Freedom Fridays: Downtime as a System

It's Freedom Friday, where I write whatever the flip I want. Because seven days of blog posts is insane, and I'm going to die, and why am I still doing this?! I'm in a prison formed by my own aspirations, and all I want is FREEDOM!!!

I read a post earlier today about downtime in an rpg. I'm not going to link it because I didn't like most of it, but it did set me to thinking about what I didn't like, things I have used in the past, and the system I'm using now. Most of all, it made me think about what I use downtime for, and the reasons to have it in the game at all.

I used to be the DM that didn't use downtime at all. When I first started playing in D&D 3.5 I did the whole random encounter, play out a trip every day, and stay in a city for a long time between adventures thing. For the most part I thought it added bulk to a game that was already bulky. What did rolling a die on a percentage table add to the story if I rolled a random encounter with a displacer beast?

That led to a period of time where I cut all that stuff out entirely. If necessary, I figured out how long a trip would take (if the players were on a time sensitive quest), but I started waving my hand through the travels. The only time I would zoom in on that time was if there was something interesting going on. If the players were traveling with a circus, there would damn well be moments to capture that feel. There would be scenes with actors practicing their scenes. There might be scenes with the circus getting run out of towns. Or maybe the entire circus would be haunted and try to pull the characters into its curse.

But those things are thematic. So much of the time characters get on a couple horses, or just hoof it down the road to the next village. Or the end up in town for a couple weeks with nothing to do. And those things just weren't fun for me.

But then I started listening to an actual play podcast called Friends at the Table. I've talked about them before, and that's because they do a lot of things I like. They also do some things I really don't like - but that's besides the point. Friends at the Table played through a system called Blades in the Dark, and I fell in love. The system was built for gritty urban gang fighting. It has an entire system of street level gangs and organizations, each with their own power level, and each out to get what they want - even if it means going through the player's gang. But most of all it has a downtime system that I absolutely love.

Between each job that your player's gang takes, there's a bit of downtime. This represents the time it takes for the characters to find a new job, but also allows other factions in the city to adjust to the new status quo. Right after finishing a job, characters gain reputation with different factions, sometimes positive - often negative. It also represents a period of time that the players can recover their health and sanity.

Blades in the Dark offers the following downtime activities:

• Acquire an Asset 
• Work on a long term project
• Recover
• Indulge a vice
• Train

Recovering is taking time to heal, and Indulging a vice allows you to relax and rest your mind. Acquiring an asset let's you find NPCs to add to your gang (this is especially helpful to fill roles you don't cover as a group), look for a magic item, find a contact, or a variety of other things. Basically, any time you want to find someone or something that takes time to track down, you use the acquire an asset move. Training is working on a new skill. And working on a long term project is just that. A long term project might be building a magical device, researching a new spell, or a variety of other things that take longer than an afternoon to complete.

But what I love most about the downtime system isn't just what the characters can do. It's what the Game Master can do as well. Because Blades in the Dark offers one more thing: Entanglements.

Whenever a character uses one of the moves above, the GM can pull them into an entanglement, which is a simple situation that drives the story forward. It's often caused by the reactions of different factions to the jobs players have done. If the gang is at war with another gang, the player might get kidnapped (or have to fight kidnappers off on their own). If the gang is known for trading information, they might get approached by a new contact on a shadowy street corner. But it doesn't have to be related to the factions. I used this move to pull one of my characters into a river haunting. The whole encounter took maybe fifteen minutes to run, but it let me set up a story hook that I plan to use in the future.

Entanglements are why I love downtime, because the downtime isn't just about the boring things that characters do, but another opportunity to add story, intrigue, and problems to character's lives.

But as much as I love the system that Blades in the Dark uses, there's an Unearthed Arcana downtime system for 5th edition that I think deserves some attention as well. I don't like it quite as much, but it has some good things about it, and remembers that downtime should drive a story forward, not slow it down.

This system gives your players a list of activities for players to do while in downtime as well. But it also has the DM create NPCs that work as Foils to the character. It shows the DM how to create long term plans and goals that the foil is working on. The foil shouldn't be the current major villain of the campaign, but they are there to get in the way of the characters and make life complicated. It details how to create a time line for the villain, setting up a list of actions and events that happen if the players don't get involved.

It's quite a fun little system, and I used it in a game not too long ago. It worked really well, and coming up with the foils was a lot of fun.

So, it turns out that I actually like using downtime. But it needs to be in the game for a reason. Like random encounters, it's only appealing to me if it drives the story forward. I'll do an entire post on random encounters down the line. But for now, I suggest giving downtime a try. But remember not to let it get boring, and if you don't have anything interesting planned (or that you can improvise), remember that it's okay to wave your hand and magically make it three days or weeks later.