Running and pacing the downtime (vague spoilers for book 1 / 2 structure)

[NinjaCaterpie]

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?

[itaitai]

I encountered the same issues.
The concept of a season per chapter is cool concept that doesn't translate well to the table.

There is A LOT of downtime with sporadic events every week or so.
We just played it event to event and pretty much handwaved the passage of time by throwing skill checks, like earn income, quickly.

The problem is that you don't really feel the passage of time when a month can go by and all you did, in some cases, is throw 3 skills checks.

I really couldn't find a better solution, because roleplaying each day is tedious.

As for winter, there are already a lot of events, yet the problem remains that there is way way too much downtime.
I suggest you just tell your players how this is going to be played out - you will face events during the winter, and we will quickly pass the time between them.
You can emphasize how the town struggles each week. Maybe the storm got worse, maybe some people lack some food, maybe a house broke down.
Just random events your players don't really need to take part it.

[James Jacobs]

I think the best way to run downtime is to spread it out—by doing all of the exploration/encounter mode content at once, you're making the downtime stuff all happen back to back, which can be boring since it's mostly just skill checks and roleplaying, if your group isn't into that stuff.

You could talk to your players and point out that the adventures are written in a way that they should have plenty of time to do the encounter mode content at a slower pace, and use the evidence of them only needing a week or less of each 3-month session to support that.

You'll also note that each adventure covers 3 months and 3 character levels. You could "lock" level progression to the end of a month, in this way, which separates those three levels of content to one per month, which might encourage PCs to take a more leisurely pace during the month and to sprinkle downtime in between encounter sections.

You can also be proactive as a GM. They don't know how they're progressing through an adventure's story, but you do, so if they finish, say, the encounters in a chapter and still have a few weeks left in that month, you can flat out tell the PCs, "Well done solving that issue so efficiently. You can now take a few weeks to relax and pursue downtime activities—here's a list of suggestions" and then let the PCs play those out. This way you spread things out more evenly over the season and help to comfort player fears that they might be "wasting time." Remember, unless a player's watching you progress through the physical pages of a book as you run an adventure, it's tough or impossible to know how far through the story things are progressing, and a lot of players have been trained through game play over the years (both via video games or tabletop games) that if they take too long they'll miss content or blow a deadline.

Simply telling the PCs that "yes, each adventure is set over a 3 month period, but they've been constructed so that you have plenty of time, so no need to rush" can help.

That all said, some groups aren't into roleplaying or downtime. If your group is like this, it's okay to fast forward through the months if they hit all their accomplishments for things. You don't want to punish them by skipping over "load bearing" downtime events, of course, but if you can tell that they're well positioned for the next chapter or the next adventure and you can tell that the players are antsy or bored, then by all means say something like "You spend the next one/two/three/whatever weeks recovering and resting in Willowshore, and then a new devlopment occurs" and go on from there.

[NinjaCaterpie]

Hey, thanks for the replies! I think a lot of that makes sense and I was trying to do something similar in Book 1. My biggest issue is probably already over as it was mostly Book 2 where a) it was a bit harder to space out combat and downtime evenly and b) I wanted the downtime to matter because of winter.

Splitting the levels up by month is a really cool idea! It makes sense as the result of regular training and practice too. I think I'll float that by the players for winter, though I suspect the structure of the book would have it naturally play out like that regardless.