Downtime Rules
In my game: One player hollowed out everything he killed and wore it as a Splendid Item and raised an army to retake his homeland; another turned the Inquisitors’ Theatre of their first adventure into an inn; a third founded a thieves guild, and a fourth a mercenary company, while another created spells that crashed the local economy. In other words, Ben Laurence’s downtime rules gave the players ways to make their mark on the world and drive the campaign forward.
We used them as written with a few tweaks; now I’m in the process of codifying the Red Hack rules, I want to make the system my own, though by necessity it will always owe a huge debt to those original articles on Mazirian’s Garden.
This is the most frustrating part of the design work for me. Downtimes move slowly so they’re difficult to test, and I want there to be a framework and an interconnectedness to them that allows players to play with the procedures in a consistent way. As always I want to have a lot going on without a lot of pressure on the DM, but where combat rules are easier to implement when they’re simpler, downtime rules are more straightforward when they’re more complex, and cover more cases without calling on the DM to make something up.
I’m also, perhaps unwisely, trying to roll other simulationist elements such as upkeep costs and the security of the PC’s home into the same system.
Fantasy City by Pedro Arnaut
The Downtime Table
My first attempt at this was the Single Downtime Roll, which I want to revise into a D12, which splits nicely into multiples of 2, 3, 4, and 6, allowing for different probabilities of events:
| D12 Roll | Downtime Result | 1d6 Events | 1d4 Events | 1d3 Events | 1d2 Events |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Poor | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | Poor | 2 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| 3 | Poor | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 |
| 4 | Poor | 4 | 4 | 1 | 2 |
| 5 | Poor | 5 | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| 6 | Mixed | 6 | 2 | 3 | 2 |
| 7 | Mixed | 1 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| 8 | Mixed | 2 | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 9 | Mixed | 3 | 1 | 3 | 1 |
| 10 | Mixed | 4 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| 11 | Good | 5 | 3 | 2 | 1 |
| 12 | Good | 6 | 4 | 3 | 2 |
A High or Low relevant attribute adds or subtracts 1 from the roll; bonuses from Holdings and other sources can simply modify it further.
Events & upkeep occur on the natural roll of the die. Lodgings and anything else that causes random downtime events can be tracked by rolling dice against the PC’s die; the event occurs on a match.
- Roll a single d4 for everyone to determine if upkeep is due.
- Don’t roll more than 1 die of each type unless a single PC has two event dice of the same size.
- Example: If a PC has a Holding that provides a roll on a rumour table one DT out of four, roll an extra d4 instead of using the upkeep die – unless the source of rumours is his talkative landlord!
- For 2-in-3 events you can simply count the number on the d3 and the next number in sequence, with 3 wrapping around back to 1. The same goes for ¾ or 5/6.
Lodging events when triggered are rolled on a separate table specified by lodgings (which will no longer include upkeep results.) I also want certain types of Holdings to generate events – for instance, the thieves guild should throw up periodic rewards and hazards, while the inn might generate a supply of rumours.
The DT event system could also be used to advance campaign clocks; you could roll a ‘nemesis’ die and the particular enemy of any PC who matches progresses in their plans that week (alternatively, factions could be arbitrarily assigned to PCs – the player might not know which faction acts on a match to their die, or even whether a match has taken place – event dice are easy to roll out of sight of the PCs, after the session.)
Downtime Actions
A PC gains one DT to spend on the first day of each week they spend between adventures.
Generic Downtime Action
Modify the roll by an appropriate attribute, if there is one.
- Good: You get what you want, or make reasonable progress toward it.
- Mixed: You get what you want, but a complication arises to be addressed in uptime. This might involve an encounter or negotiation at home, unexpected costs, a side-objective in your current adventure site, or a trip to a new adventure site. (Downtimes can be a great way to get PCs to visit a site you have prepared, because not only does it give them a reason to go there, the reason is player-driven – they’ve already bought in!)
- Poor: You don’t get what you want.
Downtime Action Categories
Since there are 15+ different downtime actions available, I’ll divide them into rough categories and tackle each in its own article:
- Economic Ventures – Rent, buy, sell.
- Information Gathering – Doing some digging.
- Magical Creation – But what’s the stuffed crocodile for?
- Personal Development – Your skills, your stuff.
- Social Activities – Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.