Ive noticed a big difference between the way GMs handle 'downtime' in their games. Wondering how you guys deal with it? For purposes of this thread what Im referring to is nonessential time around a town, running errands, picking up supplies etc. Also camping between days travelling, resting to recover from injuries and the like.

Ive played in a couple games recently where the GM simply let everyone basically do what they wanted with a couple of die rolls.

"Ok, umm, Tandor - yeah you find the smithy alright and drop off your armor. IT will be ready the next morning. You two that were headed for supplies, drop 11 gold and youve got the provisions you wanted. Imiril, there doesnt seem to be a magic shop in town but you do find an herbalist that can help you with those spell components. That'll be 50gp please. "

No description of the town or the shops or the merchants. No roleplaying getting there, dealing with the citizens, witnessing the sites of the town, nothing... just filling a shopping list. ITs the same way while camping.

"You spend the night without interruption. On your way in the morning."

No encouraging dialogue between traveling companions, relating stories or whatever.

Other GMs I have known, actually play out these scenes. They may spend an entire multi hour session following their party members  from one shop to the next, or meeting folks at the tavern or actually playing a game of chance with an old guy at the inn. When at camp they bring the NPCs in with stories and comments to flesh out their characters a bit and give them a little more life.

Now Im not condemning one way or singing the praises of the other. Ive seen good games with both approaches. Im just wondering how you GMs run it in your game and if you can explain why?

It varies.  We've done both.

Sometimes I want one thing, sometimes I want something else.

Have done both. The RP approach works best when the PCs have well defined NPCs from the adventure to continue to interact with I find. I think the TOR approach seems  promising so I want to try it out. The latest 5e Guide to Everything also has optional downtime rules.

There's a player in the middle earth game I'm in who out right says "I don't want to spend valuble game time shopping."  I tend to agree.  

I think the pretend stakes might be important to how much fun it is to pretend to do stuff.  Dungeon crawling or going to court the stakes are life and death, fame, honor power and glory. All pretend, but shopping the stakes are pretend coppers.  

I don't clip coupons in real life.  Why would I pretend.

Varies with us from player to player, scene to scene, and activity to activity.  And also the mood of the participants at the time.  Generally, if the players are showing interest, we pursue it.

My current players frequently request that I "hand wave" the downtime and get to the important bits of the adventure.  I usually oblige.

I have had some fun sessions where we rollplayed out shopping at the market, haggling over prices, describing all the exotic wares on offer, etc.

Like Gronan it depends on the mood of the day.

Quote from: Headless;1011475There's a player in the middle earth game I'm in who out right says "I don't want to spend valuble game time shopping."  I tend to agree.  

I think the pretend stakes might be important to how much fun it is to pretend to do stuff.  Dungeon crawling or going to court the stakes are life and death, fame, honor power and glory. All pretend, but shopping the stakes are pretend coppers.  

I don't clip coupons in real life.  Why would I pretend.

The downtime rules in TOR are not about shopping. Or are you just referring to RPing shopping in D&D? I certainly agree that holds little interest.

I like playing it out, but sometimes certain players just itch for action, or don't want to use the little time they have not progressing the plot.

I don't RP out shopping. We did spend close on an hour tonight RPing hanging out at the Inn, that seems fairly common in my sandbox games but not in mission/quest based play. Sometimes I Blue-book (well, Face-book these days) that sort of stuff away from the game session, again had an in-tavern discussion thread on FB over the past 2 days discussing the secret master of the dungeon.

I like to give settlements & NPCs a bit of flavour. I wouldn't go to either extreme in the OP but probably closer to the "You buy X/night passes peacefully" guy, not the "let's play out every night round the campfire" guy.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;1011462It varies.  We've done both.

Sometimes I want one thing, sometimes I want something else.

Same here. Varies alot.

In a simmilar thread here I noted that in one campaign we spent several sessions just wandering the city, getting equipped, shopping and constantly splitting up and going every which way.

In a different campaign theres been little downtime because the DM wasnt good with NPC interactions and so the campaign kept us mostly on the move and any downtime was offscreen as it were.

And in another we spend alot of time in town interacting between adventures.

In d20m they had a really fascinating feature of the PCs base town being a sort of statted out character that the players and PCs had to manage/deal with during their downtime. Sadly White Wolf failed to flesh this out and so its 50 to 75% complete. (lacks any system for dealing with other communities on the community level.)

Then theres games like Birthright where your downtime is managing a kingdom. Which could become your maintime.

In the Star Frontiers campaign I last ran oddly the players didnt engage in hardly any downtime at all. They just waved it off as "time passes-stuff happens-whats the next mission?'

It would depend entirely on the circumstances and what the PCs are trying to achieve. Buying groceries? I'm not going to bother role-playing that unless the PC wants to haggle or find something obscure or unusual. Also, is it worth inventing NPCs? Not to me, usually, unless we're going to be back this way again.

What Gronan said. In addition, most games I play have a combat round much shorter than OD&D's one minute rounds. So combat moves much slower in real life than it does in the game. Talking to NPCs often happens sequentially not all at once (since as the GM I can only talk for one NPC at any one instant) and I game with a bunch of thoughtful introverts so they think a bit before they talk so dialogue usually takes longer in real time than it would in the game. In combination this means real time when we play moves at a much faster rate than does time in the game world. It's not unusual for my groups to play 50 sessions a year and the usual ratio of real time to game time tends to be about 4 or 5 to 1, i.e. it usually takes a month in real time for each week in game time.

How does that relate to downtime you might ask? Well often I'd like to use downtime as a way of getting the elapsed game time to get closer to the elapsed real time. So all else being equal if there isn't some reason to play out downtime I'd rather hand wave it.

Quote from: Bren;1011529Well often I'd like to use downtime as a way of getting the elapsed game time to get closer to the elapsed real time.

This has many benefits in a longer term campaign, players see the passage of time in-world and it allows for eg the offspring of PCs to grow up, it allows for changes in the campaign world, it allows for seasonal changes et al. I'm aiming for this in both my current campaign worlds.

I do find some players are miserly with time and hate to see it passing, as GM this can be a bit annoying.

Also some groups consider travel time part of downtime.

Some like to play that out. Others just want to get from A to B and dont want a travelogue.

Travel can eat up huge chunks of time depending on the distances covered.

Recent example was running Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Theres a segment where the PCs are likely to spend weeks on the road. In the second book they may also spend weeks or more at sea.

For me, downtime is stuff you do in the background withotu interaction. If you have to make rolls or decisions then it isn't downtime.

I can see how a random table of events that happen in downtime might be fun, but I would like to interact with those events, thus making it not downtime.