Downtime System - Anyone have some good software to use?


Product Discussion


For the past year or so in our campaign, I've been using excel spreadsheets to calculate how much capital has been generated, expended, and lost. Given that we're starting to get into the higher levels, it is starting to get kind of complicated.

It strikes me that this is the sort of thing that real-world industry and commerce general have to use, and that there is probably better ways of handling it than simply calculating it all out, and adding a new set of lines to my spreadsheet.

Are there any open source / freeware programs out there that handle this? Or other neat tricks that anyone has figured out for handling it? I rather like the Downtime system as a whole, but the paperwork for it is getting out of hand.


Lone Wolf Development's Hero Lab has a module for Ultimate Campaign that lets you buy buildings and whatnot, along with getting goods/influence/labor/magic. It won't automatically calculate stuff, but you CAN export the data, tally up the Take 10 values, and use that. If you're going mainly by the book on that, it might be useful.

Here's how it looks in practice.

I'm not aware of any programs that actually do the calculations and such for you, though. This might be the closest you'll get.


Hmmm, thanks for pointing that out. I've come across Hero Lab before, and it looks like an excellent program, and I've tried the demo. I'm kind of hesitant about it, though, due to the fact that it looks like quite an expensive proposition to get access to everything. Our group plays with pretty much the entire Pathfinder ruleset, but our budget doesn't extend to paying an extra $10 per rule book to have access to all the content again. Although from the screen shots and the feel of the demo, I could see it potentially being worth it.

Since you seem to have it, maybe you could clarify something for me. Is the downtime sections available in the core Pathfinder module? Or is it an extra DLC that has to be purchased? Their supplement website doesn't list Ultimate Campaign as a separate module, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything.

edit: Apparently I didn't look hard enough. Farther down the page lists Ultimate Campaign as another $10 add-on.

I think HeroLab is probably out of our price range for now, but I'll definitely keep it on my wish list for the the future.


The Ultimate Campaign package is an add-on, priced at $9.99, and includes basically everything in that book. The full list of add-ons is available here - they're pretty up-to-date with this stuff, given the apparent agreements with Paizo. XD I find that picking up the big rulebooks at a rate of one a month makes them easy to fit into a budget, and it's not hard to either program in feats (and such) you don't own or just manually edit them into an exported character sheet.

If you feel like you're spending too much time hassling with spreadsheets, that's definitely a reason to consider getting Hero Lab.

(You can also save a bit of money by looking around for third-party companies selling physical copies of the software. As long as you have a registration code, you'll automatically get to update to the latest version, and that could defray the cost of getting an add-on a bit.)


It's probably not very good, but I threw something together for my a group a few weeks back the day before we needed to start planning stuff out because people were having trouble understanding the system.

I can't really guarantee that it follows all the rules perfectly, as I made in in an afternoon, and there are a few features I planned to add but ran out of time on, and have had no reason to go back and finish.

This was made for exactly what my group needed and not much else (calculate total costs, days to complete, and income modifier). It does let you choose if rooms/teams are recruited in parallel or in serial, as our gm decided he didn't want it to take multiple years for us to finish construction.

The gui is a bit of a mess and exporting to excel was never actually implemented, but I figure I might as well post it and see if anyone else manages to get some use out of it.

I saved all of the relevant stuff (rooms, teams, managers, etc) in an SQLite database that should be easy to edit if more content comes out, and users can save their organizations as an xml file to pass around if needed.

You can find the github here
https://github.com/clandowski/PF_Downtime
or a compiled copy
https://mega.nz/#!Odw3jRyA!slP0ZBBfwqSwjAnjJKbfeWFx1kUjX2nHuswfs9FBpHc

I made this in visual studio 2015, so it probably requires a recent version of the .Net Framework. Not sure if I will actually make any more changes to it.

Community / Forums / Pathfinder / Pathfinder First Edition / Paizo Products / Product Discussion / Downtime System - Anyone have some good software to use? All Messageboards

Want to post a reply? Sign in.
Recent threads in Product Discussion