if you’re worried it will slow advancement.)
It would probably go over better if you frame it as a bonus rather than a cost, like giving players a bonus to earned XP if they can earn a target amount of XP before they rest. But that doesn’t address the downtime problem. I haven’t come up with a similar “carrot” that disincentivizes downtime.
Logically, there’s no reason a non-adventurer couldn’t waste time grinding or waiting for their next long rest, so time has to cost something that only matters to adventurers. Ideally, the time cost would be simple to administer the same kinds of cost at different time scales, to prevent hours of grinding ingredients or looking for traps or resting, days of crafting, or months of having a profession. And it would preferably be a high enough cost that players think twice about too much grinding, but not so high they never spend a week on research.
What if the required XP to level up increase with age, because you learn faster when you are young? Wouldn’t really make a difference when downtime is handled on a day-to-day basis, but if you needed months to do anything substantial (research a spell, craft magic item, work to gain significant wealth, etc), it would give an incentive to go out right now and adventure. And then when you are older and learn slower, you can retire and start to really focus on researching, crafting etc (and become an npc)…
I’m still experimenting, but currently my system explicitly attaches a progress meter (a simple value from 1-5) to important situations happening in the world – things the players will want to get or stop. If the meter hits 5, the opportunity is lost or the bad thing happens.
Every time the players spend time on a rest, or whatever, the GM advances the progress on an appropriately sized situation (cave collapsing for spending a few minutes, the conducting of your homeland if it’s months).
The players are explicitly told in the guide that the world can and will move on without them if they dawdle. So far it seems to be working well.
Have you looked at the “Haven Turn” described by Brendan Strejcek at Necropraxis and embellished elsewhere? It expressly deals with downtime.
http://www.necropraxis.com/tag/hazard-system/
http://www.paperspencils.com/2017/06/11/the-haven-turn/
Thanks Beoric, reading up on this and other things in papersandpencils took a whole afternoon but now I have another thing to rip off for my personal game. Fantastic ideas well presented on both blogs.
Mass Effect: Andromeda, being the archetypal Wrong Way of Doing Everything, got this enormously wrong.
Send your crack team of elite soldiers who you never meet to pull off some daring mission. Then if your next _in game mission_ lasts enough _real world hours_, come back and cash in. But only if the random number generator decides they succeed in their daring mission. The worst part of an awful game.
Maybe Civilization gets closer. Each _turn_ gets me closer to inventing gravity or feudalism or whatever. Sure, combat turns are the wrong atom of time there, but maybe if your RPG assigns each _objective_, be it killing the dragon or delivering the bribe, a different ‘progression metric’, that ties ‘playing the game’ to ‘down time’? So, delivering the bribe gets me one Time Point closer to crafting my +3 Armour of Unreasonable Resistance, but killing the dragon gives me a whole four points? So, I kill the dragon, and that feels good. Then I loot her dragon hoard, which feels good. Then I return to base, to find I have enough (down)Time Points to finish my armour, which feels good again.
I realise that doesn’t solve the problem of ‘but can’t I just sit at my base until it’s ready?’ but I’m not sure that one is even soluble in this context.
So, this isn’t DnD, but the Warhammer rpg 4th edition has rules for downtime. Players get one Endeavor per week of downtime, which they can use to do stuff like make a sword, research, make money , learn about where they are, etc. It does put an arbitrary limit of 3 Endeavors max in between adventurers, however, because PCs have careers outside of adventuring.
An additional change is that PCs money is spent in between quests- gambled, given to charity, relatives, etc, unless you do a Banking Endeavor to store it.
RAW, players do need to roll to do stuff in downtime, because much of it can give minor bonuses to them, like a reroll or better gear. This does seem to violate some of Angry’s rules for downtime.
A hack/homebrew i’ve experimented with is attaching spatial limitations on long rests in survival themed campaigns. In a hex crawl limiting full recovery to civilized territory meant that it would be harder to recover mid-adventure and that finding safe zones could be used as a type of reward. It’s basically resting by GM fiat, but players still have some degree of choice and immersion.
This is actually I problem I have been bungling with, but after playing Persona 5, I realized I could take a cue from that and other JRPGs with daily activity mechanics (Recettear, Devil Survivor, and many visual novel-style games also do this.) Where a game day is broken into time slots and each activity takes one or more of those, and some time slots are completely used by story-scripted events. In persona 5, each day has a daytime and evening slot, and choosing to go adventuring takes a full day no matter how long you spend in Adventureland, and you have to return from adventuring to receive a full rest.
I liked how it gave me the freedom as a player to choose between earning money, raising relationships for perks, crafting items to prepare for adventuring, or adventuring in the current dungeon-of-the-month with and indication that major plot points were coming and I needed to manage my time well to be ready for the climax of each story arc, and ultimately the climax of the adventure. It also creates interesting social incentives because relationships give you benefits, and some characters will do activities for you when your relationship is high enough, which functionally gives your more time slots to play with. Some also charge money for that type of service, which creates an interesting choice where you can do it yourself for free, or pay to have it done and gain the opportunity to do something else.
I’ve been trying to develop a system to incorporate the use of time slots to emulate that feeling, but I haven’t finished it yet. Thanks for this article. It’s given me some good things to think about regarding this, and hopefully this sparks some ideas for others.
The thing that makes Persona 5 and Recettear work is that there’s a clock keeping you on task. Recette needs to pay off her debt each month, or the loan sharks will take her house. P5’s thieves need to steal the bad guy’s heart before he does something bad. Is it possible to make this system work if you’ve got a more free-form adventure planned that doesn’t have a schedule?
In a more free-form adventure, I would start with 1 or a couple adventure options that don’t have hard limit, but also give the PCs few other options – Running a shop, crafting, etc. is all basically subsistence-level work for first-level adventurers so that adventuring is the most lucrative of their limited options. Then as they adventure they gain relationships, unlock new options, learn about events, and discover more places to adventure. In addition to offering a number of time-irrelevant adventure sites they can visit whenever, also include some with time limits (the portal only opens during the full moon). You could also include multiple adventure sites or goals at once, some time limited and others not. Put all the events that affect the PCs their calendar. There is a festival in X days. The PCs go after some bandits’ treasure but are forced to retreat and now their fort is on heightened alert for Y days. The full moon occurs every 30 days. A big part of that campaign would have the PCs discovering new and interesting ways to spend their time, and the PCs filling out and managing their calendar and planning/optimizing their activities would become a core mechanic.
Some goals maye also have no time limit, but represent a threat the longer it goes unchecked. Every week the PCs fail to expose the cultist leader, his influence grows. Social DCs increase, or his forces become more numerous and powerful.
You could also expand recovery time so that short rests and long rests require using up time after returning from adventure (although I would not, at least not in D&D).
Sorry this isn’t as thought out as I’d like. I’m spewing a bit of stream-of-consciousness at the moment, while giving my brain a rest from work.
That Pathfinder mention makes me think, have you checked out Starfinder? It uses a Stamina Points system and equipment has multiple tiers (special modifiers aside), among other things such as class archetypes integrated into them (Soldiers must choose one of multiple fighting styles which determines their build) and the like.
I personally found it mechanically superior to Pathfinder and haven’t looked back ever since
I recently picked this up, in part because you brought it up, and have been pleasantly surprised. Genning up and campaign now, but this looks like it’s got a ready made niche in the tactical sci fi rpg slot that’s not quite filled by anything else.
I only wish there were more base classes that didn’t involve magic. (It’s a sci fi game, where half the classes are some form of magic user… wtf?)
This makes me think back to the AskAngry about charging XP for downtime, and the idea of using a carrot instead of a stick. Perhaps it is beneficial to make many different things “downtime” can do — for instance, during your week of downtime you can Craft (gain items), you can Grind (gain XP), you can Rest (heal faster), or you can Socialize (gain report of some sort with the town).
It would behave a bit like charging XP to craft/etc., except you’re now simply offering the carrot instead. You can craft or rest if you want, but the rest of your party might choose to grind XP and get a little bit more powerful.
What’s the difference between a character with 5,000 XP and one with 5,500 XP? Nothing. What’s the difference between a character with 6,000 and 6,500? A lot.
Why farm XP unless it will increase your level? The only reason I can think of is so you can bank XP and “beat” fellow PCs. Or at best help them with your lopsided relative strength.
But, why wouldn’t you farm XP if doing so would increase your level?
Aside from the above issue, why would a character who chose to make an item last downtime do something else this time? Same question for every other option. Is it really a decision if it’s always the same answer?
The problem remains that time is not a limited resource, so what’s to stop someone doing all of those things multiple times each and gaining a vast power increase for practically no cost?
What if every player states “I Grind for 10 years straight”, what happens then? Do you just skip ahead 10 years and give everyone a bunch of free levels?
What if you did not receive XP for grinding. Maybe a percentage boost to XP gained from advevturing for a limited amount. (spitball balancing) say a week of down time will give you a 25% boost to XP for one Hard encounter’s worth of XP. making it scale with whatever level the character is currently. Like how WoW handles rested XP. Could pair this with a XP drain mechanic to encourage getting the adventurers back to questing.
That actually sounds like a decent way to handle it. During downtime you can either craft or rest; each day you rest gives you +5% xp the following adventuring day (maxing out at 25%). This gives incentive to not spend *too* much downtime (as it maxes out), and also gives incentive to get through as many encounters as possible on that first day.
This would lead a *bit* into the “One day of adventuring, 5 days of rest” thing, but it’s often hard to take downtime when you’re directly in the middle of an adventure.
Given the themes you were exploring like opportunity cost and in-game vs. down-time time pressures, I was honestly expecting you to wrap up by proposing some sort of cap-and-trade system for game time management to address both problems. Since you didn’t – and it still seems like a natural extension to me, what about something loosely based on the following following:
1. At the start of each session, give each player 10 time points (TP)
2. Each short rest costs -1 TP; each long rest costs -5 TP.
3. At the end of a session, the GM hands out additional TP representing time that will pass before the start of the next session: say 1 hour = +1 TP, 1 day = +5 TP, 1 week = +10 TP, 1 month = +20 TP, 1 year = +30 TP
4. Each player then decides how to spend their total accrued TP before the start of the next session – for example:
a. Pursue a profession, and earn gold = TP x Level
b. Undergo training, and earn bonus XP = TP x level
c. Craft a healing potion (10 TP)
d. Customize your gear by adding one minor motification (20 TP)
e. Make (incremental) progress on a complex magical item (50 TP)
f. Go gambling; roll dice for a low chance at a high payoff (1 TP)
….etc
I’m sure those numbers don’t balance, but in principle it imposes a cost on wasting time in-game, provides a varying budget based on the time passing between sessions, and offers both simple engagement (gold or XP), or more complex options for those that want to engage with and optimize the system.
There is something to be said for Downtime being handed out at the end of adventures as essentially “This much time passes before the next adventure occurs, what do you do in the mean time?”, but the problem is still what happens if, halfway through an adventure, one player wants to stop and craft for a few days? What stops them from doing so, mechanically? Either you arbitrarily tell them they can’t do that right now, or every adventure has to include an external time pressure.
^^ This is how 5e Adventurer’s League does it, by the way, except they don’t require you to spend it right away.
A simple solution in a context where fairness and ease of play are more important than realism.
Well, this system unabashedly tries to incentive players away from grinding at the table in exchange for a “metagame” to engage with on their own time.
Having said that, if one player wants to “burn the midnight oil” to pursue a downtime activity while the rest of the party is resting, that player would be exempt from the resting penalty (but would not get the benefits of a rest).
Likewise, if the entire party wants to pursue downtime at the table, the system still accommodates them – but penalizes them with diminishing returns. For example, if the GM declared that one day (+5 TP) passed between the end of the last session and then start of the next, the party would need to spend an additional *week* to reach the next threshold (+10 TP). This means even vague threats or modest time pressures – a looming background threat or an old foe licking their wounds – incentives the party against wasting too much time.
Funny you should bring this up,
In a 5e game I just started I am using downtime as just another thing to spend to allow players to craft things like potions, scrolls, magic weapon, or make money. However I am forced to use the bullshit arbitrary time is limiting factor bit by having my PC’s forced to adventure or die.(think madoka magica’s gems)
This was the problem my group ran into when playing Pokémon Tabletop United, where you have a lot of video game habits suddenly dropped into a tabletop environment where grinding is less of a fun distraction and more of a notable waste of time with friends. Reworking a lot of the “x/day” resources (like training sessions and berry planter yields) into “x/session” resources was a quick and easy fix for the mechanical side, though not the attitude (why of course I want to hang around and look for another chance to capture that one I missed instead of progressing an interesting story).
The Adventurers’ League approach of awarding downtime as an explicit resource alongside gold is a similar solution. Sure, you could point out that you could just spend the time anyway, but when you’ve been told how much time you should be allowed to spend, then that shifts from “wasting time” to “cheating”.
There are a lot of ways to push the players to use their downtime wisely, *if* the GM is running an adventure where the bad guys have an evil plan that’s advancing on their own pace. Doom trackers, scheduled events, etc. The question is what to do if we’re on an adventure that runs on the players’ pace, like Angry’s Megadungeon, or a villain who’s playing a long game (a great evil that rises once every thousand years, etc).
Most of the built-in time pressures of the real world, like a lack of money or supplies, don’t apply, either. A 3rd-level adventurer is swimming in gold by mundane standards, and a 5th-level cleric can create unlimited food and water. Get a few adventures under your belt, and you can retire. At this point, further dungeon crawls are basically a hobby, not a quest.
Really, this feels like it might be a self-defeating criterion – “Given that the players are under no time pressure, how do we put them under time pressure?” Maybe the answer is just “come up with more creative ways for the time pressure to show up besides the dragon showing up to attack them.”
I’m currently running a game using O.L.D. The Fantasy Heroic Roleplaying Game and we are currently in the middle of a major battle using the game’s warfare mechanics. The players begin with 10 Victory Points +/- some modifiers, and the PCs side wins the battle if they earn 20. The one mechanic I really like is that each day they lose 3 points by default, and gain points by completing missions (the GM rolls for/creates 3 missions each day). The idea being that the world will be worse if the PCs do not intervene.
An interesting way to create impetus to push the PCs forward without a hard deadline would be using this idea of a soft deadline, where inaction leads to inevitable loss and action/adventuring adds more time before that point, and enough action will lead to ultimate victory. I don’t know if this answers your concern, but I hope it helps.
What if you had some counters set aside for certain events, each with a number of days that had to be counted up in order for them to occur, such as “Villain X’s forces attack the village,” or “Every 7 days, another villager dies as a tribute to the red dragon,” or “Another adventuring group claims the treasures of dungeon X,” or “Every 30 days, the orc army’s forces increase by 20.” Obviously, the PCs would have to be aware that these things would happen as time went by, but it would at least be a mechanical way to track time cost by counting down the time till bad things happen or future encounters are made harder.
Unless this was some published adventure where it’s built in by the writers, that’s still just falling back to rule 0: have the GM do the work to fix it. It works, but at best avoids the underlying problems.
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This article must have been written on a Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
I’ve been thinking about this problem for a while and come up with three possible solutions, two of which are cheap, technical fixes, and the last of which is an enormous, all encompassing solution that fixes RPG’s from the ground up…but I’ve never had the time to devote to developing it.
The first is to embrace that time is an illusion and use abstract time units. Smithing a sword costs one Long Break and brewing a potion costs one Short Break. There are four or five or whatever Short Breaks per Long Break, regardless of how much in-game time these Breaks actually represent. In one campaign a Long Break may be a week while a Short Break is an evening. In a ticking clock campaign maybe a LB is a day and a SB is an hour. Maybe it changes in a single campaign, one time an LB is a week and then they get 3 months off and you decide to count that as 3 LB’s. Then just give them plenty of things to do in downtime so that crafting or whatever has an opportunity cost.
The second fix is to embrace that time doesn’t exist and ignore it. Crafting no longer takes any time to do at all, it is just limited by leveling, the same as every other ability in the game. Want to craft a new sword or suit of armor? You can make one each time you level up, the same way a Wizard learns new spells when they level.
The last solution is to change the way RPG’s are built from the ground up. Every RPG I’ve ever seen was designed specifically so that the Player’s could play it and the GM is just there to facilitate that gameplay. D&D designed character creation and combat and the DM was an afterthought at best, the DMG didn’t even come out until 3 months after the PH. Instead, design an RPG that the GM can play as a solo experience, the way many board games these days can be played. Have rules for creating GM characters/villains, assign them goals, and provide the GM with rules for playing out what those characters do over the course of a week/month/whatever. Then when the players show up, their adventures are in response to the actions of the GM characters. Time becomes incredibly important because the GM characters are doing stuff every single in-game week, like raising an army of zombies, or crafting a +3 Longsword of PC Slaying. Managing time as a resource becomes the foundation of the game instead of an afterthought.
Fascinating!
There’s definitely a lot here to think about and develop further.
[[ Unnecessarily hostile and non-productive comment removed. And remember, if you’re not interested in crafting systems yourself, that’s not actually a point against someone trying to build one for the people who are into them. – The Angry GM ]]
Very interesting idea. I’ve been working on a similar concept, but this post clarified a few things for me. A card game (Which I will give the working title of ‘Downtime’) where you can print out sheets of blank cards on stock paper by type (location, resource, population, etc) as things of great import are created. Each faction would have a ‘deck’. In between sessions you’d apply your resources towards goals. For example, a dragon hoard would be a Wealth card of so many points, and you can either ‘tap’ it to pay a small cost (like maintaining an outpost or paying the city guard) indefinitely, or spend them permanently to do things like buy a new castle (a Location card) or create a powerful item or permanent magic effect.
This would be a fairly simple game a DM could play a few turns of between sessions, and one that powerful, high level characters could play once they amass enough power to have a town or castle and lands of their own, depending on the group. Players, likewise, are equivalent to a Resource themselves, and can apply their character’s downtime to achieving anything a card could of similar power. If they decide to make that magic sword for their Downtime turn, the Goblin warren (an easy task for them, so not worth an adventure of it’s own at mid level) will grow, and either they will start Raiding resources from the local village, or the Necromancer BBEG will use them to make his Undead army grow (convert the Warren’s Population to Undead Population in his Faction).
Figure Downtime turns to be a day or week or something, and Boon cards could be handed out to players to exchange for favors or resources later (a Boon card being equivalent to a certain number of Resource points one time) as quest rewards.
It’s a really rough idea so far, but I wanted to toss it out conceptually.
The latter game pretty much exists. “An Echo, Resounding: A Sourcebook for Lordship and War.” You can see a sci-fi version of the system in the free version of “Stars Without Number”.
Personally, what I’m working on is a system of metacurrency inspired by “Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of” and “Unity”. Essentially, the players have ‘weal’ points that help them succeed, but the DM gets ‘woe’ points that enable them to make the game more challenging for the players. So one option would be to have the DM accumulate woe during downtime, to reflect that while the players are resting on their laurels, the world is becoming more dangerous.
What if downtime always occurs in between sessions. Like I spend a couple hours every week writing up the next adventure. The players should spend a couple hours every week planning their downtime if they want an optimized downtime. Make them grind out a study session.
Alright so the players get 50 hours of downtime to “spend” in between sessions:
– Crafting a sword takes 3 steel, a craft level of 3, and 25 hours of work.
– Steel costs 100gp
– Spending 6 hours mining gets you 1 steel
– Crafting a crippling poison takes 2 hours and requires 3 nightshade bells, 2 purple mushrooms, and a salamander maw
– spending 3 hours of downtime gets you one nightshade bell.
– You can only buy nightshade bells from the witch. You have to “unlock” the witch before you can buy them
– Salamander maws must be found on a quest
– For each hour of downtime spent at a bar they lose 1 gp and gain 1 reputation.
– For each hour of downtime street-performing they gain 1gp
– For each hour of downtime spent in the market they get a “10% off coupon to a max of 30%” to simulate finding a good deal
The players can be lazy and get a bit of income, or they can “game the system” by grinding the numbers and get the most out of it. It all has to be done in between sessions though, so it forces the players to spend real-world time figuring out how they want to spend their in-game time
If one of the players uses the downtime periods to grab lunch, does time become triple illusiory?
Shadowrun deals with downtime by tying it to your money via living expenses, and downtime is enforced by taking months to train skills past the basic ratings or to purchase really expensive gear. It’s honestly really burdensome and with enough reserve money or a daytime job there’s little to stop the players from just spending forever not doing any runs, short of the GM having to step in and having a fixer call them for an urgent job or something.
Whenever there’s a downtime period that’s longer than the usual in-game week I make a publicly editable document for our party to note down their downtime expenses between sessions so we’re all on the same page regarding our resources. Without fail, most of them will come to the next session having put no thought into it, and half the session is wasted.
Time is handled somewhat better on an encounter scale since there’s all kinds of tables for the GM to roll on to decide how long it takes for whatever passes for security to arrive on scene, and a bunch of skill checks do take a significant amount of time depending on how well you roll. The pressure is further increased by the result of the former roll usually being hidden from the players, so there’s also the uncertainty factor coming into play, encouraging them to get done as fast as possible.
I think Torchbearer, (could be a different game) has turns that represent what characters do when not adventuring. There are a number of activities you can choose that all have benefits, so it builds in that opportunity cost to a certain extent. Dungeon World has fronts which represent the villains’ advancing agendas and Blades in the Dark uses timers, both of which codify the idea that things are happening while the players do other stuff. Each of these systems uses a layer of abstraction (like turns) and simplification specifying different kinds of actions. Not sure if that’s in the direction you’re thinking, but they might be worth a look.
I believe Stars Without Number has a faction turn and that the same designer built a fantasy version of domain play rules called An Echo Resounding. It seems like Domain play and turn-based kingdom management may be more maximalist than what you’re going for, but there could be good ideas there too.
I’m tracking, another fascinating thought exercise. In my own 5e game I cheated and gave my players license to use Paizo’s downtime rules for Pathfinder from Ultimate Campaign. Not perfect by a long shot, and just as breakable by my players as my powergamer immediately tried to get one over on me. About the only restraint I’ve got on them is that while they’re inside the current campaign arc, if they want to take a builder’s vacation and go do something non-campaign focused, then the BBEG wins, and their project won’t finish due to the interruption.
After reading the above, and remembering back to previous editions, would it be possible to attach an XP cost to magical item creation? Throws earning the currency (the grind) back into playtime instead of downtime, though I always thought it was silly an exchange – I get this shiny thing, but forget how to play the piano, and now I have to relearn that.
Outside of that, the only thing I could come up with on the spot – slap two restrictions onto each project your players come up with, one you tell them about and one you don’t tell them about. The first is the cost in gold. “I wanna make a Sun Blade!” “Fantastic, this is going to cost you.” “How much?” “How much you got? That, plus 10,000.” Whatever one player wants to do, you automatically assign the cost of “everything the party has and then some” to it. Either the party is behind your Maker McGee, or they are going to have a long slog to earning the cash.
The second, hidden cost is how many projects (otherwise known as fun, shiny toys) you actually allow to come to fruition. A party with one really cool whatever is fun, but a party with every member having the 3 max (or more, I’m sure someone has gotten around attunement in 5e) shinies is boring. You figure out beforehand which projects you can live with them having, and then every other crafting project fails – they don’t make the DC, kobolds raid the PC’s shop and steal ingredients, the party has to leave town on a new adventure or the BBEG is going to snorfangle the wackadoodle, whatever. And you make sure you stick the loss of the entire party’s haul of cash to them, otherwise the negative reinforcement isn’t going to take.
There are more elegant ways to take crafting out of your game, but I can think of few that would be as efficient at destroying player buy-in.
[[ Comment deleted as it was completely nonconstructive. Thanks for your input, Bill, but I’ll decide whether someone’s comments are useful or not and if anyone needs to be yelled at, I’ll do the yelling. This thread is done. Drop it. – The Angry GM ]]
I struggled with this issue for about a month a while back, when I was making a crafting system. I came up with 2 semi-decent solutions to the issue.
The first solution for the issue is something a lot of people here have been discussing; an arbitrary, abstract unit of time. I have tinkered with this idea a bit, but it really is hard to do well, and need to be redone for every campaign; every way I found of generalizing this system makes it lose most of its effectiveness.
The second idea I had was “why do I need downtime in my campaign”. Yes, downtime can be fun, and yes, it can add to the game, but once I eliminated downtime from the crafting system, it just started working so much better. I decided to, rather than use downtime to control things, instead say that sure, a player could make a +4 Greatsword of Antagonist’s Doom, but then needed to go get some Enchanted Darksteel and 50k GP first. This system hasn’t seen play yet, and I have not tried generalizing it out of my specific campaign, but using gold and materials made the system function so much better, especially because gold is an extremely useful resource in my campaigns.
I do think that downtime has potential to be great, and Angry probably will end up making a great system for it, but I sometimes don’t get why so many people insist that it is necessary. If the players want the legendary +5 Sourcebook of the Munchkin, there are plenty of other ways to let them get it: wizard selling it, sidequest, crafting, or just having the Obligatory But Ultimately Useless Dragon have it in its horde.
OFFTOPIC Is there an option to edit your comments? My comment made from mobile at 2am could just use some corrections.
Not as far as I’m aware, sorry. Although I could be mistaken.
Currently playing through XCOM 2, and like its predecessor they share a fun balance of time management.
The active part of the game is the turn-based, tactical alien shooter part. Time passes in rounds, maybe lasts a few in-game hours if that.
The passive part of the game is the overhead economic management portion of the game where your primary resource is Days. Research, building, and crafting each take a certain number of Days to complete (along with actual resources spent) but while Days are counting down on your progress they are also counting down towards an overarching enemy plot as well. Literally, in the 2nd game, there is a big red bar across the top of the screen showing the enemy progress. Your passive portion of the game is interrupted with urgent active missions.
Perhaps D&D (or TTRPGs in general) could be analyzed a similar way. There is a passive nefarious plot running in the background that the players don’t see, but are aware of. Active missions (stop the This Guy, find the That Thing, recruit the One Guy) don’t take that much time (game currency) but fill the exciting action role and probably make up the majority of table time, while moving toward the end goal of the passive plot.
I’m not sure I’m as quick to dismiss living costs as a “timer” as you are – they don’t have to be very fine-grained, just something abstract, like cost of living in an inn for one week is 10gp, cost of owning and maintaining a keep is 100gp per week with upkeep, cost of servants, etc., cost of owning and maintaining an empire is 10,000gp per week, etc. – just keep it to nice, round numbers (and then likewise, keep downtime activities to timescales that play well with that – one week, two weeks, half a week, etc.).
Now, this doesn’t necessarily tie in so well with existing adventures because they give gold arbitrarily. But, if the DM is creating their own adventures, then it can be used to cap how much downtime the PCs have before they have to go adventuring again, and you can give guidelines on how much gp to give depending on how much downtime they want their PCs to have, or what scope they want their campaign to have, etc.
As a side benefit, that means that gp becomes somewhat important again, because now there’s always an opportunity cost to buying something – and the DM can somewhat control how much that opportunity cost actually is (e.g., if the DM wants to limit the amount of downtime, they can give less gp, or more gp if they want to be more flexible with downtime, or “upgrade” the PCs to the next spending tier if the DM accidentally gave them too much gp, etc.).
PC’s are in town to eat / drink / rest/heal at an Inn. Buy goods / weapons / armor / etc. That’s about it.
The 20th level NPC who really runs the region will be acutely aware of all adventures in his/her territory. The longer these upstart adventures hang around the greater the probability the NPC will have them killed.
I always try and give the campaign a used/worn feeling, even a level one dungeon (is always at least 2 levels below ground level) any level one level dungeon has surly been looted and thoroughly cleared by adventures in the past.
My PC’s are on the bottom rung of the ladder, they need to feel it, and understand there isn’t room for unlimited high level characters in the world. If they think they could spend down time creating some powerful weapon or magic, wouldn’t a NPC already have done it? Would a master thief already have all the money making grafting swindles locked up? And the rulers of a town or region would control all business operations already.
Adventures need to bust up the ranks by adventuring.
If I remember, it was D&D 1st edition that had some level restrictions on the Monk Class…that always stuck with me and made sense. Can’t have forty level 20+ anything running around.
Sorry, but I don’t understand your logic at all.
You’re saying that if crafting was useful, someone would have already done it?
How does someone having “already done it” prevent you from crafting?
And how exactly does someone “already have all the money” from swindles, such that nobody can ever swindle people for money ever again?
Level 1 dungeons are not ancient but well-travelled ruins that have had anything of value looted already. Level 1 dungeons are makeshift campsites, where a few goblins or bandits have stopped to rest after robbing a nearby caravan, small caves filled with fresh loot for the taking.
The world is far more chaotic and unstable than you seem to think.
I don’t know that your understanding of logic, is the logic of the game world I play in, but maybe this real world example is better (IDK). If you wanted to set up a machine shop, to cut precision parts for the use in automobile manufacturing… you happen to find yourself with the sufficient capital investment, and you open your shop… you are not the first machine shop, you would be competing with others who are in business doing the same thing, maybe some have been doing it for 20 years…
Level 1 dungeons are not ancient but well-travelled ruins that have had anything of value looted already. Level 1 dungeons are makeshift campsites, where a few goblins or bandits have stopped to rest after robbing a nearby caravan, small caves filled with fresh loot for the taking.
Exactly, during the game, read the article. Or, at least the title.
I don’t know what crafting your referring to?? But, if one of my level one fighters is resting/healing that’s what she is doing, she’s not crafting a Honzo Sword. And if that 1st level fighter told me at the end of the session that’s what they were going to spend the next month doing, and if I gave her a 1% chance of that happening, and she actually rolled a 00/01 then, I guarantee there is a 99% chance that a 5th level fighter will know that a Honzo sword was created, and relieve her of it as soon as it was complete, and a 50% chance that that 5th level fighter might kill the level one fighter for having the audacity of setting up shop in her town to create a sword of that magnificent quality. The world is chaotic you said it.
Swindle in the game, figure out how to role-play a swindle in game.
I had a 3rd level thief wanting to set up a snake oil sales business to run while he was out adventuring. I let him, The guy he hired to run the business ended up taking the cart, the jars of olive oil and moving to a new town. He made his 2 gp a month and lived happily ever after… The thief tried to convince the group to go after him; a magic user gave him a 2gp and said shut up. But at least if the group had set after this swindler of a swindler it could have happened in game, and played out in game, what would be the fun of all that happening in downtime.
Personally, I’ve never been fond of the premise of “adventurers can’t make money by not adventuring”. It suggests a massive bending of in-world reality around them to make capitalism fail in their presence — or, if it’s a lesser degree of it, like all adventurers must be adventurers because they’re complete failures at mundane things instead of because they’re the people brave and skilled enough to try. Things like the way the 4th Edition rust monster works make me cringe too. Furthermore, as has been previously pointed out, some people like the idea of crafting as a means of saving money. I’d be dissatisfied with a crafting system that doesn’t seem capable of producing sane in-world results.
As far as the whole “time is an illusion” thing, weirdly I’ve had an experience that could be considered the opposite of the much more prevalent downtime-is-not-a-real-cost phenomenon you describe. Namely, I’ve run a game in which the players drove me nuts by splitting up constantly, later complained that this meant sometimes they didn’t have anything to do in a session, and refused to schedule solo sessions to resolve this. When I asked them why they kept doing this despite the detrimental effects to the game, their answer was “to save time” — as though in-game time were more real to them than real-world time, and they couldn’t actually perceive how their own actions were distorting the game. (Which may say something about why I’ve found scheduling so impossibly hard…)
I don’t think it’s “can’t make money” so much as “can’t make as MUCH money.” And killing the digression about how absurd the cost is for some things, I handwaved it by noting adventurers are the nouveau riche or non-local suckers. “Yep, my glass of craft beer cost me $50, but that’s what I pay everywhere. Let me buy a round for everyone.” (shudder, sorry)
Point is that in pretty much all the tabletops I’ve played that cover downtime, players have the ability to keep a roof overhead, basic food on the table, and have a little discretionary income. Or they can go on an adventure and (paraphrasing what is noted elsewhere in this thread) come back with enough money to pay cash for small mansions.
btw – I keep coming back to this when I consider downtime and crafting myself. Apparently my hindbrain thinks it’s important, but hasn’t figured out how to tell the rest of my brain why or how it is.
I wonder if the solution isn’t something along the lines of “Downtime Points”. The GM assigns the points to the players based on the amount of downtime he plans between adventures. It doesn’t need to be an exact formula, but generally more downtime = more points. The points essentially represent “opportunities” that the players can then spend to craft, earn extra income, make contacts, carouse, etc. Each option comes with some sort of benefit.
Since Downtime points represent opportunities over time, they can’t be saved. At the same time, downtime points spent can go into projects that take more than one downtime session to complete. (For example, crafting a sword may occur between multiple adventures, with points being spent on it during separate downtime periods). Also, just because there is a cost of downtime points, doesn’t mean there isn’t other costs associated with downtime activities. (Crafting can still cost gold for example, Downtime points just represent time spent on it).
Naturally, the game should have a set list of things to sink points into, but it might also be a place for the DM to insert story driven options into as well. Such spending of points might represent doing research on a cult during the downtime, which can provide bonuses in an upcoming dungeon (or even additional hooks).
This is, of course, fairly abstract and “gamey”, but then again the G in RPG stands for games.
Angry should look at how Burning Wheel handles offscreen time. There should be a totally legal copy of Burning Wheel Gold you can “acquire” online if your google fu is good enough.
But in a nutshell,
>There are no classes, only “Life Paths” (vague groupings of skills you get which reflect something your character did during a significant period of their life, aka “I was a grave digger for three years”)
>A collection of Life Paths give you a set of Skills
>Skills are what you actually roll to do stuff in the game with
>Advancing Skills to become more powerful requires that you go up against higher DCs, in general
>But they also require some checks against really low DCs
>During offscreen time skips, aka GM says “You guys spend a month waiting at a harbor town for the next ship heading to that island you really need to go to,” you can Practice
>Practice is a system where you divvy up a certain number of hours in a day into a training regimen for your character; I’ll spend 3 hours a day training my Balloon Animal Creation skill, 2 hours a day training Alcohol Related Trivia, 1 hour a day on Awkward Dinner Jokes, etc
>Depending on how many hours you spend on a Skill and that Skill’s Cycle (the amount of time that must pass before you earn a check to advance the Skill), you earn a check to improve the skill depending on the number of hours you sank into it every day
So in practice, downtime turns into Eye Of The Tiger training montages where you can get much-needed skills trained up. And because, practically speaking, every adventure won’t necessarily make use of all the skills, you can use this time to shore up your character’s weaknesses or improve their strengths.
With this context in mind, I think such a system could be developed to also accommodate crafting systems.
Try spending a weekend reading it, it might give some brain-fuel to figure out how to tackle this issue.
My problem with such a system as you’ve described is that it turns players into “monks”, WRT to their skills. They spend 8 hours a day, every day, training skills. Players will do that because players are not their characters, and players don’t need to worry about spending 8 hours repetitively hiding, or practicing intimidation infront of a mirror. But somehow their characters become so OCD to work on being intimidating for hours on end because there is a mechanical advantage (and no disadvantage) to doing so.
[[ I’m not sure the tone in this comment is necessary. Look, I don’t like editing and policing comments and I usually don’t have to do it. But for some reason, people are getting a little… let’s say “pointed” in their disagreements. I’m getting a little concerned about the way some of you are talking to each other. Enough that I’m considering locking down the comments on this one. There’s room for exactly one Angry GM-style asshole on this website and I got here first. You can state a point without belittling the point you’re disagreeing with. That’s to everyone. Not just this poster. – The Angry GM. ]]
[[ And yes, very much aware of the hypocrisy, thank you very much. – Also The Angry GM ]]
My apologies if my post came across snarky and/or rude. It was not my intention.
OSR inspired stuff already has a few solutions to this.
1. More separation between players and characters. Characters willing to go into dungeons are assumed to be weirdos. This means that they can’t make money outside of adventuring because the characters would just spend it on drinking and gambling or obsessively reading or donating to the church.
2. Players have a roster of multiple characters. If some characters want to do a long project then they sit out the next adventure and you use another character. Otherwise the group is going to adventure with or without this one character. A character that wants to make money farming no longer wants to be an adventurer, retire the character and make a new one.
3. Spells aren’t just daily powers but cost money in terms of ingredients, so every spell is lost money. Spending time > risks encounters > risks HP > require healing spells > cost money. Or a game like DDC has almost no limit on using magic per day but has pressing your luck mechanics to risk consequences.
4. Adventuring parties are closer to caravans with lots of basic laborers doing stuff. Time not spend adventuring is costing you money.
5. A video game like Darkest Dungeon adds a stress mechanic that builds up while adventuring and requires money to clear. If players drag their feet, they lose money. You want your characters to sit around all day in the woods > get more stress.
Pendragon and Ars Magica both address this by changing the scale. These games follow the entire life of a character (and their descendants in Pendragon).
You want to spend months designing your magical blade? Sure, there goes six months of the twenty or so years you have left of being fit enough to adventure.
In my new campaign the players know there is a year before the elder evil attacks. Spend six months on the sword, you have only six months to save the world.
In another system I am working on, the characters are contracted to spend 18 weeks a year on quests, if they insist on crafting longer than the designated downtime their patron shall be disappointed.
In short: if you want time to be a limit- set a budget. Tell the players how much time they have, or at least show them the mechanics which shall determine how much they have to go.
I was going to mention Pendragon and Ars Magica, Pendragon a downtime “turn” is a year, you can do various stuff, but you are aging.
Ars Magica, it’s 3 month “turns”, and downtime is a key part of the system.
Time is precious. Both pretty well assume that EVERYONE will get the downtime benefits and have a menu of various benefits so there’s always a choice.
I think Angry’s problem here is that he’s thinking of a few days or weeks as enough time to make that magic sword, if it’s months to make a sword or months to research a new spell or months to train a new skill, and you can do any ONE of these things because there’s only so much time, that works fine.
My crafting skills have scores, and I use these to determine what can be crafted, and how much crafting they can do between 2 adventures/sessions. So I’m on the arbitrary train with most others here.
There’s one comment about splitting downtime into different things to do, and it could work with some devoted players but it would seem complicated for most of my players.
And here’s the important part:
3/4 of my players are absolutely not interested in doing stuff in their downtime. Yeah. Crafting? Don’t care, realm managing? Don’t care. Spending xp for next session? Do i really have to? I don’t about your population of players but because a system is there doesn’t mean that everyone will want to use it. Which means that you’ll have to do something about those who don’t.
For me players who are interested invest in downtime skills and those who are not, don’t. At the end all you have to do is balance it so that one category doesn’t overwhelm the other. I think that you should keep that in mind for whatever system you’re designing.
About downtime in the adventure, they can take it but it’ll have an effect, maybe lower xp, maybe opportunity cost on a sidequest maybe loot, I just tell them: this action is wasting time there will be repercussions, are you sure that you want to do it?
I do the same when they try to reroll the same action, it’s allowed because sometimes they can’t find any other way or really need to rest but they know that there’s a cost so they try to keep it to a minimum.
As for healing, there’s only so much that first aid can do and my healing spells steal health rather than producing it, meaning they can hurt each other to somewhat balance the damage but they can’t create health from mana, praying, resting or whatever.
I am tempted to lay it out as, “Every day you spend on “downtime”, the bad guys get to spend on downtime.” I think I could come up with a list of things to spend points on, and give the bad guys one point each day.
What if the campaign isn’t about bad guys? What if it’s a dungeon of the week campaign? Or explore the world?
There may not be a single group of The bad guys, but it would be an odd campaign without enemies at all: so we can adapt the idea. In the dungeon of the week campaign there are still bad guys- whoever lives in the next dungeon along.
In the exploration campaign the most obvious way to make things fit is to introduce a recurring menace of some sort. Maybe rival explorers, maybe pursuing avengers (I’m sure they did this in one adaption of Around the World in 80 Days). I’d be tempted to make expies of Team Rocket but that’s a taste thing.
This is actually pretty close to the Xanathar’s Guide variant, which encourages recurring NPCs (called “Foils”) invented specifically to harass you during Downtime. The main premise being that each Downtime activity has its own consequences to make up for time not being a resource (not all consequences involve Foils, and if you roll well you can get away with no consequences at all).
I’m not sure how well it succeeds, but it might at least be worth a read.
If you don’t have Xanathar’s Guide, the Unearthed Arcana they based it on is free:
https://media.wizards.com/2017/dnd/downloads/UA_Downtime.pdf
This is why I liked the experience cost to craft things in 3E. You don’t have to introduce a new resource to track. I actually apply it to all crafting at the normal 1/25th base gold cost in XP. You could extend it to XP costs for other down time activities to something like 40XP a day (based craft Wonderous Item) or like 2 XP a week based on Craft skill approx(25 roll x 20 DC / 10 silver / 25). Maybe split the difference and make it like (Character Level x 10) XP per week. I wouldn’t have someone lose levels this way, because they shouldn’t get worse they should just get further from getting better.
It is based on the assumption that adventurers spend all down time honing their abilities by default. If they decide to trade that off for crafting a sword or something, they have less resources for improving class features. That opportunity cost of skill in Class abilities is measured in XP. The extension of this is NPC classes may be allowed to ignore this particularly experts as downtime is their class.
If you don’t like penalties, you could turn this the other way round and give a (Character Level x 10) XP bonus to players every whole week they train and players have to sacrifice that to do something else. Just make it cost gold (say Level x 10 in gp) and actually keep a tally of down time weeks to hit characters with age penalties to prevent abuse. Keeping a week level calendar can add some flavor to a game anyway as seasons can be a thing.
I think I messed up this is the first part of the post above:
I liked the experience cost to craft things in 3E. You don’t have to introduce a new resource to track. I actually apply it to all crafting at the normal 1/25th base gold cost in XP. You could extend it to XP costs for other down time activities to something like 40XP a day (based craft Wonderous Item) or like 2 XP a week based on Craft skill approx(25 roll x 20 DC / 10 silver / 25). Maybe split the difference and make it like (Character Level x 10) XP per week. I wouldn’t have someone lose levels this way, because they shouldn’t get worse they should just get further from getting better.
It is based on the assumption that adventurers spend all down time honing their abilities by default. If they decide to trade that off for crafting a sword or something, they have less resources for improving class features. That opportunity cost of skill in Class abilities is measured in XP. The extension of this is NPC classes may be allowed to ignore this particularly experts as downtime is their class.
I’m one of those DMs that pretty much always puts a time limit on every quest to prevent long rests. PCs wanting to take a long rest is honestly one of the most terrifying things that I can hear as a DM in 5E. All the pacing I’ve set up for my adventure planning goes down the drain in one long rest. What should be a climactic battle becomes a cakewalk when the PCs enter at full strength. I’ve never seen anyone come up with a better solution to it other than just putting story-based limits on why the PCs can’t rest. Honestly I’m shocked at people who say it isn’t a problem, where do people find these amazing players who don’t want to rest the moment they’ve depleted around 50-75% of their spell slots.
I use a mix of time limits, unsafe rest locations, and quantum ogres to deal with the problem. If you raid half the dungeon and retreat, the dungeon gets restocked while you’re out. The treasure doesn’t.
yeah, this.
I don’t think there needs to be a strict time limit on ever quest. I wouldn’t classify the limits as story based so much as realism based. If anything I would say the fact that encounters are confined to rooms in unrealistic. My assumption from the meta-narrative of the game is that the PCs are moving thru so fast and stealthily that no one else has a chance to notice. if someone was invading a fort, home etc. and then left and came back the next day they should expect some kind of reinforcements to be in place even more so if they did it day after day. The easiest system is to refresh some of the already beaten encounters. Or have something else move in to the prime recently vacated real-estate. Maybe defenses adjusted to exactly counteract what the PCs did the previous time. Maybe the big bad of the dungeon is just waiting for them in the next room. or he hides the best loot in a room they already searched.
They could get around some of this by resting in the “dungeon”, so they don’t have to retread the same part, but I think it is very likely someone will notice and attack when the party is at reduced effectiveness, half asleep unarmored, no prepared spells, etc. It is more unbelievable that they rest thru the night unmolested. Imagine if a group of bank robbers got half way thru robbing a bank and then decided to try to hole up in one of the bathrooms for a long rest.
Now if you are putting in all this anti long resting realism, in a large dungeon you should probably have a couple rooms that will make good rest spots so they have somewhere relatively safe to recharge if you want them to. For example, maybe after killing a cave lion you could hint that from the scattered bones around the room it looks like the goblins probably don’t come here that often. now if they rest here the goblins might assume the lions got them and just refresh the guards in the previous rooms. of course if they use it again they may find the goblins figured it out.
Just be careful sudden introduction of realism to a campaign can be dirty pool. If players are used to getting away with this give them some warning first. Like have them all make a wisdom checks and the one who rolls highest thinks it is a bad idea to rest as leaving may give the enemy a chance to regroup or sleeping next to the goblin kings throne room may result in being detected.
At lower levels it’s not quite as big an issue, because the PCs don’t have the effective resting tools available to them and are forced to rest in the dungeon. At higher levels, they’ve got teleport spells and similar things that can let them rest in safety. So you can’t really use the “it’s dangerous here, they’ll attack at night” fallback.
As far as restocking the dungeon, honestly I always felt that it came off as punitive and unrealistic. In a period of under 24 hours the monsters are going to somehow find a bunch of reinforcements to restock what they lost? Where exactly are they getting a new stone golem to replace the one the PCs smashed? And not only that, its pretty boring too when you just have the PCs go through the same (or very similar) encounters to what they’ve already done. It’s going to come off as obviously punitive, and it’s the worst kind of punitive because it’s designed just to bore the players. At least that’s the way it turns out everytime I’ve tried that method.
Maybe there’s a way to make it come off better, I don’t really know.
Perhaps only partially restocking, with whatever they could get together on short notice?
If I recall, the Angry Megadungeon will restock with Random Encounters (including a roll to see if anything is there at all. Not every room has to restock every time).
Conversion of time to money requires opportunity, not just skill. An armorsmith is only going to make money per person who wants to buy armor. Give your GMs an out by having your system rules say something like: “Here’s a table for GMs to roll on to determine how many opportunities for [profession] exist in [town size].”
Conversion of time to attrition mitigation can be solved by a push-your-luck mechanic. I like to put a poker chip on the table every time a player fails a roll or loses HP. At the end of each encounter, players get bonus XP for every chip on the table (and the chips stay on the table). When they rest, the chips go back in the box. If they’re resting at a time I don’t like for pacing reasons or whatever I lie and say, “Hey guys, that last encounter was tougher than I intended. I’m to adding [however many I think I need to encourage them to keep going] XP chips to the table.” Experience represents growth, which only happens when characters are challenged, so it works well.
But in the end, if the adventure designer builds an adventure that allows infinite time, and its played in a campaign with infinite time, players can and should use that time to increase their odds of success. The system can’t artificially forbid it without getting very messy at certain tables: most adults spend most of their days converting time into money and most players expect their characters to be able to do the same. If you give them an infinite budget, they will exploit it.
“And, in D&D 5E, there’s nothing else to spend your money on anyway since you can’t craft or buy magical items unless the GM decides to offer those options. And no one bothers to tell the GM how important it is to offer those options.”
Seen you say this a few times. Thought I’d share my solution. Obviously homebrew, but I wouldn’t have had to if wizards had produced a meaningful system for systematic upgrades.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=1SnvSOh2xeO71XsJxHVzTYJ1HYqqMsqql
As much as I want to second Red Markets… someone already called it. So instead I want to bring out the clock mechanic from Blades in the Dark. To be honest BitD kind of abuses this idea, but essentially you decide what the clock is for (guards catching you sneaking into a building, perfectly looting a safe, finally tracking down that one guy who got away) and then player actions can add it remove ticks on the clock. Once the clock is filled, whatever it is about happens. However, you often have a dozen clocks running at once, so you can have the clock of when the dragon will attack tick up by one or two each day (make a roll for it), and then tell the player that they’ll need to fill out a separate clock in the meantime to make the items they want. Clocks can fill at different rates depending on the action and how good the roll is. And they don’t all have the same size, with longer clocks existing for longer and more complex projects and shorter clocks handling situations that are moreel sensitive or have a shorter time limit.
You can also look at conditions for City of Mist – definitely a narrative games, but essentially your actions can give a variable number of ticks to a certain track. When it reaches enough ticks, a thing happens. CoM uses this for tracking magic effects, wounds, timing and all matter of stuff (e.g. if the huntsman if tracking you, you could get a “tracked” condition, where he gets closer and closer with each hour or day and you have to start taking actions to allow him down or hopefully empty and then lose the condition. To be fair though, at heart these two concepts are pretty much the same.
If the GM is okay with keeping track of time mechanically, and having multiple clocks on the go, I think that those games may have some inspiration. However, to make it work you would really need an ongoing threat or reason for them to not just fool around constantly. You could use a resource cost as well (ala Red Markets) to make a more tangible opportunity cost, but I would say that clocks/conditions could deal very nicely with tracking time and making it a resource in the game.
Interesting, very reminiscent of Angry’s “Time Pool” mechanic.
I do have a solution, but it only works in my particular kind of campaign: West Marches style. There is a different party each week, and for bookkeeping reasons, I start every session on a Monday (in-game time). If a character wants to take a few weeks out for crafting, then that means that that player cannot play that character for the next few sessions (equal to the number of weeks they are taking out). And since I have tied the number of characters a player is allowed to have to the level of their highest-levelled character, if a player wants to play their favourite character in the next session, or, at low levels, play at all, they can’t spend too long crafting (or performing other lengthy downtime characters), or their characters will end up ‘tied up’ for too many sessions.
So it’s essentially the same opportunity cost as turns in a board game, as other characters (and for characters, here, you can also read players, as West Marches is all about player competition) will be adventuring, getting loot, and gaining levels.
I’ve not played Ars Magica, but if I’m not mistaken it does something similar as a core mechanic.
Conversely, from an efficiency stand point every character in your game should try to have some down time activity as crafting doesn’t have to be consecutive and in West Marches play many characters are going to have weeks they don’t get to play, particularly a player’s extra characters.