Hi all,
My players just finished book 1 with about 1.5 months to spare, so only downtime activities left, and the first chapter of book two is all downtime. Since I have a new player who is just here for the subsequent two sessions, I am not sure that playing downtime for those sessions would be very interesting for him (and probably not a good reflection of what pf2e is).
I was thinking of hand-waiving all this and jumping to chapter 2 - the monastery, and, once that is finished, allowing the downtime activities to happen during the remainder of the fall. I appreciate Chapter 2 is somewhat reliant on Chapter 1's downtime to access the monastery, but I am not sure that's a really big deal - I can narrate that away.
Thoughs?
PS I have 6 players so I expect at level 4 they could handle the initial challenges of the monastery without needing them to level up again.
If you think it's best for your game then you should do it. The campaign will withstand such change.
For my campaign, the players started researching the ritual halfway through summer and were ready to go to the monastery by the last week of summer.
I allowed them to do this.
It worked out well.
Maybe I am just imagining, but the PCs missing a level of XP made things noticeably more difficult on the path up the mountain.
It was no dealbreaker, but it is something to lookout for.
Similarly, some early fall downtime events have rewards that are meant to help with the path and monastery, which I felt very noticeable when the PCs did them after returning from the mountain.
Thanks, Synapse. I may mix it up a bit: one or two relevant downtime, then monastery or something similar.
So I ended up turning downtime into a "worker placement" type boardgame. Though I gave my PCs the option to skip ahead to Pilgrims Way before the research was complete, they were having fun just doing the town activities and RPing, so the entire session only had 1 combat (the one with the vipers, but the snake-man managed to talk them into fleeing when they were bloodied).
Here are my notes and pictures of the setup if anyone ever wants to use it:
https://www.electric-rain.net/2025/01/05/downtime-activities-as-a-worker-pl acement-boardgame/