Downtime

What is Downtime?

Downtime is a phase of play that happens between adventures. Downtime begins as soon as the party arrives back home after adventuring, Home can be a Stronghold, a bed in Silbermere, or even a Base Camp. The purpose of this downtime system taken from Downtime in Zyan is to give additional avenues of character progression that are not correlated with leveling or political domains. 

Downtime is either resolved at the table at the end of a session after an adventure has been wrapped up, or online between sessions through Discord voice calls and text channels. In face-to-face play, with a party of four to five players, Downtime may take about 30 minutes to resolve.

Each downtime, characters may perform activities of daily living and run errands that can be quickly adjudicated on the spot. Each player character may also perform 1 downtime action drawn from the list of 10 actions that follows. What puts an action on this list is that it both takes time and is potentially significant in that it develops a character, leaves a mark on the campaign world, or provides a leg up for adventuring. 

Gaining Downtime Actions

Each Player Character gains 1 “Downtime Action” after attending a session, You can never have more than 1 “Downtime Action”. Players should track each Character’s Downtime actions and activities separately. 

Downtime Activities

This short list provides players with the list of available options from Downtime in Zyan along the page they are found on. The Referee had decided that this webpage did not need yet another 40 pages, so the Referee declined to add these pages to the website.  

• Building an Institution (9)

• Cultivating a Relationship (12)

• Gathering Intelligence (14)

• Learning a Skill (15)

• Martial Training (16) 

  • As part of "Mastering a Skill" Fighters can learn Combat Talents from Carcass Crawler Issue #1. All Combat Talents are a 5 step tracker without a teacher or a 3 step tracker with a proficient teacher. 

• Research (18)

• Revelry (20)

• Spellcraft (23)

• Splendid Artifacts (29)

• Spiritual Exercises (31)

Doing a Downtime Activity 

To perform a downtime activity, the player must say how their character goes about doing the chosen action. If it seems like it has no hope of success, the Referee will inform the player of this and make alternative suggestions. For all downtime activities, the player rolls 2d6 subject to modifiers to adjudicate the success of the action. Generally, a 6– is a failure, a 7-9 is a mixed success, and 10+ is a success

Base Modifier

The source of the base modifier added to this roll is specified in the description of each downtime activity. It is also possible to raise or lower the base modifier by a further +1/–1 based on situational advantages or disadvantages. If the Referee has reason to think that something would be harder or easier than usual in the circumstances, then the modifier will apply. 

Player Aided Downtime

Furthermore, any player may forgo their own downtime action to aid another player’s downtime action, adding a further +1 to the roll provided they can make a plausible case that their skills and efforts would assist in some meaningful way. As many player characters who wish to contribute may do so. But the total modifier for any downtime roll can never exceed +3/–3. In some cases, the base modifier for the downtime action comes from ability scores, if so; refer to the corresponding table. 

Can I Use Retainers During Downtime?

No. Some downtime activities cannot be farmed out since they involve the player character intimately. Furthermore, this system, including the downtime activities of cultivating a relationship and building an institution, is intended to provide an alternative to the typical “paid labor” model of the relationship of player characters to NPCs. The player’s companions are people with whom their PC has cultivated a relationship. If the player characters have access to a major supply of labor they can trust, it will often be through some institution they have built. Instead of granting a player character an extra downtime action, such resources can be drawn on to provide a fictional modifier to downtime rolls. At the end of the day, players should also understand that this system imposes a certain resource management aspect on play that is essential to making the choices between sessions matter. Like other rules, it is not 100% realistic, but it serves to dramatize the fact that life is short and there’s never enough time.