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.
Quote from: S'mon;1011570I do find some players are miserly with time and hate to see it passing, as GM this can be a bit annoying.
I have experienced the same thing.
Quote from: Omega;1011579Travel can eat up huge chunks of time depending on the distances covered.
And of course on whether you include a lot of encounters during travel or just elide most of the time and events.
Most of my thought have been covered, but as far as I'm concerned it comes down to will that downtime be interesting to play out. If yes, then play it out, if no then move on.
I've been in games where we actually had fun buying supplies for an expedition, talking with the locals to get additional info about our journey etc, but mostly we just gave the GM a list of needed supplies, marked off money for the approved supplies and fast forward to get on with more interesting things.
Don't know if it's what the OP mean, but Downtime in games like Shadowrun is the time between missions. Usually it's dealt with in a "zoomed out" way but eventually it's played out when something interesting may happen. It may also mean any activity that's not central to the game premise, like the time between cases in a CoC or Delta Green game.
Some games have clear prompts for when these should be played out. Blades in the Dark, for example, have "downtime rolls" that may result in your hideout being raided or a member being ambushed, for example. Apocalypse World have moves where one of the Operator gigs may go wrong, or the Hardholder community may revolt. All these are prompts in the rules for the GM "zooming in" on the action, even before (or after) the main "thing" of the game comes up.
Ultimately, it's the group interest who define if those scenes should be zoomed out or in, I think.
Quote from: S'mon;1011570This 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.
Yes I recently suggested the Adventures in Middle Earth approach of down time between adventures being months long and my players had a cow!
Quote from: soltakss;1011613For 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.
I'd still call it downtime if a few quick rolls resolved a day or more worth of time in a "safe" area or "safe" travel. Now sometimes specific events might drag you out of downtime.
Frank
Frank
Apparently Mutant Year Zero has a neat system that ties the characters downtime into the development and growth of their settlement.
Quote from: rgrove0172;1011750Yes I recently suggested the Adventures in Middle Earth approach of down time between adventures being months long and my players had a cow!
I've had players like that too, and I think this is one of those things that needs to be established and accepted at campaign start.
One of my current DM's uses time banking. He takes notes of the realtime calendar and applies those days to the campaign whenever we are between adventures. I've been in his game for almost two years now, and guess what, my character is going to have his second in game birthday soon. I like it. The last game I ran, we played for almost 3 years before things fizzled out. Only six months of game time had passed. Felt disjointed to me.. so much had happened!! It really felt like three years...
I think an accelerating passage of time helps increase believability of campaign events (so you can have a couple of years of border tension slowly mounting into a border war, for example) and allows for new expressions of character (the young teenage fighter becomes a man, the middle-aged mage starts to get old, those inclined can start families and children will become more than diaper bundles...it's all very interesting).
I've never been in combat, but I have been treeplanting, and after six weeks of hard work and camping in the bush, you need AND want to have more than a few days to recover. Extended downtime from adventuring makes perfect sense.
Edit to add: at the table, speaking as a GM and as a player, I like a mix of played out downtime and abstracted downtime. Hybrid. Where the line is drawn, I cannot say, but as long as playtime is interesting, it works for me.
Quote from: saskganesh;1011873One of my current DM's uses time banking. He takes notes of the realtime calendar and applies those days to the campaign whenever we are between adventures. I've been in his game for almost two years now, and guess what, my character is going to have his second in game birthday soon.
I'm interested in the mechanics of this.
Say we start session #1 on Day 1 in the real world (RW). During session #1 a few hours pass in game (IG) and the adventure continues the next session from that time point. Session #2 occurs 1 week later RW (assume we play 1/week), but only hours later IG. So in the RW 1 week has passed, but IG only hours have passed. [We bank 7 days.] The next play session, #3, happens and during it the characters do some traveling so that 3 days IG pass by during session #3, but again 7 days RW.
Question: Do we bank 7 days or the net additional of 7-3 days?
In session #4 the party travels in the wilderness for 2 weeks IG to reach their final destination. The session ends before the big climactic battle. So 1 week has passed RW and 2 weeks have passed IG.
Question: Do we bank any time at all? Do we reduce the accumulated banked time of 10 (7+7-3) days or of 14 (7+7) days by the 2 weeks of IG time, which would reduce the banked time to 0?
In session #5 the party has a climactic battle that lasts an hour or so IG. This ends the adventure. [We bank 7 more days.] And we apply the banked time to the IG timeline either at the end of session #5 or before the start of session #6.
Question: How much time do we have banked?
a. 21 days
b. 17 days
c. 7 days
d. None of the above (Please explain then how many days we do have banked.)
Sounds way to convoluted for its own good. But probably isnt and obviously someone made it work.
In my own Red Shetland campaign I had to track multiple groups and manage the time scales of all this. It was ALOT of tracking as half the players scattered fairly quickly and the rest were sometimes at varying points in time. Sounds convolited? Not really. But it was alot to track. But due to the nature of the campaign things stayed more or less evenly on track. It was just that some groups were a day or a week behind everyone else sometimes.
Same to a lesser degree when I ran Gamma World in 2000-2002. The players were at differing times now and then. But overall any given group was on the same page. Mostly.
Socializing and Shopping was the most common times when players would diverge. Again sounds complex. But was just a matter of jotting down when and where people are and sometimes telling fragment A to hold on until fragment B catches up. Or telling fragment C that they find the remains of the camp of fragment A. The current 5e canpaign Im in is much like that. Though I do not know really how the DM is tracking it.
Quote from: Bren;1011936I'm interested in the mechanics of this.
There's two ways. One is to add RT to campaign time no matter what, the other is have campaign time substitute for RT as much as possible before RT is added. (RT is never subtracted.)
So a game that is played weekly, and the session has a week's journey, you can say 14 days has passed (7RT+7GT) or 7 (just GT). If that journey takes 10 days, you can say 17 days has passed (7RT plus 10GT) or just 10 (all GT).
One speed is faster, the other is a bit slower. The main thing is to create a greater passage of time so I'd recommend realtime+gametime as much as possible. And if characters are really busy and involved in a lot of time sensitive adventures, just keep banking time, and then apply it at a later point (etc. Winter comes, and the snow is hard and heavy, so you all stay at home and enjoy life and maybe make babies and we pick up five months later in the spring: the road is open).
Quote from: rgrove0172;1011459"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. "
Some players like their GM to tell them what their characters are doing. I just stay clear of everyone at that table.
I run a lot of D&D Adventurers League; downtime there is another resource earned in adventures, like XP and gold. Downtime days can be spent on faction specific benefits, some story awards in specific adventures, for advancing from 4th to 5th level and 10th to 11th level (I think because the last level in a tier is a longish slog otherwise, and players are cut off from joining their friends in adventurers that are restricted to the next tier), and to pay for spell services from NPCs (with a divine spell, this represents service to the temple which provided the casting). Since players and their characters can play with a different DM every time, it would be difficult to manage between-adventure activity any other way.
In my own campaigns, I generally let standard activity (buying supplies in town, changing prepared spells, and so on) proceed without my involvement; unusual or risky activities have to happen in a game session (at least any roll for success or for outcome of risk), and non-standard things (rare items, hirelings or info) are potentially an adventure -- so even if it doesn't seem important to me, there's still some NPC to talk with (so players can't infer significance of NPCs by the detail of interaction with them). Travel within a safe/civilized region is generally standard; so travel within the Shire, say, just depends on distances and how travel proceeds. But entering the wilderness/frontier is usually an adventure with wandering monsters, unknown obstacles and random events that may derail the players' plans. But I've abstracted out lengthy travel where it didn't offer much of interest, even though it was technically a low risk wilderness, and skipped the wandering monsters on the excuse that the PCs traveled with a large enough caravan of NPCs.
Quote from: saskganesh;1012021The main thing is to create a greater passage of time so I'd recommend realtime+gametime as much as possible.
Thanks.
I like the GT+RT option. I'm getting very tire of old players playing young characters who age actually age at a slower rate than the players. It'd be nice if the age of the PCs could catch up to the age of the players. I'm going to seriously consider adding this to most every setting I run.
It depends on the system and how you want to run the calendar, I suppose. Some games, like Pendragon, have the idea that one adventure runs per season, when it is over, the season ends and the next adventure takes place. At the end of the year, a "Winter" season allows for certain events which might be roleplayed or might not be. In Call of Cthulhu it might strain credulity that tentacled monsters threaten Arkham every week, so same thing--a continuous calendar of game time while something goes on, and a long time between adventures.
As earlier posters suggest, I run a continuous game calendar while something is happening, and then time elapses after that. But then I mainly run Call of Cthulhu.
Here's a shock to everybody I know: I like downtime to arise organically from within play and make sense within the setting and not be an externally mandated "cycle" of play. In MERP I had characters winter in Rivendell one year and once they hung out with Beorn's great-grandson recovering from some wounds: we didn't need any mechanics to do it.
The One Ring's system is pretty badass though. You're always going to have OOC in downtime when you start abstracting and fast-forwarding, it's unavoidable, but in the various TOR adventures there are lots of opportunities and examples for ad hoc shorter timeframe downtime sessions.
Quote from: CRKrueger;1012299Here's a shock to everybody I know: I like downtime to arise organically from within play and make sense within the setting and not be an externally mandated "cycle" of play. In MERP I had characters winter in Rivendell one year and once they hung out with Beorn's great-grandson recovering from some wounds: we didn't need any mechanics to do it.
Same here. One reason I like 5e D&Ds downtime stuff is its mostly either answers to basic questions like "how much does rent cost at this living threshold?" or things to handle offscreen sorts of events, player initiated events, or just a quick what the hell happened. Owning a business, shopping a magic item, making something, living expenses, random partying, etc.
Alot of that is things the players decide to do. Not something the game mechanics mandate they have to do. And the rest is just simple RPing.
It depends: is there stuff going on during the downtime that could possibly affect the PCs? Are there things that might happen?
If the former, then obviously the PCs have to react to those in some way. If the latter, then random rolls are called for. If there's nothing of relevance happening or having a chance of happening, then you entirely go by what the players want their characters to be doing in the downtime, though obviously you have to decide there whether some rolls or even a side-session is required.
Of course. The players decide to send the PCs off to sell a magic item. In 5e D&D you might want to roll to see how long it takes, then how much is offered, and if you are feeling like it, roll for possible complications which Xanithar's Guide adds. A seemingly simple action can end up cascading out of control now and then.
I've almost always made or seen both modes available depending on what people want and what makes sense for the situation. In some games, such details are more or less out of scope and so more or less never get played out. I've never seen a game of much length where all stuff had to be played out in detail. Sometimes it can be tedious and needless and take a lot of time, and sometimes it also means some players are waiting around while others shop or socialize. So there's some balance that the GM might do well to feel out, allowing details when wanted or needed or when it adds something, and scaling it back when it's not adding much.
It also really helps if the GM is good at assigning appropriate chances for interesting things to happen and for PCs to notice them, and rolls and describes what PCs notice appropriately. e.g. there will be some chances of getting noticed, jipped, followed, pickpocketed, mugged, making new acquaintances, discovering something interesting, etc., even when just going to water the horses or buy more food, which a good GM can assess, make appropriate perception rolls, and describe appropriately the right level of detail and information for each.
Usually I and the good GMs I've played with will allow players to play out things if they want to. To me this is part of letting players explore the game world and pursue their own interests, more or less whatever those are.