What To Do During Downtime?
I've always loved the "home base" parts of games. When I played Knights of the Old Republic, I wanted more time aboard the Ebon Hawk. I wanted more space combat, something to do aboard ship. When I played Assassin's Creed: Black Flag, sailing around between quests was my favorite activity (probably why I never finished the plot). In Dragon Age: Inquisition, walking around the headquarters and masterminding the organization's response at the war table was frankly more fun for me than playing the main plot (again, a game I never finished).
But the same part of a TTRPG, the so-called "downtime" has always been a challenge for me to run in an interesting way.
In this week's article, I'm going to talk about some efforts I've tried to make downtime more engaging. I'm going to talk about D&D, the downtime rules in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, and the Bastion rules in the 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide. I'm going to talk about Vaesen and the ways in which its base-building is the same and the ways that it is different. And I'm going to talk about the best framework that I've seen for doing this better.
What Have I Tried?
Projects of Fuzzy Timing
The first time that I really tried to intentionally include downtime was a few years ago. My players were a sort of special forces team for a revolutionary government. (Sorry to my previous group, when I had not yet modified resting to take a significant quantity of time, which made their pseudo-American Revolution narrative have extremely funky timing). For this special forces campaign, I had a plan to throw more plot hooks than they could take at them. Choosing which enemy factions to crush would determine the course of the revolutionary tumult; allow the radicals too much leeway and they'd undermine your authority, but focusing on them too much and you'd give breathing room for a counter-revolution by the deposed monarch.
I didn't know the terminology at the time, but essentially what I was using was a version of Apocalypse World's Fronts.
Between missions/deployments to combat a specific advancing front, however, were months of downtime. This was intentional not because of any gameplay decision, but because I did not want the entire buildup to counter-revolution to occur in an in-game month. This should be a years-long narrative, and so the downtime needed to take months.
Unfortunately, this made it really hard to get a sense of scale or camaraderie. The characters were seeing each other for days out of every month? Not exactly making them best friends. And it meant that the characters were aging, which certainly made some players double-take as they thought about how their characters really should have changed more over 3 years than they were being driven to in the narrative.
These long downtime lulls were meant to be filled by individual projects. Someone was learning how to dual-wield swords, to mechanically gain a new feat. Another person was trying to invent a new magic item for themselves. Others... didn't really know what to do with all this downtime because of the lack of guidance, and that didn't work.
None of this was systematized. I had a vague sense of how long things should take from a realism perspective (or a verisimilitude perspective for things like "how long should it take to invent a new spell?"). And so someone would pitch me a project, I'd say "yeah that'll take 4 months" and they'd say "ok, I spend all 3 of these months of downtime on that, and then I'll do more in our next period of downtime." Not particularly engaging.
Regular Routines
The next campaign I ran took place in a single city. This time scale was better, and so downtime breaks were now in-universe usually around a week or two. Choosing to take a long rest (requiring 2 weeks) would now usually eat up that time, and so it would be a choice between a personal project like working towards a new feat and taking a long rest. That was fine, and it helped prevent the situation of over-resting and neutering the challenge of combat.
But this system was still fundamentally unsystematized. Personal project durations were still mostly based on vibes, rather than anything concrete. Some players still did not have much that they wanted to do, and so resorted to "rest, rest, rest" as their only downtime activity.
I wanted to occasionally interrupt them, however. Instead of "you have 4 weeks, what do you do?", I wanted to add in disruptive plot beats, an idea that I took from the AngryGM. Their headquarters was attacked one day, for example. To facilitate this, I asked my players about their characters' daily routines: who slept at HQ versus who was out in the city? Where did people spend their free time? While this did not have any real mechanical impact, it was an interesting character-building exercise.
Takeaways
From thinking back on these modes of downtime, I have a few key lessons to guide the rest of the article.
1) Downtime should have more structure than I gave it, to help inspire those who don't have major plans, while still providing flexibility for when someone does have a project.
2) The multi-year scale with long downtime chunks is not a great pace for me and my campaigns. I later ran a campaign that cared about each day and it felt gruelingly slow. The "every session is average a week apart" pace worked best for me and my group.
3) Downtime needs to have both mechanical and character arc-oriented components, to encourage different types of players to engage with the downtime system.
Cycles of Play
Justin Alexander of the Alexandrian (one of the TTRPG blogs; if you aren't a reader, you absolutely should be) describes one of the problems with the new D&D Bastions mechanic as the lack of a clear vision of play. For downtime to work, there needs to be a clearly delineated cycle of the narrative that makes "downtime mode" clear to your players, just as much as the adventure itself is. Each of the following sections engages with this idea to a greater or lesser extent.
Bastions & Downtime: D&D's Published Systems
The 2024 Dungeon Master's Guide for D&D introduces the Bastion system – Player Characters, at level 5, get some sort of stronghold. The Alexandrian describes the system as the following:
The bastion turn is clearly the intended downtime part of this cycle. While you are out on adventure, you can't issue orders to your bastion, leading to rolling for events. While you're home during downtime, you can issue orders to your bastion to craft things or create other buffs.
The issue that Justin Alexander describes is that bastions are not really integrated into the plot part of the campaign. It is a distinct mode, yes, but the modes should link. Downtime should drive plot hooks too, which feed into the campaign plot, which should inspire downtime activity. As bastions stand, they are cordoned off in a "bubble".
The same is essentially true of the Xanathar's Guide to Everything systems for downtime. There are a lot of rules and tables for calculating money being generated, but they mostly are their own stage. They don't feed into the narrative. They're passive, with things happening TO you rather than providing active components to engage with.
Beyond this, they're almost entirely mechanical, particularly bastions--so they fail my 3rd lesson. Bastions just feel kind of soulless to me. If every bastion has a theater (as the Alexandrian identifies is likely to happen), then they're not a choice. There's no role-playing happening there because there are no decisions to be made in character. There's no real way to express your character or to advance your character arc. Everyone gets one, so they're not relevant to your characterization.
Vaesen
Vaesen has a very similar base-building mechanic to bastions, something I noted in a failed article I tried to write last year. You assemble your fortress piece-by-piece, unlocking specific buildings.
Where this works better than bastions is that they are not merely tacked on. Vaesen has a very clear cycle of play. Mystery, solve the mystery, return to base, prepare for the next mystery (with mechanics for specifically this activity), and set out again. This means that your return to base is baked into the story, and the system takes advantage of that.
Most of the rooms offer mechanical boons, but these are rooted in that cycle of play. You gain extra preparation. You can keep more objects to take with you. You can even recruit a companion NPC who will accompany you on your adventures, something that the Bastion system explicitly disallows your recruits to do. There are more opportunities to connect your Vaesen base into the story and to generate meaningful hooks.
The system has a lot of the same bones, which is why it really wouldn't surprise me if the designers of the bastion system took cues from Free League, the makers of Vaesen. But it works in Vaesen because the game is built around the stronghold, rather than there being a distinct bubble between them.
Campfire Stories
In contrast, an idea that I recently read about by Sly Flourish and by GM Without a Cause is the idea of campfire stories. In a campfire stories mode, you don't need a fixed home base. Between adventuring moments or travel, when the party settles down for the night by the campfire, you prompt the characters to tell a story. This can be a way to collaboratively worldbuild, or it can be an opportunity to really focus on expanding a character's backstory.
Giving randomly-determined prompts helps solve the problem that I've had in campaigns when I've tried to disrupt the pace of adventure by saying "and then you're all sitting around the campfire, now roleplay." You can also use this system to bring players to the fore who might be quieter at the table, by having players take turns. If it is your turn to tell a campfire story, then even a less-developed character has the opportunity to get fleshed out.
This system has the advantage that it works in more styles of campaign. In my recent hexcrawl campaign, for example, I could not really have a permanent base like a bastion. The players needed to not have a home base for the structure to work. But campfire stories? Those can happen on the road.
But there's no mechanical part to the campfire story, which I think would be important if this was going to be our primary downtime activity. I want to encourage players to advance their characters beyond just mundane leveling up, and campfire stories do not scratch that part. Maybe there could be a simple one to encourage more reticent players to engage with the system (maybe using the oft-forgotten inspiration mechanic in D&D), but there's not really a logical way to fit in character mechanical advancement or producing magic items or anything like that.
Town Mode
The AngryGM also proposes a way to do all this without a bastion when he writes about adapting the downtime system of Persona 5, a video game. In this system, he advocates for making enumerated lists of activities that you can do in town, and then pressing players with plot complications so that they never have enough time to just do everything. Some of these rewards are mechanical (resting and recovering), while others are character arc-oriented (connect with someone you know) and still others are plot-focused (decipher the Nether Scroll).
And honestly, I still like the guts of this idea. Enumeration helps with problem #1 that I identified, though I'd also like some more flexibility built into the system. The blend of mechanical rewards, character arc activities, and plot-relevant activities is great at addressing problem #3. While the AngryGM eventually took a lot of his "Town Mode" content in a different direction before abandoning the project, I did like the bones of this idea.
Still, it is a ton of work, especially for a globe-trotting campaign, to flesh out all of the cities to create unique, location-driven opportunities that make different towns feel different. But for a campaign like my one-city campaign? I wish I had done something like this to offer to my players. Or for a bastion, where the list of activities swells as the players build it?
Conclusion
The core of what I would like to see in a downtime mode for my campaigns going forward is rooted in the AngryGM's sketch, but borrowing some of the key elements from the other systems I've discussed. Particularly, I think that bastions or home bases can work, and getting to enhance and grow a stronghold is something that I would love as a player.
But a bastion doesn't need a whole system that is different from this mode of downtime in a city. What a bastion gives you is control. You can grow the opportunities available for downtime, instead of just dealing with the options presented in the city.
Want to enchant a magic item? Well, you can do some of that work if you are in a city with a mage's college, but if you're on the road, you might be out of luck if you enter a city that can't support that sort of experimentation and enchantment. But if you have a bastion, you can invest to build your wizard's tower, and the option will always be available to you.
In short, the strength of the system is that it is enumerated and still flexible. If a player asks if they can do something not on the list, they might be able to, and then you can add it to the list. But by listing out a bunch of opportunities and making sure that it spans a wide assortment of mechanical, plot-relevant, and character arc-oriented options, most players should be feeling the time crunch without adding their own things to the list.
Lastly, downtime mode needs to be built into the structure of the play cycle. Whatever the scale of time in your campaign should have a level at which the system kicks over to downtime, regardless of location. In my hexcrawl campaign, where every day counted? I could have each night be "downtime", with options to rest, tell a campfire story as character work, or whatever other opportunities I could generate at camp. By making downtime part of the routine and part of the cycle of play, and by making sure that the rewards are linked to the campaign's focus (whether that is through mechanical benefit, plot, or character work), you can burst the "bastion bubble" that the Alexandrian describes and which plagues not just bastions, but a lot of downtime as a whole.
Last week, I wrote about "rumor cards", and the end of that article was a teaser for fitting them into this system of downtime. For a mystery campaign, using this downtime mode of play to be a space where players can find out new clues or plot hooks, can be an ideal way of integrating your bastions/home base directly into your plot.
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