I am running a homebrew campaign and a little while ago the party saved a major settlement. As a reward they were promised some masterworks and I wanted them to be hand crafted so I figured I'd get the party up to 2nd or 3rd level and then have them actually receive these items then.
Long story boring they adventured for 2 weeks straight in game time. The beleagured party staggered back to their home town; yes they were 3rd level but they'd been going for a while and were out of rations, mentally fatigued and the players were a little ticked.
When I asked the issue the player running the wizard PC was frustrated he hadn't had any time to craft anything. I asked him what his expectation was from past campaigns since he and I have just started gaming and he said he was thinking after completing the fairly involved first quest saving the town that the party would have about 3 weeks of down time.
Is that normal? I've since moved the game forward and next session they should be wrapping up another major point so its a natural breaking point for giving the party down time. I'd planned roughly about a week downtime but if that's too stingy I need to know.
I'm asking the community because the rest of the party has since gotten most of the gear they wanted but I sense the wizard player still isn't happy. I asked him about it and he says its cool, but I'm second guessing. Please offer your advice.
This is usually a role playing decision for my groups, not a GM decision.
The GM's role is to allow the players opportunities to decide to have down time. This is all about plot pacing and story arc construction.
It is definitely meta-gaming but I absolutely try to put an opportunity for my players' PCs to rest, relax and party between major achievements. Not always. In fact right now I have my group caught in the middle of nowhere after leveling up to level 8 and they have to rush back to town not to party, but to try to save it. But that's an unusual situation, and assuming they manage to save the town, they will get to bask in glory and reward for a few days if they like.
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In my Kingmaker game I usually have about 3 months to a year off between major adventures. If your players feel 3 weeks between adventures is "about right" for their characters let it be so. That's plenty of time to craft, start romances, attend a business or start a guild. All the fun stuff that makes characters involved with the world.
I've had other groups with no downtime, that just went from adventure to adventure. It was surprisingly less satisfying as the characters didn't develop those hooks into the setting to make them really care.
Also don't forget travel time can also be used as "down-time" for crafting (so long as you have some portable tools handy).
@ AD and the Dude: as always your advice is sage and well-founded. The same wizard player has suggested the party get out of town and wants to find/fix up/build a hideout in the wilderness. I've tried to encourage/incentivize the players to stay in town just because that's easier for me to provide them w/jobs, but he and now one other player seem dead set against it. I think I'll kill 2 harpies with one boulder.
Once they get back from this adventure they'll have a month of down time. This will give them ample time to scour the wilds, find say, an abandoned hunter's shanty once used as a hidey-hole by the local elite rangers who patrol these lands, and even some times to add some personal touches like doilies, table runners and underground labyrinths.
If, during that time he'd like to sit in a comfy chair and write 2 scrolls of every spell he can cast...so be it. I don't know about 3 mo's to a year; maybe at higher level.
My only concern is that my players DON'T seem to go "looking for work" as some put it. Their first adventure gathered them together out of a jumpstart. Since then I've put out rumors, plot hooks, even flat out told them that because they roleplayed so well they'd earned a boon in a neighboring town and that the NPCs they'd helped would probably have more for them to do; they disregareded all of this.
I figured they were just solely focused on getting back to their home town. Once they got there though...nothing. The first hour of the next session after they got home was me saying "ok, so...you're back in town, and here's a recap of the emails telling you what your characters learned that happened since you were gone and...now what?"
Eventually I got a little bored and I told them they were invited to a party w/some gypsies. They didn't interact w/anyone at the party so I just attacked them that night with a witch and from there they just kind of followed the trail of destruction til eventually they found one of the PCs sisters missing and this is their current mission.
If I give them TONS of downtime, will this encourage MORE active participation or even less?
On the point of your original post: I vary it A LOT. Most of it depends on the campaign arc and what I'm trying to accomplish.
Unless I'm running a game where there is a sequence of events on a tight timeline I tend to go slower on lower-level characters so that both I and the players can see where the PCs interests lie outside of current plot arc, which usually leads me to writing in additional flavor for them at higher levels. Around mid-level I tend to try to up timing factor a bit more where the characters are more likely to get ambushed or interrupted in their "down time" and may be forced to use secondary or backup items as their primary things may be in the middle of the "upgrade" process. At higher & epic levels it depends entirely at what's going on in the campaign as anything that doesn't stop them from being ressurected is mostly only a stop-gap attack or an attempt to distract the PCs by a BBEG.
Reading your update:
Is it all of the players or only some of them? ... if it is all of them, you may need to have an OOP conversation about how it takes two sides to make a table top game run
How experienced are the players? ... One thing I've noticed with newer players is that they sometimes don't react until they see something they know how to deal with.
Does your group switch up games a lot? ... some players (I know I've been guilty in the past) get incredibly bored with lower level games... games fall apart quite often, usually at lower levels, so some players have issues focusing as much if it's their 30th or 40th 1st level PC they've played that year.
Hope that helps,
-TimD
Mark, the limiting factor to the number of scrolls your player's wizard can create is likely going to end up being gold, not time. All crafting costs gold, and many spells require special costly components on top of the base crafting cost.
Some players like to use "down time" as crafting opportunities to tip the balance of wealth in their advantage. Some even try to sell their crafted items to other party members at "bargain" prices that are higher than what RAW allows them to be sold at.
I don't know what is driving your player's desire to have a cabin in the woods. It sounds to me like an opportunity to provide a plot hook. Perhaps the perfect cabin he is looking for is abandoned, but haunted. Maybe it's occupied but the current owner is willing to sell (which can help you pare down party wealth a bit).
I'd do what I could to roll the house hunting into the plot so that the player feels more engaged.
I have never found downtime to be very good at engaging players for most of the players I have gamed with. There are a few exceptions who love to email me with the details of their character's life activities, but most just wait until an adventure pops up again and will just say "Oh yeah, while in town my character got a job at the blacksmith and made XX gold." To which I usually say "Oh really? Let's look at that..."
There are, as I am sure you know, guidelines in the core books for how much characters can make doing hired work for NPCs.
I am running a homebrew campaign and a little while ago the party saved a major settlement. As a reward they were promised some masterworks and I wanted them to be hand crafted so I figured I'd get the party up to 2nd or 3rd level and then have them actually receive these items then.
Long story boring they adventured for 2 weeks straight in game time. The beleagured party staggered back to their home town; yes they were 3rd level but they'd been going for a while and were out of rations, mentally fatigued and the players were a little ticked.
You promised the party some masterwork weapons as a reward, and then did not give them that reward for two levels? Perhaps that is why they were ticked. That +1 to hit would have been useful.
Furthermore, by 3rd level masterwork looks commonplace. The characters have their sights on getting their first +1 weapon. The reward looks a lot less impressive when delayed.
As for downtime, it depends on the nature of the adventure. Some adventures involve a continuing plot, especially one to stop a recurring villain, that has the PCs running from one encounter to another. No downtime, because the bad guys would get an equal amount for free time. Others are independent adventures, with a potentially unlimited amount of downtime in between.
Remember that as the GM you must give the party the reason to stay together as a band of comrades. But the reason does not have to be action. If the heroes are loyal to a town, their downtime could be spent supporting the town. For example, the fighter could ride out on patrol, the cleric could establish a local church and serve the needy, and the wizard could set up an arcane laboratory and craft magic items. I find that friendly social interaction with grateful townsfolk is usually enough to make the player characters feel at home in a town.
I don't know what is driving your player's desire to have a cabin in the woods. It sounds to me like an opportunity to provide a plot hook. Perhaps the perfect cabin he is looking for is abandoned, but haunted. Maybe it's occupied but the current owner is willing to sell (which can help you pare down party wealth a bit).
I suspect the wizard does not want just a cabin. He probably wants an impressive wizard's tower or an secret underground lair. That is something to be encouraged, because refurbishing a lair consumes money, which encourages the characters to look for work.
In one longlasting D&D 3.0/3.5 campaign, our party cleared raiding trolls out of an old outpost keep. The duchess of the province heard of this. She offered to give us the keep and staff it with men at arms if we would defend the border there. We alternated between repairing the keep with labor and magic, driving away tribes of orcs or ogres, and departing on adventures to earn money to restock the keep. The keep gained a reputation as a safe area, so after one adventure, we returned to find a refugee camp around the keep. We built a city wall and made a town. Then we had to defend the town from the army of the neighboring orcish kingdom.
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I usually grant a small downtime, 2-4 ingame days for players to use after major/minor storyline plot ends or at least when they do have time.
They don't have anything to do actually tho, none of them took any crafting skills or such beside wizard scribing scrolls. I am kind of working of giving them 1 free skill point for any craft/proffesion skill just for the fun and character flavor.
I tend to vary it by situation/mission. Some adventures are time-based so back to back. Every few levels at least though I try go give some downtime so the PC's can craft/learn new spells/do whatever they need to. Usually I'll let them be the judge of how long they take and do a general 'what did you want to accomplish over X period of time?'. Let's them do mundane tasks without spending excess time at the table, there's always email or google docs if more detail is required/desired.
I let the players decide as well, usually they just pick up some supplies, stay a night at the inn, get horribly drunk and into several squabbles with the law and then are off on their merry way to the next adventure the next morning.
None of them ever took any crafting feats and they rarely buy new magic items, and when they do they just leave while the item is being crafted. So there is little reason for them to stick around.
@ some of your questions: All the players are well experienced, but we only just met one another and started gaming this past summer. None are power gamers; in that I mean they've all made negative comments about players who optimize hardcore toward combat. As a result they didn't seem that concerned about not getting the masterworks though you're right Math; in the end I probably should've gotten them the weapons/armor sooner. Also they have all taken some levels in crafts or professions. In point of fact during their wilderness journey it came out that, even at low levels, they have enough skill to comfortably survive indefinitely, which is how the whole "cabin in the woods" idea got planted.
Its primarily 2 players, neither of which wants a "magic mart" experience (their own words). They both want a connection to the town they're in now and the items they have/will have. Both players have played Dark Sun and liked the idea of having an item that "acquires" power in some way, but they also want some input in their items which is why they want downtime to help make them.
These 2 players are exactly half my group. The other half consists of a guy with no opinion in the matter and another guy that just recently came in and feels the pacing is fine for now. I think the downtime being requested by the 2 players is indicative of a larger issue of feeling "dialed in" or connected to the campaign world.
The other thing these 2 players have said is that they played Forgotten Realms; when they played they immersed themselves in source material. From the novels to the game books, they devoured detail and tried to have their PCs live the authentic "FR" lifestyle. I don't really know what that is, but I do understand the meaning since I did the same as a kid with Greyhawk.
Since I'm running a homebrew I don't have that much source to give them. I have a cheesy hex map of the area and they've studdied it a few times; I have a player's guide they've read back to front and for their current town I have a stat block and a few paragraphs that they've already gone thru.
I gave them a week's downtime at the end of a couple sessions ago. The new guy didn't say much, the guy who doesn't care either way said he brewed beer; these other 2 players did things like wandering among an encamped gypsy caravan, researched spells and the local area, and generally commiserated with family and friends. There was also crafting of scrolls and general maintenance.
But like I said in my last post; once the next actual game session started up again they just kind of sat there, all of them, passively waiting for "something" to happen. So I've since attacked the town. Twice. My hope is that is that this plus the Pharasmin oracle of Time having a prophetic sense of impending doom will motivate them to pick up some of the plot hooks I've got scattered around.
One last concern I have: do you think time between game sessions affects motivation for downtime or getting things going again once we meet? We've been pretty regularly gaming, but due to schedules and lives we play only once a month. Could this be fueling the malaise?
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Do you keep a campaign journal?
I don't keep one for weekly games (just quick notes) because its easy to remember remind the players of the details week to week.
For a monthly game campaign journals are crucial.
If you're worried about maximising table-time for adventure you can handle downtime via e-mail, or a Facebook page (or in the pbp section of Paizo.com) then each session recap last session and say "the party then took an [X WEEK/DAY/MONTH] break in order to (whatever happened over the Internet). Today's story begins with our heroes discussing their next expedition" then you hand them a list of plot hooks you're prepared for and off to the races you go. It's how I handle Kingmaker and Skull & Shackles and my players seem to like those games :-)
We rotate GMs between major adventures.
Usually the adventure ranks the party two or three levels total, then the party gets as much downtime as they need, and the GM switches. We sometimes take 'real time' off from the campaign at these breaks as well. This keeps the players fresh and energetic when we do play, and ensures the GM will not get burnt out. We think this mode of play is vastly superior to the single-GM "follow the yellow brick road" style of game.
As the "new player" in the campaign, but without trying to meta-game (and hoping you don't mind, Mark), I'd like to offer my input:
This has partially been my homebrew experience in the past. My players always liked shiny source material to read, and so running something in the Forgotten Realms or Pathfinder world was ideal, because there is both a a ton of existing material, as well as an immense amount of freedom to build your own. I don't consider it a weak point in the campaign, but I know that for example, were this actually set in Pathfinder's Ustalav, I am certain I'd have a stronger connection because I'd have more information at my fingertips, knowledge of the world around me, and be in familiar setting that I'm already very engaged with.
Secondly, time between sessions: this has always been an issue for players and I, and why I try to forge every week/every other week games- we used to forget a lot of stuff! Even with my weekly games, I run a journal and write up interludes for characters to keep them thinking about stuff between sessions. You hardly do a poor job of contact, so I think that the time lapse between sessions is likely a good part of this issue. This is often inevitable with families.
Interesting that I used to be the one that had to MAKE time for semi-frequent games, and now I'm always the one pushing for consistent play.
@ S word: I have my notes as to what happened on my laptop; if you'd like I can post a camp. journal if that'll help. So far D's player has kept such copious notes that I haven't really had to (in fact he's helped ME remember some smaller details...).
As far as downtime goes - my primary concern is the fine balancing act between keeping a sense of urgency that, until you've saved the entire world, there's still impending doom and the fact that D and M might want a cool ring or fancy bow made.
Finally just to the community in general: there's still that nagging, lingering thought of how to make downtime interesting and relevant to the entire group, or at least those who want it. I suppose that's part of my job as GM though.
As for this being a homebrew and thus not having source material; experiences are different for every kind of player. My own experience within homebrews has been that when my old GM's didn't have something in their world already that I wanted for my PC, I made it for them.
Ex: I had a guy in a 2e/3e crossover campaign that was a halfling homesteader and he wanted a big group of sages or whatever that he could go to for info on the land so that he could find spots for his new halfling community he'd be building. When my GM hadn't thought of that I pulled up an alternate character of mine, a halfling cartographer, and suggested The League of the Endless Journal: a series of wayfarers and cartographers who establish permanent repositories or "Journal Entries" around the land.
Since they are a chaotic group with no really well established leadership these repositories could take a variety of forms. Since it was a high-magic world they were usually pretty fantastic. I initially envisioned rune stones but my buddy suggested all kinds of stuff: a well outside a roadside inn, a singing bush, even an extradimensional space in a brick wall.
So...my advice to all my players in my homebrews has been if they want to see something in my world suggest it. Don't worry about details or stat blocks, but pitch me your idea and I'll take it and run with it. If it wouldn't fit into your exact region maybe there's somewhere it would make sense. Just be prepared for me as the GM to put my own spins on it.