Down Time for Characters?

[Palantir]

Down Time: Do you have "down time" in your campaigns where player characters are not out & about on "quests?" They instead stop and rest/train for extended periods.

This occurs in my world as players need to stop & train/study for advancement in major cities, locations. This time can last from 2- 6 weeks depending on the player, his class and active involvment in previous adventures.

When they stop to train etc. in a major city I have "mini-adventures" set up for them to accept & do (or not). These are designed to give back ground info on the location they are in, create new contacts/friends/enemies or setup future adventures.

The players can also give me a list of "things" they want to do while they are resting or not studying. One player wanted to gamble, another learn a hobby etc. This is another way I use to flesh out their players.

 

[Aries]

Depends on the situation entirely.

In Alternity, the design makes it clear, that some injuries, in the absence of supernatural or basically miraculous healing, means your PC will be most definitely out of action for easily identified spans of time.

Either the group goofs off while buddy heals, or buddy gets to sit on his butt or go home for the night or possibly next few sessions while game timeline progresses through that span of time.

Clearly that is not an acceptable notion for the affected player.

Now, in one game based on AD&D, I had a girl in the group who had a fondness for casually explaining she was dragging some guy to her room for casual sex. I rolled some dice, and in the appropriate time told her, guess what, your female knight is quite pregnant "everyone please start explaining how your PCs are planning to conduct their actions for the next 9 months.
I then had her deal with her nice new shiny 0 level player character

All rolegaming, that is clearly rolegaming, not ROLL gaming, must have appropriate cause and effect AT ALL TIMES. If you wish to make a fuss over realism, then you have to make allowances for realistic reactions.

Hyper real games can be a lot of fun, but if you skip out on realistic reactions, then you're just lying to yourself.

Or in other words, either get out the deck of cards, or die, and act out the night's gambling, or roll the dice, and explain what the PC's night's gambling resulted in with a simple result.
But there's little point pretending to be realistic if you are not going to reall do it right.

For a lot of cases though, a few simple questions usually suffices, "is anyone really doing anything in 3 days of game time?, no, ok you are all out dX times coin for living expenses, now it's 3 days later".

 

[Dr Zaius]

I'm not sure the campaigns I was in ever had too much "down time" built into them. But I do agree that adventures should come from unexpected directions and not just the local orc cave.

 

[Palantir]

For a lot of cases though, a few simple questions usually suffices, "is anyone really doing anything in 3 days of game time?, no, ok you are all out dX times coin for living expenses, now it's 3 days later".

Yes I agree and this happens quite frequently.

But it's hard to "believe" that adventurers would be out adventuring 24/7 with no "normal" time off.

I played with one group that literally just jumped from one adventure into the next with "nothing" in between. That was pure "hack & slash:" the younger players enjoyed it but I quit going after a second session. There was little if any roleplaying.

 

[Dr Zaius]

This is where a really good DM/GM could shine. All things being equal, it's probably more difficult to DM this type of down time due to the open-ended nature of the situation and the lack of a clear immediate goal to drive the characters on than it is to DM hack-and-slash adventuring. The players would actually have to roleplay and the DM would have to work hard to make it all interesting and worthwhile.

 

[Aries]

It all depends on the methodology.

24 hours in a day.

What are you doing in your day?

Learning a new skill? Fine, there goes 8 hours of daylight, you are with an instructor.
Off hours? Gambling? Fine, 3 hours a night? Fine.
One hour shopping in a day? Fine.

End result, wakes, eats breakfast, over to training hall, 8 hours, pass a proficiency test to score one of your mandated predetermined number of increments before you pass.
Dinner time.
Walk to gaming hall, pass 3 tests, one per hour. Success, you win X sum of coin based maybe on your stated level of wager. Fail, same thing, reverse direction.

That's really just 4 dice rolls per day. And the DM says at the end of the week, pony up X sum of coin for your meals.

A quick note like that for each player allows the DM to rapidly pass through say a full month of time for 4 players in maybe 15-30 minutes depending on how much table babble is distracting the gang.

If the DM has decided there are 3 possible random events each day possible to occur, simple dice rolls to see if they initiate. Maybe a random roll to decide who in the group it occurs to as well.

Planning is the key to anything usually.

 

[Wik]

Down Time: Do you have "down time" in your campaigns where player characters are not out & about on "quests?" They instead stop and rest/train for extended periods.

Used to do this when we played GURPS - used their formula for time spent vs experience and money gained.

Now when I was running GURPS The Prisoner back in college, anyone who wasn't playing that day had "downtime" in the sense that I was more than happy to kidnap/coerce/clone/dopplegang them when they weren't present, which was a blast, but probably not what you're talking about here.

- Chad

 

[Palantir]

That's really just 4 dice rolls per day... A quick note like that for each player allows the DM to rapidly pass through say a full month of time for 4 players in maybe 15-30 minutes depending on how much table babble is distracting the gang.

Well for some of my "down time periods" & for some DM's & players they like the simplicity of just rolling a few dice to get thru all of that but maybe I wasn't quite precise in what I meant.
I guess it should have been more of- "do you have down times for players & do you role play that time?"

There are times when there's nothing of interest the players want to do or I don't have anything occuring for them at that time so I/we do some dice rolling to cover that time. However, I usually always have a paragraph (or more) of information for each player on what they saw or encountered of "interest" during their down time. Normally there will be at least 1 player who will get a page of information on what occured around them that creates links for future adventures for them or the group. This in-turn will setup the next "down time" with the players following up those leads/contacts etc and thus creating role-playing during that down time (assuming they do so in the same location).

Some examples of such "down time" roleplaying and past contacts has lead to: 1. Some of the PC's agreeing to help work / serve food at a formal ball at the castle at the request of a befriended neighborhood baker. = some choice overheard conversations / scoping out the inner castle / making friends of low NPC's in "key locations." 2. Befriending the local street urchins and thus learning some interesting new paths through the city/NPC's to watch. 3. After a PC Fighters training in the arena & confrontations with a 1/2 Ogre plus further encounters with him and tests of might that 1/2 Ogre determined he liked the "spunk" of the PC's and became loyal to the party (but not joining them).

Note I used the word befriend quite often and that was the case: it was during the down time roleplaying that the players themselves took direct actions to engage the random NPC's they met. I did not have an "adventure" that said the local baker would become their friend or that they should feed or toss a few coins to orphans that was all player "down-time" actions. But once the players made the connections I used them to create further "down-time" activities.

Just for info: one PC said they liked pastries = how they met the baker, the thief after a successful night out training = why she tossed some coins to the orphans, the fighter because he's pigheaded thought he was better than the 1/2 ogre = why the ogre liked him- never gave up.

 

[Aries]

Well that's a bit more elaborate, and in some cases that's cool with me too.