Downtime Rules as a Stand-Alone Game

[Jhaosmire]

Has anyone tried this before? The rules add such a complexity that I'm wondering if they could be used in such a way.

If you ran a campaign (like I plan) that is more Social than Adventure, where the characters are in a large city, each turn will either be a week or a day (not sure yet), and their goal is to rise from small-time nothings to big players within the town.

Any advice when using these rules, or strategies I should look out for as the GM of the group? What are your experiences with the DTR?

[mardaddy]

You need to read, "Dave the Commoner," for further inspiration.
Dave the Commoner

[Jhaosmire]

I'm just over a month into reading this, and it's great! This is exactly what I was hoping the Downtime Rules would be, definitely going to use this as a basis for my upcoming one-shot/campaign.

[Meirril]

Honestly the Downtime rules are a mess. It requires a huge expenditure to get started, and the main way to earn in that system is to buy opportunities to convert gold to resources for half cost. Then you need some method to convert from resources back to gold.

The downtime rules provide a way for characters to do that, via the crafting system. Creating magic items is the most efficient method, though normal crafting works but much slower. Or you could use a the gunsmithing feat to craft at a really efficient rate. But in any case, this is players doing the crafting using the normal crafting system. You can't use NPCs to do this because the downtime rules give no provision for a player to control such a thing.

Also please remember that events are suppose to happen. Events are the fly in the ointment that are suppose to keep the Downtime rules from becoming an economic juggernaut. Though by the rules only one event is suppose to happen each week, and only to one business in town. So the more businesses you have the less it matters if one fails.

And if you want to seriously break the Downtime Rules, just open a series of Pits in town. Don't hire anyone to work at them, just sit back and slowly accumulate money from the holes you dig in town.

[mardaddy]

Meirril - so what you are saying is that it's not your cup of tea. Which is fine. It is a different kind of game, not high-adventure. RPG's are big tent, room for many styles and players and all that.

If you want to host one on the boards here or over an online source, count me in, Jhaosmire.

I would love the challenge of starting as a 0-lvl commoner with a 10pt buy and see what happens as I struggle to make something of myself. And if an event that is, "fly in the ointment," occurs that eventually dominoes my demise over the course of in-game months... well, that is actually kinda IRL cool. Struggling against the odds all those months to try and bounce back & thrive, or will it be the poor house and starvation? No different really than a PC death in a high-adventure RPG, just takes longer and has its own drama.

The Downtime Rules that the OP is suggesting just takes the type of players that would embrace this kind of game -- it's all about managing expectations.

Perhaps eventually if they survive and become something, it will evolve into a regular PF game of high adventure with a seriously LEGIT backstory for the PC's, instead of one revolving around the mechanics the player desires at PC creation.

[Meirril]

No, what I'm saying is the rules for Rooms, Buildings, Teams and Organizations are poorly designed. If you want to get the most benefit you never build a house. You build a series of rooms and run each room as a seperate entity so you can make an extra 1gp and 1 of each resource the room can produce per day.

Like take the humble Pit. Without paying for any staff you can let it operate by itself to generate 1gp 1sp per day. Or you can have it produce 1 opportunity to purchase labor per day. Since it only has a +1 you have to choose which.

But if you decide to build 10 pits you can have them all be run as a single building which has a stat of gp or labor +10, so you could have it produce 1 labor and 2gp per day, or 2 labor per day if you invest all +10 into labor.

Or you can run 10 separate pits each one producing 1gp 1 sp, or 1 labor. So a maximum of 10 labor, or 11gp. Same resources. Just different organization. It doesn't pay to make a building larger than 1 room, even though you shouldn't allow people to do that.

And the same applies to making teams and organizations. The rules are just badly designed. So if you want to run that as a campaign your GM should go over the rules and alter them to suit what he wants to see in the game. Also to explain his vision of the campaign because its going to be very important to get all the players on the same page.

[Lucy_Valentine]

What I am currently wondering is "why does a hole in the ground make money, why would it help me hire labour, and what kind of town would let me just go around making holes in the ground without having me arrested?"

I am liking the commoner story, though.

[mardaddy]

As a player in this hypothetical game, would you really attempt to make a farmstead of pits?

I would see that as metagaming a perceived loophole in the ruleset.

So... houserules to prevent meta-gaming (if the players are so much against the RAI of the game and just. cant. help. themselves. but to munchkin/powergame it.)

No different than 99% of any other RPG.

[Andostre]

Lucy_Valentine wrote:

What I am currently wondering is "why does a hole in the ground make money, why would it help me hire labour, and what kind of town would let me just go around making holes in the ground without having me arrested?"

You have to make sure your PC has medical insurance (or can cast cure light wounds) and a good lawyer. Then you secretly make the holes, and the next day you walk around and accidentally fall into one of them. You sue the town for negligence, get healed up, and eventually hire more labor to dig more holes and have more accidents.

It's the perfect LE abuse-the-rules plan for an abuse-the-rules player!

[Daw]

How much of this hate and discontent is due to the suggestion being seen as an attack on the concepts you think are what is important? I am losing my ability to defend or even empathesize with the pathfinder mindset.

[Dave Justus]

Personally I find the downtime rules boring and I'd rather do anything but play a game of Purchases & Payrolls.

If it is your cup of tea, good for you.

I do think is a valid (and separate) question of whether a particular rules set works. In playing a game, I don't think it is 'meta-gaming' to know the rules. In a regular game, I wouldn't call a player saying I want to take power attack so I can do more damage to be 'meta-gaming'.

In this game, I wouldn't consider someone who said, ok, given those rules, I'll make some pits, to be 'meta-gaming.'

Now I agree that the whole pit thing is stupid, and it would be a valid houserule to disallow it. And if that is the only thing wrong with the downtime rules, you are good to go. But if it is just one example of things that don't work or don't make sense and you will need a bunch of houserules to fix it, then it might be time to conclude that the rules actually aren't very good and are not going to create a very fun game without a lot of work.

[Daw]

Oh, honestly I totally agree with you, that the idea doesn't really interest me. What interests me in this thread is the level of venom in the negative response.

[pauljathome]

Meirril wrote:

No, what I'm saying is the rules for Rooms, Buildings, Teams and Organizations are poorly designed.

I've never even looked at these rules so the following analogy may be way off.

I HAVE played Kingmaker with its kingdom rules system.

Those rules are completely and utterly broken if you try and build your kingdom (especially cities) in an optimal manner with no attention to what a city really SHOULD be.

However, they did work fairly well as long as the players attempted to actually build a kingdom that would work. They provided trade-offs, they made you plan a little, they had some synergies. We ended up actually using them for the entire 6 books of the Adventure Path and (mostly) enjoyed things.

It sounds like the situation is similar. The rules work as long as you deliberately try to NOT break them.

[Matthew Downie]

I cannot see any hatred or venom in this thread. Someone thinks the rules are poorly balanced, someone thinks this is amusing, somebody else thinks that doesn't matter as long as you try to role-play rather than optimise.

[Lucy_Valentine]

Daw wrote:

How much of this hate and discontent is due to the suggestion being seen as an attack on the concepts you think are what is important? I am losing my ability to defend or even empathesize with the pathfinder mindset

We've had:

one cool story
one "the rules aren't great" subsidiary discussion, with examples, total four posts
one post by me being a bit surprised and confused
one joke about the point that prompted my surprise and confusion
you posting about hate
one statement that someone doesn't like that DT rules
you following up the suggestion of "hate" with the word "venom"
one on-topic suggestion
and now two people confused by these suggestions of venom and hatred.

Which part do you think is hatred, or venomous?

As a somewhat serious point of discussion etiquette, you don't know what tone people are trying for with the words they type. So if you want to be friendly and engage in good faith, it's appropriate to read those words as if they come from people who are being polite, unless of course the words themselves contradict that.

[mardaddy]

As I stated, RPG's are a big tent, there's room for all types of play and styles.

The bloke that is running Dave on the blog is doing it right; houseruling the weak spots, not basing his play on strictly gaining mechanical advantage or manipulating what would be illogical data points, but having his fun in the spirit of the struggle.

(what would be hilarious is if Paizo FAQ'ed the pits mechanic Merril is referring to, and someone posted on the boards their discontent that their ranch of 4,000 pits is now, "nerfed.")