| NinjaCaterpie |
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There's a lot of downtime in the books in this AP. My group's at book 3 and it's been great so far, but I feel like I've been underutilising or otherwise running the downtime poorly.
My first issue is something I call the "Persona Palace" problem. The players are very motivated to fix their issues, so they go out and do all the adventuring they can as soon as they can, which ends up making the pacing a bit weird.
- In Book 1 they basically completed Ch 1-3 in basically the first week of summer and were left somewhat twiddling their thumbs. I ended up running a few other events before skipping a month and leveling them up for Ch 4.
- Book 2 kind of enforces this as the players need to "unlock" Chapter 2 and 3, at which point they might as well do it all at once. The rest of the season is downtime interspersed with events.
- Book 3 looks similar to Book 1.
The second issue is that... I guess downtime just felt kind of boring? Or at least it does without adding a lot to it. The subsystems feel like just a lot of skill checks constantly (AND you can add normal downtime on top?). Especially in Book 2, where each week mathematically matters, but things don't change week to week, my players were often just going "I'll do the same thing I did last week" and rolling another skill check. There's only so many ways you can describe helping out with the harvest when you need 12+ successes worth of points. The weekly events are good but some are realistically short vignettes for one party member. Unless I add a bunch more for that week, it's back to rolls. I'll note that I actually ran the downtime in 2-week blocks for most of the season, ie. half the rolls, and it still felt this way.
I guess one thing is my players aren't super NPC-oriented (aside from one or two) and were more focused on the stuff they needed to get done, which meant they didn't actively do anything "fun" during downtime.
Any advice to running downtime to make it more engaging? Especially for players like I've mentioned? I guess this is kind of a more general question about running downtime in PF2E and in APs with long stretches of it, since I've historically handwaved it in previous campaigns.
Also, has anyone who's run Book 3 got any cool extra events they added during winter?