RPGaDay 2020 #12 Rest

 One of the hardest parts of any campaign is managing downtime. Adventures are fun, but they're not everyday affairs.

Unless they are, of course. One of the gaming forms I've spent the longest time with is the megadungeon. In this situation, the adventure is a proactive thing, something the characters choose to do, rather than reactive, in which the characters are pushed to respond to events. (Though I do think that having events also happen in a megadungeon context strengthens it.)

In the first megadungeon I played in, run by my friend Kris, downtime was an obstacle. Mostly because there was only one party member who required it. The party wizard had developed the ability to make magical items and would occasionally need to take several days away from dungeoneering to make something. On the one hand, we didn't want to leave that player out of the action, so the whole party waited in town for them to finish. On the other hand, nobody else had anything to really do in town (it was largely handled as an abstraction), so all we did while he was working was twiddle our thumbs. (Not that it took long at the table. He just established what he was making and how long he took.)

And then there was Sir Meriweather. I'm sure I've told the story about him, or at least how it/he ended. But there was a good long time when he was simply the leader of a competing adventuring party. So every time the wizard wanted to make a magic item, we also had to go to Sir Meriweather and ask his party to stay out of the dungeon to keep things fair. (Maybe the fact that he agreed to do this as much as he did should have been a clue.)

For my own megadungeon game, downtime was much more prevalent. Between training times for leveling up and for serious injury, some characters spent as much time down as up. Troupe style play kept everyone playing for nearly every in-game day.

When it finally fell apart, I attempted to run the Pathfinder version of the megadungeon. For that, I tried to use the downtime rules from the Ultimate Campaign supplement. It was only a modest success. My core consistent player was more interested in plundering the dungeon than doing much in town. My inconsistent players were too inconsistent to make filling in the blanks when they missed a session really worthwhile.

My current campaign hasn't had a lot of downtime. Since I tend to keep the calendar pretty tight, only about 2 weeks have passed in the game, pretty much since the beginning of the world. Though, as I have mentioned, I have big ambitions for this project that involve more than day to day dungeoneering. (There are dungeons in the world. It wouldn't be D&D without them.)

I actually had a player quit the game because the timeline wasn't moving fast enough. It was hard to see the forest of worldbuilding for the trees of dungeoncrawling and exploration. While I might accelerate the timeline at some point in the future, the main thing the party needs right now is gold pieces. (The kingdom-building rules I'm using lean heavily on the use of gold pieces as its primary form of input and output.) And, as everyone knows, the best place to get gold pieces is from a dungeon.