The point of roleplaying is to vicariously experience incredible events and fantastic moments. Few people want to spend hours playing Cubicles and Deadlines, the game where you play as tax assessors trying to stave off depression while assembling in-depth reports (patent pending). People want to skip the boring and get straight to the good stuff.
But what if the boring could improve the good stuff? Outside of action movies, people don’t generally go running from one deadly situation to another. Heck, even in action movies, the hero takes time off at some point to do something else. People have families and interests and hobbies, and these things flesh out a person so that they are more than a chain of actions. When we get back to the action, we can relate to the character, and we’re invested in the outcome. This week, we’re taking a look at campaign downtime.
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What is downtime?
Downtime is any time your character isn’t screaming and waving a bloody meat cleaver, or trying to intimidate a peasant out of his last copper coin. Downtime is the time in between action sequences, when characters don’t have anything immediately requiring their attention. Downtime is not to be confused with the off-screen time between scenes. Downtime is on-screen, but is generally more relaxed.
Some examples of downtime scenes are as follows:
At the end of the day, the party makes camp. Throughout the small clearing around the campfire, the party takes up various places to rest for the night. The ranger climbs a tree and sits whittling wooden figurines for her children back home. The fighter gives some pointers to the wizard on strategic combat, to avoid unfortunate fire accidents in the future.
The party has just stumbled into town after a hellish two weeks spent fighting off Gnolls. Spying a bathhouse, they quickly realize that they are utterly filthy and repellant. Before they speak to anyone, they had better clean up. During the bath, the characters discuss recent events, process the growing bonds between them, and swap stories from their pasts.
The group is waiting for their contact, but he isn’t showing up until tomorrow. For tonight, they’ve got the entire tavern open to them. And what a tavern it is. The ranger is challenging all takers to a knife-throwing contest in the corner. The Dwarf is attempting to drink everyone under the table, and winning. The fighter is writing a letter to her employers, letting them know why she’s taking so long to return with the amulet; unfortunately, the Gnome wizard keeps insisting that he has interesting snippets to add to the letter.
The quest completed, the party settles back into normal living. The Dwarf announces that he’s opening a tavern. The other characters begin to pitch in, helping design the establishment. By the end of construction, the party has a business they can be proud of. When the next quest comes along, they turn the place over to the sharpest barmaid to run while they’re gone.
Why do I want this in my campaign?
Think real hard about the people you’ve met in your life. Have you met any who had zero hobbies or interests? What do the more interesting people you’ve known spend their time doing, besides running for their life and killing people they run into? In the books you’ve read and the movies you’ve seen, weren’t the more interesting characters the ones who had at least one thing they cared about? In fact, don’t we often have difficulty connecting to characters in movies who never display any bit of humanity?
Characters come to life when they resemble real people. A character who consists of nothing more than an arm holding a sword is worse than boring. A character who whittles wooden figurines of the monsters she kills and sells them at market or ships them home to her family, however, is someone to whom we can relate. She cares about her family, and she picked up a useless skill somewhere good for nothing more than creating something small and interesting.
Downtime also serves a much more concrete purpose: It gives players a chance to roleplay. Downtime sessions could be called zero-combat sessions or party-building sessions. Players get a chance to inhabit their characters and explore some motivations. Characters get a chance to process what’s going on and to improve the party dynamic.
Downtime is essential to a storyline. If you’re planning to run one action scene after another, players are going to burn out incredibly quickly. Not only that, but no lengthy campaign can sustain itself at such a pace.
What were some of the more interesting downtime bits you’ve engaged in, and what does downtime do for you?