<style> /* Page */ .phb { font-family: Cambria;} /* Background */ .phb { background-image: url('https://gmbinder.com/images/OoFEE9F.png') } .phb { background-size: cover } /* #, ##, ###, ####*/ .phb h5, .phb h4, .phb h3, .phb h2, .phb h1 {font-weight: normal;} /* #'s */ .phb h1 { font-size: 420% } .phb h2 { font-size: 250% } .phb h3 { font-size: 186% } .phb h4 { font-size: 145% } .phb h5 { font-size: 135% } /* Class Table */ .phb .classTable { border-image-outset: 25px 10px !important; align:center; width:90%; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto; line-height:11px; border-image-source: url(https://gmbinder.com/images/5xtTr8S.png); } .phb hr+section blockquote tr:nth-child(odd) td { background-color: inherit; } /* Tables */ table tr:nth-child(odd) td {background-color: #ffcce6;} /* Notes */ .phb blockquote {background-color: #ffcce6 } /* Footer */ .phb:nth-child(odd):after{ content : ''; position : absolute; bottom : -12px; left : 20px; z-index : 100; height : 336px; width : 99%; background-image : url('https://gmbinder.com/images/rIiBrzN.png'); background-size : cover; } .phb:nth-child(even):after{ content : ''; position : absolute; bottom : -12px; left : -12px; z-index : 100; height : 336px; width : 99%; background-image : url('https://gmbinder.com/images/rIiBrzN.png'); background-size : cover; } /* Footnote */ .phb .footnote{ position : absolute; right : 80px; bottom : 32px; z-index : 150; width : 700px; text-align : right; color : #c16e8d; font-size : 13pt; letter-spacing: 0.5px; font-variant: small-caps; } /* Page Number */ .phb .pageNumber.auto{ font-size: 13pt; color: #c16e8d; position : absolute; bottom : 32px; width : 50px; text-align : center; } .phb:nth-child(even) .pageNumber.auto{ left : 5px; } .phb:nth-child(odd) .pageNumber.auto{ right : 5px; } </style> # Downtime Revisited: Downtime is sadly ignored by a large number of DMs in favour of actual adventuring. This partly by design; downtime is meant to be inherently less interesting and less rewarding than dungeon delving or infiltrating balls or stealing a dragon's hoard. But it can be a very versatile tool in a DM's toolkit for immersing your players into your world. ## Goals of Downtime: #### 1. Spend money. Most players earn ludicrous amounts of money and have no way to spend it. If gold is not spendable, then it is not useful as a reward. Part of 5th edition was built to avoid the 'magic mart' of previous editions where gold was a required currency so players could purchase sufficient gear to survive later levels. 5th Edition therefore made character advancement alone sufficient to excel at higher tiers of play, and created Downtime activities to, in part, give a way for players to spend their gold. #### 2. Fly Solo. During an adventure, each player has to play as part of a team. The group follows the group's goals, defeats the group's enemies, earns rewards as a group. The problem is that each character also has their own goals, motivations, backstories and aspirations; time at table spent on personal goals is boring time for every one else. Downtime fixes that problem. It need not be spent at table, but in the background; it's also designed to be resolved with just a couple of rolls so that it can be dealt with quickly at table if needed. You can build solo quests that don't rely on other players and unique downtime options that allow the player to advance his or her goals. You can run these quests via text, email, or online platform in between games, and it's perfect for busy holiday times when the table cannot get together to play. #### 3. Help make characters unique. When the party is defending itself from a hobgoblin raid, there is no time for the criminal to pick pockets or the sage to make discoveries or the medic to research cures for a disease. Downtime can, in part, be considered extensions of backgrounds. How does a noble relax compared to a folk hero or a criminal? If you were a guard before adventuring, how do you spend your time differently than the sage when you're not both slicing into kobolds? #### 4. Be less interesting and less profitable than adventuring. Many players enjoy crafting magic items, being a travelling merchant, accumulating wealth and property; but these are inherently more fun if done via adventuring. It is important when creating downtime activities that you do not create something more profitable than adventuring, because adventuring is the very reason you are playing. Downtime options allow players to do non-adventuring gigs for their personal story advancement, while also saving session time to concentrate on adventuring. #### Ignoring Downtime Downtime is an optional tool. Like any such tool, you are not obliged to use it. For instance, perhaps you run a social game, and your players have all the opportunity they need to distinguish themselves. Or maybe the party prefers the simplicity and honesty of hacking and slashing. You can decide not to include downtime for any reason at all. However, if you're not sure whether to include downtime, consider the Goals section. Do your players have a way to spend money? Do your players have a way to show how they are different? Can they pursue their individual goals? If your game fulfills the goals of downtime in other ways, it is unecessary to include downtime. More importantly, what if your players are just uninterested? One player might eagerly accumulate downtime to craft important magic weapons, while another might simply be uncertain about whether they even want to do anything at all. Perhaps your party prefers to roleplay 'downtime' like trips to the tavern or schmoozing with rich merchants and nobles. The goal of D&D is fun; if downtime isn't fun for your table, simply exclude it. If, however, some players are more interested in downtime than others, consider giving downtime to the whole table; the ones who don't use it will accumulate it until the game ends or they find something interesting to do like pit fighting or carousing. ## Distributing Downtime There are few guidelines in any official D&D book about what, exactly, constitutes downtime, and how much to give or to distribute. It's left almost entirely in the hands of the DM, except for Adventurer's League and an unhelpful blurb in the DMG. In Adventurer's League, players are given a flat 10 days of downtime per session. It seems a lot at first; for a few hours of play which might represent a single battle, a day chasing clues, a few hours searching ruins or a week's worth of travel. Why so much downtime in comparison to in-game time? In part, this is because Adventurer's League gives you explicit additional uses of your downtime, including copying spells (which is done by most tables in-game), spellcasting services (such as *revive*, *lesser restoration* or *remove curse*), or catching up (if you're behind on experience). \pagebreak But it's also a way for players to personalise their Adventurer's League experience. AL tables will have a mix of regular players, infrequent dabblers, and otherwise busy people who happen to have a spare evening. Table time can't really be spent on individuals and so it's hard for a player sometimes to fulfill their characters' personal goals. Downtime fills this need. But what about normal tables with a stable player group? With normal non-AL tables, downtime isn't often a currency you can spend. Per the DMG, it's time between adventures. The reason there are no guidelines is because each campaign is different. Your table might go from level 1 to level 20 without spending a single day on downtime. Your game might have a 'gig economy' and have weeks between bounties, investigations or quests. Your main NPC might need a long recovery from the last battle before they can begin to interfere in your players' lives. The DMG offers the following guidelines: </br></br> *As your campaign progresses, your players' characters will not only become more powerful but also more influential and invested in the world. They might be inclined to undertake projects that require more time between adventures, such as building and maintaining a stronghold. As the party gains levels, you can add more downtime between adventures to give characters the time they need to pursue such interests. Whereas days or weeks might pass between low-level adventures, the amount of downtime between higher-level adventures might be measured in months or years.*</br></br> This *extremely specific* and *not at all vague* set of guidelines does, at least, imply that greater downtime rewards should be available at higher levels. ### Downtime As Needed This way of distributing downtime means downtime is accrued and spent as a consequence of locations and actions during the campaign. It helps keep downtime fairly simple and uncomplicated, but downtime options are necessarily restricted by the campaign. #### Option 1: Organically This is, in many ways, what's assumed by the DMG and PHB for using downtime. When you're uninterested in having Downtime serve as a kind of currency, and there is no ticking time bomb in your campaign, you can simply give downtime once they reach certain points. Examples include: waiting out a storm while travelling; having gone back to town after completing the quest; unable to continue an adventure because you're waiting for (a clue/the macguffin/reports from scouts/the guild master to assign a job/etc). This makes *spending* downtime extremely easy; the location and time determine what downtime options are available, and there is no saving up. It also has the advantage of not needing to worry about retroactivity, verisimilitude or retconning (see the next section, Spending Downtime). It has the consequence of possibly being unfriendly to a player's goals; if they want to repair their mother's Sword of Awesomeness but can't because they aren't near a forge, the player can't advance their agenda and may get frustrated. Lastly, this is potentially the option that will least motivate your players. This option is a good option if you are a new DM, have a table full of new players you haven't learned about yet, or if you want the least complicated option. #### Option 2: What do the players want? If the players have a specific goal, such as erecting a Wizard's Tower or running a tavern or crafting a powerful sword or learning to speak Draconic, you can simply give them the time they need. Ask what they want and, if they can afford it, give them time equivalent to the longest activity. Players simply adventure until they have the required gold to do what they want, then they take time off to do it. This fits the in-game concept that adventurers have goals that need lots of cash to fulfill. After they've finished, they can set new goals or even retire (permitting the player to change characters). It's easy enough and simple, and because of the way downtime is designed, it doesn't break any balance. After all, players have to pay to raise that tower, hunt a rare creature to craft that sword, pay a tutor to learn draconic. After each adventure arc is finished, simply ask what they want to do with their time. Sometimes they'll have an opportunity, like fixing up Tressendor Manor in Lost Mines of Phandelver. Gaining a manor is something Tier 1 characters can't normally afford, but it's possible to gain the title to the manor. In that case, they have a specific goal but nothing near the gold necessary to fix up the manor; therefore, you can give them enough downtime to spend the gold they have. Then they go adventuring, get more gold, and get more downtime. This option is best if your players' characters have clear, defined goals as a group or if they are all invested in using downtime or advancing their character. It can also help to excite and intrigue players interested in the things they can do outside the troup. <div class="descriptive"> It's rare you'll get an entire group of players equally interested (or equally uninterested) in downtime. Often you'll get a mix. If you're offering downtime and some of your players aren't interested, that's okay; just like a ranger or sage that might be uninterested in gold or fine things and don't care how much gold they have or how much they spend. If you're using Downtime As Needed, simply use Relax or Recover as downtime and have them spend the required gold. If you're using Downtime As Currency, allow them to accumulate it or spend it on simple things. </div> ### Downtime as Currency Using downtime as a currency is, in many ways, both easier and harder. It's easier, because you can track it more easily; you know how much your players have received and how much they've spent, much like gold or silver. If you've discovered you haven't offered enough, or have offered too much, it's easy to adjust the dial to a better earning rate. \pagebreak It's harder because spending it is at least partly spent outside the structure, timeframe, location and circumstances of the campaign. This can cause difficulties with metagaming, verisimilitude, or retconning depending on your mindset and the mindset of the table. #### Option 3: Milestones If you use Milestone levelling, you can offer a set amount of downtime, increasing per level. For example, levelling in Tier 1 is pretty fast: you might simply say that in Tier 1, you gain 1 downtime day per level you're gaining (2 days when you gain second level, 3 days gaining 3rd, etc). Increasing tiers might grant more downtime; Tier 2 levels might be 5 days per level (30 days when gaining level 6). Instead of an (X times new level) formula, you can simply give out so many days per level (such as gaining 2 days per level in tier 1 and 10 days per level in tier 2). #### Option 4: By XP This is possibly the easiest; assign a set amount of downtime days per 100 xp. It has the advantage of being simple, easy to track, and scaling with level and with tier. #### Option 5: Gradual Downtime Sometimes players will have downtime goals but the campaign levels too fast or too slow to use milestones or XP as a metric. Instead, you can grant them days per session. A reasonable option is to tie it to how much free time they have per day; if they spend 8 hours adventuring or travelling and 8 hours sleeping, that leaves 8 hours to do whatever. Gaining a half-day (4 hours) per long rest can easily represent time gaming around a campfire, copying spells in the morning, practicing a song while riding or planning a heist for when you get back to town. Then you can add more days as per the Organic or What Players Want option. #### Spending Downtime As Currency When you give downtime as a currency, you come into circumstances such as having more downtime than actual in-game days played; or spending downtime even though you're not currently in the right location. What it comes down to is mechanics not matching the story so far. You'll want to give consideration to how much weight you'll give the campaign when telling players what options are or are not available for spending downtime. It's similar to the difference between running a shop, determining what goods are available, playing the shopkeeper, and haggling; versus handwaving shopping as "we can just say you picked it up in the last village, just go ahead and deduct the gold." It's entirely up to you how you run and most DMs make the decision based on what is most fun for the table. Feel free to change things as the game progresses or if you change your mind. ##### **Location**: Some downtime activities, such as Religious Service, require the right location. If there is no suitable temple, they can't perform religious services. Selling magic items requires people able to buy--unlikely in the middle of Lake Galifar or in a small town in Dessarin Valley. You can simply decide players might retroactively declare they spent time while in the appropriate area. If they haven't yet reached an appropriate area, perhaps previous downtime days were spent planning a heist or gathering tithes which they then 'finish' once they finally reach the area they need. >For instance, Jo wants to craft a scroll, which she can do while they're camped by the river waiting for the weather to improve. Tixo wants to rob a noble she knows in a city they haven't yet reached. Dantes didn't know what to do when they were in Waterdeep previously but decides later he wants to do some research. Jo spends accumulated time crafting a scroll; Tixo makes plans and can spend a portion of her downtime but must wait until they reach the right place to finish the activity and spend the rest, while Dantes does some research. ##### **Time**: All downtime activites require time. Sometimes, players have more time to spend than they have time in one place; if you have 10 days of downtime but only spend three days in town, it can put a halt to any player's plans. Note that base downtime rules allows you to split up spent downtime. It doesn't matter for crafting a magical dagger if you spent 5 days in a row, or 2 days last week and 3 days a month ago. You have several options here. You can simply require that they can only spend three days on activities that require a town; they can save their remaining downtime for the next town, or spend the rest on activities that can be done while travelling. Or you can handwave it; it won't break your game, just a bit of verisimilitude. If you want, you can allow players to split 'town activities' into 'plans made while on the way to town' and 'execution of plans while in town' to allow a happy medium between strict timekeeping and handwaving. ##### **Retroactivity**: How strict you want to be here will depend on you, your acceptable level of verisimiltude, and what the players want to do. Say your players left Candlekeep a month ago, and now they want to do retroactive things; crafting a magic item to use against the Skeleton King, or doing research in the vulnerabilities of undead, or listening to rumours at a tavern. The problem is that the players didn't know they'd be facing skeletons when they were in Candlekeep. Personally, this doesn't bother me. I enjoy players getting invested in downtime and like that they get involved in the world I've built. But it may bother others; they may consider it metagaming or too much retconning. If this is an issue for you, consider how specific the activity is; making a magic item like a sword that can be useful against any creature, for instance, is more flexible than researching a specific type of creature the character would have had no interest in at the time. You can also consider it an opportunity to offer clues, especially to new players who aren't familiar with devilish immunity to fire, for instance. \pagebreak ## Using Rivals Rivals can be useful or useless depending on your campaign. Sometimes it's useful to make a new rival based on your interactions; other times it's easier to just assume there's no rival, or instead assume that the rival is an already-existing bad guy. Most downtime consequence lists have several entries that qualify for Rivals. This is a way for you to tie your world into downtime and tie downtime into your world. You can, of course, completely ignore rivals; downtime consequences might be enough. But you can also use rivals as prods to provoke the party into certain actions; or as quest hooks to get the party into another area where they 'accidentally' discover the next clue to the location of the MacGuffin. I've found that, in general, it's not worth investing a lot of time creating rivals just for downtime purposes; it's easier to use NPCs you have already made or to use mistakes PCs make to invent rivals. However, when your players are invested in their backstory or love to use downtime activities, a unique rival can give a personal edge to that character's activities and goals. #### 1. Spontaneous Rival: Making a spontaneous rival can be remarkably easy. Your player badly failed at a persuasion check with the High Merchant; you can decide that the High Merchant has a lot of money and clout to mess up any transactions in the city (blocking licences, inflating prices, artificially inflating bids for work, threatening businesses that don't overcharge for services, etc). In fact, if you allow ability checks to critical fail (a common house rule) this is the perfect penalty to attach to that fail. #### 2. Already-existing Bad Guy or Henchman The local bandit lord has escaped the party several times, but their interference and the loss of his men has not gone unnoticed; in retaliation, the bandit lord holds up shipments of goods suitable for adventuring (such as weapons and armor) or kidnaps or threatens those inclined to help the party. He might put out a bounty on one or more characters, or spread unsavoury rumours about them. This has the advantage of both using existing elements of your game and giving a source of more quests. With almost no extra work you have a complex network of ties and consequences to affect your players. #### 3. Personalised Rivals Because downtime is particularly useful for solo activities and helping draw out backstory elements for your players, a rival that matches a character's backstory is perfect for getting that player invested in what's happening. This is the perfect time to create a detailed rival, including motivations, methods, and goals. Discuss your player's backstory with them; get a good idea about what they're looking for, and determine whether they want you to completely surprise them or if they have definite ideas about their goals. ## Creating Downtime Activities The DMG is notoriously silent about how to make new activities for your players. Adventurer's League doesn't allow freestyle downtime at all. Here's my attempt at offering guidelines that help you create balanced and interesting downtime options. The first step is why you're creating this new activity. Typically, it's because your player wants to do something, and there's no existing rules. If this is a simple quest, background roleplaying, or something similar, you could just run the quest off-table; no rule says all gaming must be done as a group. If you decide this will come up frequently enough to create a new activity, you'll want to make sure you understand the goal the player has. If you make a Merchant downtime activity, is it purely for roleplaying, or is the player trying to become wealthy? You can also create downtime activities to fill a niche. If your campaign sells magic items, then the Selling Magic Item downtime activity is less relevant. If you don't want to spend a shopping session haggling over darts and rope, you can create a Haggling or Shopping downtime activity, and rolls can increase or reduce the total cost of the items bought that day. ### First Trick: Refluffing There is a decent variety of downtime activities in official sources. If what you want to create resembles another activity, it's probably easier to simply use the same rules for your new activity. For instance, Haggling has a random outcome based partly on how much you invest; you spend a percentage less than full price on goods. Gambling reflects that surprisingly well; instead of a 'stake' you use the total amount of shopping that day; instead of how much you gain, your successes reflect how much you save. You need to decide which rolls you'll use (persuasion, certain tools like for assessing value, performance, deception, intuition) and adjust the actual values (a merchant would rarely go below their actual costs, which you can set at half price or 50% savings). Note that gambling takes a workweek per Xanathar's; haggling is something done while shopping, so the reduced possible savings reflects spending less time. The advantage of refluffing is you can be more certain it's balanced, it's already simplified, you're not introducing complications or have much risk of breaking your game. Pit Fighting can be refluffed as athletic competitions, marathons, physical contests, ranked competition, or even magical duels. Working or Crafting can represent earning income. Carousing or Temple Services represent socializing and earning favours or networking. The possibilities are nearly endless! ### Second trick: Wing It If it's just a one-time thing you want to get through quickly, find out what the player's goal is. If there is a reward, make it worth no more than twice the cost. Ask for three ability checks that seem related or necessary if there are degrees of success, or a single roll if it's a simple fail/pass. If it's an easy request, you can completely forgo the roll too. \pagebreak ### No More Tricks: From Scratch * Does it have a cost? If you are accessing a social class different than you (a noble looking for a criminal, or vice versa), paying bribes, buying materials, or paying for rumours, assume a cost of 5gp to 25 gp per day of work, with the cost increasing based on the exclusivity of what you're paying for * Does it have a reward? Rumours, favours, crafted work, money, allies, and information might all be rewards. Assume potential monetary rewards are no more than twice the costs, or no more than twice your Lifestyle payment for each day if there are no costs. Rewards should have degrees of success (multiple skill checks required) and some should carry risks (other than Complications. For example, you can lose while Gambling). * How much time should it take? Somethings can be done in a day or less, while others require more days. Be sure to adjust both costs and monetary rewards for how many days you are working. When in doubt, make it a workweek (or 5 days). * Decide on consequences. In general, the bigger the reward, the badder things that happen when your luck goes south.