Practice
Looks like Inquisitor isn’t taking any chances with her newly resurrected girlfriend. Assuming she lives through this training exercise, Magus will very likely be stronger for the ordeal. Of course, it’s arguable that she’d have gained more benefits from a little R&R.
We touched on this subject back in “Quest to Excess,” but seeing as today’s comic is the unofficial denouement of an eight-page arc, I think it’s worth revisiting the theme. Namely, characters (and players!) need an occasional break from the constant go-go-go of runaway plot train.
I won’t name names, but certain APs are notorious for neglecting downtime. Home games fall into the trap as well, believing that a game without a ticking clock is a game without tension. Stop the ritual before midnight! Catch the assassin before the coronation! Slay the werewolf before the curse becomes permanent! These are all fine premises for an adventure. Certainly they work to keep a campaign rolling. But if your must-solve-now quests all come one of top of another, that design choice comes at a cost. Elements like item crafting, base building, exploring intraparty relationships, and pursuing all those interesting side-quests that your players wrote into their backstories all wind up on the chopping block. Obviously, the relative importance of these things is going to vary from group to group.
So here’s my question to all your GMs out there. When you’re trying to balance the tension of the ticking clock against downtime, how many days off should the players get? Does the answer change if there’s a dedicated crafter or business-owner in the group? And for the players in the room, should you always have access to “as much downtime as I want,” or is there something to be said for time-as-a-limited-resource? Sound off with all your favorite (and least favorite) time tables down in the comments!
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Ranger is considering the benefits of getting Inquisitor into trauma counselling, I can tell.
Of course it would be a hoot if, next time Team Bounty Hunter meets Gestalt, they hand her tail to her thanks to Inquisitor putting them all through boot camp.
Heh. Laurel actually did a counselor PC back in one of our Exalted games. Her epic motivation was to “make every exalt in Creation a happy and well-adjusted person.” I believe she wound up opening day spas.
She actually as art of that one: https://www.deviantart.com/fishcapades/art/Traveled-157756729
That’s lovely art. 🙂
And it’s a wonderful motivation! A lot of RPG worlds could benefit hugely from having licensed therapists available to those in need. It’s one of the charm points of Ravenloft that there are actual well-intentioned psychotherapists running around.
I wonder if mental health results in Ravenloft are better or worse than other settings?
Well, Ravenloft has Madness checks as a core mechanic…
But they have the most sophisticated psychotherapy to compensate! … Where possible.
Is one of the players role-playing their PC having a mental breakdown? Are they sobbing quietly in the corner, saying things like “It never ends, does it? As long as we live, it will never end…” or “I can’t take this anymore! If I knew that’s how it was going to be I would’ve never joined you!”? No? THEN THEY CAN TAKE MORE!!!
*taps X-card*
In KAP (King Arthur Pendragon RPG) it is kind of the opposite. As you are a knight in that system, you have a manor to sustain, a family to make kids in, and you only have sixty days of knightly obligation to your liege lord. That is when you go for fighting his enemies, patrolling his borders, mooching his allies, bribing and cajoling the neutrals, and finally, go Adventuring!
The conceit in the game is that each session should be the adventure for that year. And although there are adventures which can span several sessions, after finishing that adventure you then go home for that year and attend to you manor, family and all that, and have a different adventure the next year. There are also meta-plots that can be more then one adventure. You could be involved in the whole Lancelot and Guinevere thing, or the Tristan and Isolde thing, for instance.
Another multi-year adventure (taken in batches) would be your wooing of a lady (or man). Usually the father (or the party itself) asks for proof of love, or economical viability or heroism, to be found worthy of the desired person. These “quests”will then be the subject of several years of adventuring.
All in all, you always have downtime between adventures. This is also needed to heal again, as combat is usually pretty brutal, and healing can take anywhere from 2 to 12 weeks. In other words, if you’re wounded during an adventure, you need al that downtime to be able to go on an adventure next year.
The downtime even has a name: The Winter Phase. This is when you train to get better (raise skills and other stuff), and find out if you had any children, or anything happened to or in your family. and those happenings might then be the reason (plot hook) for next years adventure.
As always, Louis, it’s good to be reminded that there are more games than D&D out there. I begin to fear that I’m falling into that trap these days….
In my own games, I’ve enjoyed the similar step that Blades in the Dark takes. There is a discreet downtime step for “between heists” activities, along with multiple mechanically-significant downtime activities to take. When it works, these are fun bonus RP scenes. When it doesn’t work, it can feel a bit like doing the necessary paperwork to go on another adventure.
That is a really interesting setup, but I know it wouldn’t work for every group.
In it’s own way, it puts a lot on the GM too since the downtime sounds like it may be the primary part of the game there to set the stage for those years long intrigues and the like. Interesting idea though!
Manomanoman, not one comic in and I imagine Magus is already eating those words about death not having any real consequences! This has been a great little arc, thoroughly enjoyable and really taking characters in directions they couldn’t have beforehand, which is lovely to see. I can’t be alone in having to deal with overly paranoid PCs, and if Inquisitor keeps this up I imagine one could get a lot of mileage off stuff like the famous Countdown Puzzle.
And ofc as usual the unsung hero of the comic is Ranger’s facial expression, lovely work as always!
Cheers! I’ve got another year of grad school at least, but we’re talking about moving on to the next thing after that. Figured it was high time we broke out of the steady-state of the plot.
Is that the one were nothing happens, but you force your players to panic?
When you say “moving on to the next thing”, do you mean a new big arc… or a whole new project that replaces the Handbook?
The latter. We’ve had a traditional fantasy comic in the works for a while, but my dissertation work has slowed that down to a crawl.
I am torn between lamenting the loss of the Handbook, and giddy anticipation of what you two will create next. ^_^
Will it be all-new characters in an all-new world, or will you be using elements of Handbookworld?
…
On a sidenote, have you ever considered creating a full Handbookworld Gazetteer?
It’s going to be brand new, but we’ll see if I can resist the temptation to sneak in some characters from Handbook in the background. It won’t be for quite some time, however, it’s still in the early stages of development (look at my writer spilling the beans early!), so there’s plenty more Handbook to come!
Our current plans are to create a published volume of Handbook comics that will also include some new comics (that are more than one panel!) to flesh out some of the stories that we feel are too difficult to do in our current format.
I’m sorry, I just started drooling… Let me fix that real quick.
erhem
When the time comes to publish, please let us know well in advance? I’ll want to save up for that. ^_^
We absolutely will!
I do try to squeeze in some down time between arcs but I must admit I tend to push my players forward a lot. Less that I’m trying to drive them onwards, more I’m simulating multiple other factions who are all pursuing their own plans, none of which the players want to succeed.
In my own game, the party has finally stabilized the political situation in a city, because after the third uprising that the party put down hard, there’s no one with more important or skilled than a DMV clerk left alive. The party gathered all the survivors into the center of town and said “right, you’re all going to work together and not oppress each other any longer. If you don’t listen to us, we’ll burn the city down for fourth time this month. Figure out a fair system of government or we’ll be back.”. They had to be this blunt because every time the party left previously, a new faction would try to seize control and massacre all the people they didn’t like.
Point is, as a DM I need to learn how to balance all the hidden doom clocks that are ticking down with the desire to let my players dig into the world. Maybe I should make my campaign settings less hellish first…
Three questions for you though:
1. Do you provide downtime for your players, and if so, what do you do with it?
2. What species is ranger? For some reason I’m thinking bugbear?
3. What does ranger’s shirt say?
That’s the thing about hidden doom clocks. They’re hidden. You can push ’em back a few ticks and no one will notice.
If there isn’t a plot-based “doom clock” ticking, they can pause as long as they like. No one has tried to abuse this yet, as my mega-dungeon party has mostly build city walls, an adventuring academy, and similar town improvements with their days off.
I believe they’re all called out in the cast page:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/role-call
Ranger is a half-orc. She was raised by wolves.
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1119/4994/products/1_50b9633d-708e-4ddd-8bf5-56c56d92cda2.jpg?v=1527190150
She is a hunter after all.
As a player and sometime DM, I think downtime is exclusively determined by the story. Sometimes there can be a lot, sometimes the ticking clock is hanging over the groups head like a sword of Damocles, waiting to fall on their necks at any second.
It is too easy, I think, to come up with hard rules for this situation, when it is more about the “feel” in the moment. I personally love a certain amount of downtime, but sometimes you just don’t get it.
The game I am currently involved in has had a ramping sense of tension since the beginning. We “had to” keep things moving or lose tracks and trails and clues to the next thing. Early on, we had a few weeks here and there while we could do nothing else but wait, and we had a few moments where the timing of the greater quest was in our hands (sort of… ).
But as time has progressed and the greater quest has started to become more clear, the pieces on the board are moving into prime positions, and time is becoming of the essence, we no longer have ANY down time. It is rush, rush, rush or know that if we don’t, the BBE is going to “win” before we even have a chance to reach the end game.
But maybe this timetable is not for the next campaign, and I have been in other games where it felt slower or faster, but still felt “right”.
And of course, as usual, there is always the group dynamic to take into account. How do the players (and DM included) feel?
Ever changing, based on situation at hand, no “good” or “right” answer to say (which probably applies to a lot of game questions 🙂
Who determines the story? This is a serious question.
If you let the table know your preferences, those preferences may begin to appear with in the game world. As you say, the group dynamic and the feeling of the players / GM are always important.
So in that sense, why do you value a ‘certain amount of downtime?’ And what are you usually trying to accomplish in it?
I think the group as a whole determines the story. DM sets the hooks, players follow, the story evolves.
I personally like downtime in game because it feels like downtime in real life. Lowers the stress for a bit. If the game is nothing but constant tension and ticking clocks, it either wears you down into not enjoying it anymore, or you get used to it and it is no longer tension… roller coasters are not fun because they go down, they are fun because they go up, down, side to side, round and round and all the other things that happen. And… they stop. So you can get back on!
but, you know, personal opinion and all that 🙂
We’re talking about personal opinion in your personal game. That mess is relevant!
When I DMed a long-term campaign I had gotten off of a Fire Emblem: Three Houses kick, and I think that really affected my pacing decisions.
The first arc was pretty standard D&D pacing without much downtime beyond the occasional boat ride, but at the end of said arc I awarded the party a plot of land and some rules for base-building. I sent them on a McGuffin hunt, but the locations were uncertain. At the end of every 1-2 months a new one would be located, and it would be up to the party to find it.
Nice structure. As a player, I find that a regular cycle like this helps to set my expectations, meaning it’s easier for me to plan my downtime around them.
It also gave me an excuse to use recurring baddies despite my party’s efficiency at killing them. The Clone spell takes 120 days to set up between deaths, and while this has been argued, a careful reading will reveal that a queue of multiple clones doesn’t work by RaW; (The phrase “Original creature” as well as the lack of language in the spell for what happens if you have a queue. Setting up multiple has use as backups if one gets tampered with.) you need to set up a new one each death.
It helped that I mostly divided my villains into teams: Asdif the BBEG necromancer would usually go on missions with his Halberd-wielding bodyguard Boyd, and Bubbles the anarcho-primitivist-ecoterrorist Druid would would go with her silent but deadly Assassin companion The Green Wind. (The party never managed to kill TGW in all their fights, she always got away, even the climatic finale.) Later on The Old Dirty Bastard who led the Wu Tang Monks named called “The ghost-faced killer” joined said teams intermittently. Because of their varied respawn schedules they were never all fought simultaneously until the final battle.
What does Ranger’s shirt say?
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1119/4994/products/1_50b9633d-708e-4ddd-8bf5-56c56d92cda2.jpg?v=1527190150
You know, I had never really seen our various game night campaigns as the absolute laziest packs of part-time murder hobos in the multiverse until you asked this question.
I was just looking over nearly 15 years of adventure notes, and the “ticking bomb” trope just hasn’t been used very often, and even then, it rarely seemed to motivate us beyond “Oh yeah–hey, guys? We might want to skip looting the cupboards.” One campaign was more of a boy’s club that reunited occasionally to drink and save a village, another campaign served as live-in guards and gofers for a wealthy wizard…
Most of what I found were fetch-quests, I-love-a-mystery, and revenge or spite missions. Even the ones with time tables (get in, get out before dawn) weren’t on a difficult time schedule for the PCs. I guess our crew just doesn’t do urgent. I suppose that’s why our blacksmiths, trap-makers, alchemists, and entrepreneurs can always say “Since our last adventure, I…”
I will refer you to the tale of the Terpinator.
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/drinking-problems
There is something to be said for this playstyle.
So what does Ranger’s shirt say? I’m sure it has appeared before, but I don’t want to root around the archives to find out
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1119/4994/products/1_50b9633d-708e-4ddd-8bf5-56c56d92cda2.jpg?v=1527190150
She is a hunter after all.
And a wolf by adoption.
The bigger the buck, the more everyone gets to eat.
Ranger learned these lessons early.
Clearly: she’s alive. Not to mention strong and tall.
We were talking about this in a certain Varisian AP we’re running right now and apparently at the part of the story we’re in, the GM thinks the writer assumed we’d just have fast travel of some kind. So because we are mostly on foot and caravan, particularly for the places we have to go, the time table has been ‘adjusted.’
My game, because the only rails I have are the ones I make, follows a bit of an Adventure/Down Time formula. I throw time investment part of the crafting rules in the garbage where it belongs and generally there’s anywhere from a planned 5 day – 3 week gap between the last adventure and the next one, which is generally covered in a single session unless they have other ideas.
Sometimes you have to light a fire under them, but I feel the game should be driven by the players as much as possible. So they have clues and plots to follow and characters to interact with, and generally the downtime session(s) are about figuring out which plot they’re going to go bounce to next.
So it’s a little like a Shadowrun footwork session I guess? Complete with quest giver/Mr. Johnson and doing some research to learn what they can before it’s go time in addition to making any preparations. It works well for my players, at least. I’ve had several times where I’ve been thanked for just getting out of their way to RP with those sessions.
So wait… You do full “downtime sessions?” I’ma need a description of what those are like.
So, the week before, I tell everyone that this adventure has concluded, and next week, I need a list of your various planned down time activities just so I can keep track and send any developments their way as needed. I inform them that the next session will take place in the social map-to this point that’s been the Adventurer’s Guild/Tavern and the part of the town they’re in where they keep adventurers and other undesirables known generally as the Adventurer’s Ward.
From there, I tell them that essentially… they can talk to NPC’s and look for quests, or talk about leads they have and decide what we’ll be doing next. OOC wise, I inform them that I’m not making the next adventure until I know which direction they’re going, so there ain’t nuthin’ until they tell me what they doin’. ;p
I do update all the NPC’s… The town I made has… I don’t know, 50 NPC tokens on it? The PC’s can talk to any of them, and while a few of them have very definite personalities, most of them just hear rumors and such. Additionally, the PC’s get pokes and prods about any previous information gathering attempts that have gotten any traction during this phase.
Then they sit down, compare notes, decide what they want to do next, and I make the next adventure.
Poor Magus. And she’s still having to deal with the negative level(s) that come with being rezzed.
What does Ranger’s shirt say?
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1119/4994/products/1_50b9633d-708e-4ddd-8bf5-56c56d92cda2.jpg?v=1527190150
She is a hunter after all.
Why do you make it look like if things can’t wait? Isn’t every game like Skyrim? Oh, dragons are invading our country on the brink of civil war but first lets do some dungeons and stare at the aurora for half an hour 😛
On the note of downtime maybe i can point you in the direction of AoS Soulbound? It got a nice array of downtime activities from which players can choose depending on species, attributes and other things. Maybe worth the check 🙂
My mega-dungeon is player-driven. They decide when they explore the recesses and when they faff about in town.
If major events happen (orc army invades!) then time may be of the essence. But for the most part the PCs can adventure or not as the mood strikes.
But I was given to understand from my oldhammer buddies that AoS is the not-good! How can it be good if it’s the not-good?
It doesn’t need to be good as long as it got things you can borrow to make your game better. Just like D&D 😛
AOS is a decent high-fantasy setting when taken on its own merits, even as a Warhammer fan who mourns the death of the original setting. The main problem is that its launch was handled badly and that it wears the skin of a beloved setting like a bathrobe. Makes it hard to let go of the resentment, you know?
Souldbound on itself isn’t bad if you ignore the whole AoS thing. Better to think is what happens while the Old World is doing it’s own stuff. Like Soulbound is on what Sigmar was bussy each time the Empire need him 😀
I think the problem with giving unlimited downtime is it kinda breaks the immersion of the campaign when the villains will wait on their world-ending plans for the players to be ready to face them (except in certain cases, like, for example, the game Dragon’s Dogma, where the villain actually is waiting on their plans for the player to be ready)
I tend to go with ‘you can take as much downtime as you want, but the more you take, the more prep-time the BBEG gets.’ which isn’t that bad when the BBEG doesn’t know the party is after them, but when the BBEG is aware of the party’s actions, it becomes an overt threat that the longer they take, the more difficult the challenges ahead will become. As an example, as-written in War For The Crown, if the party finish part of the first book’s second dungeon, but then leave to take a rest, the villain will reinforce with tougher enemies. (Fighter 3s instead of Rogue 1-2s)
You’re assuming that world-ending plans are necessary for a campaign. Granted that “you arrive just in time to stop the ritual” can feel forced when it happens every time, but players could just as easily explore a map; fight an ongoing threat rather than a time-sensitive one; work as bounty hunters; etc. Motivation is all well and good, but it can exist beyond “BBEG will blow up the ocean if you take two weeks to craft.”
That’s very true, and in that case yeah, down time is great. Skull and Shackles is like that, there’s no real pressing threat for most of the campaign so your players can just, like, be pirates. (as long as they’re good enough at it to pay the crew and not starve to death) I’ve wanted to play in a Shackles game just to be able to really play a crafter bot for a while, just never gotten the chance (the other campaign I really want to play in is Iron Gods, but I’ve already mentioned the only time I got to play that game before lol)
As a lifelong fan of Thundarr, the Barbarian, I also want to play Iron Gods. One day….
Amount of downtime given should only be determined by the timetables involved in the adventure. If the enemy is moving quickly and there’s only a week of downtime before the defensive preparations need to start, then that’s what the player characters get.
If there’s a couple months because on top of stealing the original plans for a campaign from an enemy nation, there’s also winter coming along, AND there are newly several openings in the upper ranks of the military and people need to be trained up to deal with a group of particularly menacing foes, then the player characters should get several months of downtime or half a year of time. A real shame that covid hit and I moved so I never got the chance to resolve that storyline.
Usually I pick a month or two as downtime. After playing Wildermyth though, I kinda want to run a game that gives 8-12 years downtime between arcs, depending on the lifespan of the shortest-lived species in the party. It’d be a fun way to incorporate age mechanics, into a game, with potential for children or grandchildren to sub in if the original party member’s age bars them from the build somehow (such as a TWF build losing qualification for feats due to age dex penalties).
The most meta quest hook. It forces the GMPC to go questing to get the precious session notes back!
I had ideas for a Sidereal exalted game where centuries pass between sessions and players have ties to nations and dynasties rather than NPCs. Never quite got off the ground with that one though.
Yeah, I was running a “war is brewing” game and the party were tasked with backing up a spy and infiltrating the castle where the plans were kept, hopefully escaping undetected.
The party almost got caught getting into the enemy capital, thus endangering the spy’s operation. They then infiltrated the capital but went balls to the wall, leaving many bodies in their wake and actually killing an enemy general (said general also a member of the royal family). They obviously stole some information (troop numbers, supply chains, etc.), but the actual plans were useless at that point because they would obviously change them.
They got out of the castle, but then I needed to make an escape sequence, so the next session would have been getting out of the capital and rolling for late autumn weather. Cold rain would have affected travel conditions and light snow would have made following the party easier.
Following escape, they would have had about four or five months of downtime (to account for late autumn changing to mid-spring).
I think that the game I was running would have worked out well with a “15 years of downtime” situation… fend off one invasion and the next one won’t happen for almost a generation. Then the player characters might have families and play differently.
In my dragon riders / musketeers game, I wanted to mimic Dumas and put 10 years between each of the parts of my campaign. However, I found that players only really care about elements that they’ve met in-game. You have to make those backstory elements present during play. So while “they may have played differently if they had families” sounds good on paper, I find that those NPCs disappear if they’re purely off-screen during downtime.
Over the years I’ve come to enjoy the downtime and “slice of life” heavy roleplaying elements of games more and more, sometimes more than the plot itself, my favourite games at the moment such as our long running (8 odd years) L5R game where this tends to be the main focus of the game interspersed with terrifying bursts of violence.
One of the key pleasures to be derived from RPGs is the sense of contributing to the story. It can be easier to do that in sidequests than injecting new ideas into the main storyline.
If their character truly needed downtime, then they’d be willing to fill out the downtime application form.
And if they had time to do that, then they clearly had plenty of free time already and should not be allowed to squander more.
Back to the main quest with you, slackers!
Harsh but fair.
I’ve always enjoyed lightly trying to find things to do when my character isn’t actively on the adventure, though the opportunity hasn’t come up; even when I was doing a Dwarf Forge Cleric who screamed to make something really cool or interesting. But you know what takes time? Making platemail. It was the only item I hand-crafted over time and was also the last.
Shit takes time, and we were usually adventuring in one way or another. So that one suit of armor was really all about I had time for; any other crafting I had to do was in the field and with magic. Which! To be fair, happened often enough that I valued my character decisions.
As a GM, I do try to leave space for what the players want to do and pursue their own leads. Last campaign, I didn’t really have any PCs that needed time to do their own thing. This next campaign, I’m quietly hoping I can leave enough space for folks to do their own thing every once in a while. Of course… This coming campaign has the backdrop of a big ol’ obvious cataclysmic event just around the corner, so it may take extra work to signal that, “Hey. Yeah. Disaster is coming. But it’s coming at the speed of plot, so like, chill out and do character things. Shit. Talk to eachother. Talk to your favorite NPC. Live a little, cause never know when the dice say you die today.”
That whole vibe. The apocalypse vibe.
((Side note, unrelated, I did successfully finish my first campaign as a GM not too long ago!! People liked it, fun was had. We’re doing it again +1 person this time around. It gonna be great!))
I always tell new players to answer three questions during character gen: What will you do in combat? What will you do in social encounters? And what will you do during downtime? If you can answer those three questions, you’ll (almost) always have something to contribute to the game. And more importantly, you’re less likely to be bored.
Tell them that the Handbook of Heroes guy said, “Well done. Keep up the good work. The multiverse needs more heroes like you!”
I’ve been adding more downtime to my games lately. It wasn’t until I started running APs and modules instead of homebrews that I started focusing on that.
I’ve found that downtime also helps to add to the player’s roleplaying. If they players know they have a month to craft, woo the princess, run their business, or even just get to know the locals then they really appreciate the setting more.
When I ran the Shackled City AP, I told my players at the start of the game that there was going to be big chunks of downtime in between chapters. (Up until a point, where they would be up against a clock. But I promised to warn them when we got to that point.) And what I found was that my players began to really get into the setting. Which made certain reveals and plot elements all the better. This was their city, their people, being attacked and oppressed! Not just some town they stopped in as they teleported across the world.
I think that we GMs get tunnel vision when it’s a homebrew. We see where the plot is going, and we’re anxious to move on to the next cool thing. When it’s a module, it’s easier to see where the breaks might be.
Vey cool! Does the Shackled City come with a good setting guide? I find that players do well when that have a non-spoiler resource to reference. All those details about interesting taverns and eccentric locals and minor quest hooks come online when a player is able to investigate them of their own free will.
This reminds me of that time with “Manly Guys Doing Manly Things” when they said you can just punch someone through the pillow in a pillow fight and it still counts
I really ought to read that one. It’s one of Laurel’s favorites.
It’s great; cutest velociraptors on the internet.
It really depends on the type of adventure you’re running. When the stakes are relatively low, I don’t see why you shouldn’t give the party a week or more (maybe much more) of downtime between adventures. If the stakes are high, I don’t think it makes sense to have downtime unless you decide that it can work that way (The enemy can only attempt this ritual under certain circumstances every few months or something like that).
I does make me wonder if adventure design should take that into account. And if you do want to rush the players, it may be a good idea to state somewhere around session 0 that “crafting and similar will be of limited use in this campaign.” Because I think you’re absolutely right about the “it depends.” It’s just a matter of deciding best practices around those particular circumstances.
I’m currently in 2 living world groups. They each have rules for how much time passes each day. For the first group, one real life week is an in-world month. Each adventure takes one in-world day unless it’s specifically said to take longer.
I’m not sure how the other world works but there’s a calendar for in-world days.
Reminds me of the Gygax bit:
I ran a game set in a fantasy version of Regency England where the sessions represented small adventures taking place over the course of the year, and every four or so sessions there was a “winter” session where everyone pursued their own careers, obligations and diversions, and also leveled up. There was a naval officer who went off to fight naval battles against the French elves, a thief who helped his guild pull of a counterfeiting heist, and a wizard who spent the winter being tutored in magic by a white dragon (in exchange for certain favours). I think it worked well, establishing a slow but steady game-time pace for leveling up, and keeping everyone embedded in their Jane Austen-esque social roles.
Neat! Sounds sort of like an informal version of the Pendragon setup that Louis Kolkman described further up the thread.
This is also true in video games. If I take the Elder Scrolls as an example:
in Morrowind, you start the game with the quest to bring a letter to a dude in a nearby city. When you do so, you get enrolled into a secret spy network, and your first mission is basically “run around, do some random adventuring, discover the land and get accepted by its people”. There’s no hurry. It leaves you truly free to do whatever you want at your own pace.
in Oblivion, the emperor dies in front of your eyes and your first mission is to bring his magic amulet of emperorness to his last remaining heir. When you do that, you find out that demons are invading and then the entire world is on fire. Maximum urgency. You can decide to just forget it and do various sidequests or exploration at your leisure, but narratively it doesn’t make much sense. If you do that you end up with the weird and extremely video-gamey situation that demons are invading, but they’re just chilling at their invasion spot, waiting for you to show up, and daily life in the empire is not at all disturbed.
In Skyrim, a dragon unwittingly saves your life by destroying the town where you were gonna be executed, allowing you to escape. Your first mission is to go warn the local ruler that there are dragons destroying towns and letting convicted criminals go free. Again, like in Oblivion, there’s a lot of narrative urgency placed on you because these dragons are there to kill everyone, destroy everything, and end the world. You gotta do something! Or you can chill out and do random sidequests and exploring, and it just works out just fine but story-wise it’s nonsensical.
In case it wasn’t clear, I very much prefer Morrowind’s approach. In this kind of game where you’re supposed to be doing what you want at the pace you want, having a plot that tells you to run around doing this and that ASAP just feels completely disconnected.
Back to tabletop: in our Ars Mag campaign we have something to do ASAP, but at the same time we’re not ready to do it, so we have to do research and training first, and so our big epic quest to Save the World has been on standby for over a decade. The years fly in that game when the basic time unit for magical activity is literally season. Even the simplest, most basic activity like reading a beginners’ level book takes three months. Good thing the problem we need to solve is not especially urgent…
This reminds me of early episodes of Series 2 of Critical Role. The monk gets enrolled in an order of “protectors of the weak, righters of wrongs” type organization, and just has to go uphold the tenants. That’s weak sauce as motivation for a full campaign, but it’s nice to have an open-ended excuse for “go be an adventurer” to actually make sense in a setting.
Your characters have shown up as a background detail in another comic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/qpyhmj/ocarttales_from_the_tables_episode_9_i_think_this/
The Creator has been contacted. The planar merger is under negotiation.