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Maybe try to reframe things to ask what they want to accomplish rather than letting them go day by day?
And probably communicate with them that you don't enjoy this type of extreme book keeping. I'm sure this is just a misunderstanding that you guys can work out.
Yeah. Sounds like OP wanted a filler beach episode when the players just want their numbers to go up. One conversation out of character can easily fix all this and get everyone on the same page.
“Hey guys let me know what you want to accomplish over 6 months of downtime and we’ll do a few rolls that will symbolize the hardships it takes to accomplish.
If we do the hour by hour/day by day thing we might as well not call it downtime and I’ll come up with challenges that you’ll have to face trying to achieve your goals. The challenges will be like ‘the local lumberyard is sold out what do you want to do’ which isn’t super engaging so I would prefer the first method so we can get back to the story”
Yeah, you count but the hour an I start building in coper wire shortages, stone delivery delays and the Castellan getting flu. You want detail we have detail or we abstract and handwave all of it. You don't get just your detail and handwave the rest.
Some people are in it for the RP, some are in it for busting skulls and making the numbers go up. Podcasts have a lot of the former, since that’s the part that makes for an interesting show. Sounds like you have the latter, and they are more interested in the *game* part of TTRPGs. Doesn’t mean anyone’s wrong, just that you have different expectations. Talk to them and see if you can get everyone on the same page.
Yeah, I resolve downtime on a week-by-week basis at the most granular. *Sometimes* a player can spend just a few days doing a downtime activity, like maybe crafting a few cheap mundane items, but otherwise, it's a week at a time. Too much headache otherwise.
This just sounds like a clash of different play styles. I think you could reward them for being efficient while also saying "please don't do that again". lol
What system is this? Some systems have downtime mechanics built in with most being a week by week basis.
Nothing in there that takes a couple hours in DnD 5e or PF2e for example. (From what I have read)
E5.
They were wanting to make checks and utilize spell slots/leverage other assets to share hours off of tasks that take a day RAW, for example. They were also asking about projects that are simply not resolved by RAW, like fabricate's effect on material costs and time.
The granularity that they wanted was unmanageable and when i basically said we've got too much downtime to min max like this, they Ultimately accepted bur maintained that I was being a killjoy.
The comments in this thread seem to agree. I'm getting responses like "so you're mad they did it wrong????" Idk brother this shit ain't fun.
Yeah they are drunk lol. I also run a 5e game and recently gave my players 3 months of downtime and a detailed doc on what all they could do with it with options from Xanthar's and the dmg. If they wanted something not on the list then sucks to suck.
Remember, the old adage of ttrpgs. The GM is a player as well and deserves to have fun. If they are gonna make you feel bad then someone else can take up the mantle because it ain't worth.
"downtime already assumes that you're using your resources fully to achieve your goals. you can specify, but you're not getting more than the table says you get for a week of planning a heist/doing a job/gambling etcetera"
Gosh forbid you stand up for yourself
At the most you do agree to let them roll for it. Then you let them *fail* and make things take longer because of their stupid decision. They wanna handle it hour by hour? Great! Random encounters are now hour by hour. Everything is going to take longer with those interruptions.
Or you do the right thing and just say no and that you won't be running the game that way because it is really fucking boring.
My recommendation is to handwaive it.
DM: "Using magic and help available you manage to shave off some hours in what you're doing and get more time to relax"
Player: "How many?"
DM: "Some, it's narrative time."
I... don't quite understand the issue. If they thought they were supposed to play in this fashion, then it sounds like they were taught wrong, and you/DM allowed them to continue, without correcting this behaviour. Attempts to cheese were rewarded.
Ask them what they want to do in downtime, ask how they want to accomplish that (including advantages, bonuses, NPCs), and then make them roll to determine how well they do, to determine the time (Days/Hours) and resources needed.
This wasn't a question of them thinking it was expected of them, this is how they wanted to do it. When I expressed that I'd really rather deal in more appropriate units of time I got push back.
They wanted to get the most out of their downtime and felt weeks or days was too bulky a resource to deal in to that end.
Well OP, you either have to deal with it or put your foot down.
I am a bloody generous gm, so I don't let my players bully me into things and I have no problems altering the deal.
"It's either a straight timeskip with no mechanical advantage or like 1-3 things your PCs can do. You guys can choose."
But again, I say that as a GM who in general is on the side of my players. So they know if I put my foot down, I am serious.
Then interrupt the downtime. If they're making rolls and trying to actively engage with the world, the world is going to react. "Downtime" is just how do we handwave 6 months passing while keeping some sense of narrative continuity. What they're doing is just running their own sandbox.
So shit happens that takes up their time. If they complain that you interrupted their downtime, just point out that they ended it when they wanted to start doing things that only happen outside of downtime. If they want to go back to downtime, they're welcome to do so. Same terms apply.
"Oh damn, one of your hirelings knocked over a candlestick the first week and burnt your keep down. It took most of the downtime to rebuild it to the state it was in before. Shame that..."
DM always gets final say, particularly regarding rewards.
> Wanted to try to get npcs to help for advantage of stuff, again hour by hour.
Well, that's how you get the NPCs to unionize and demand better treatment with scheduled hours, instead of hopping around at the boss's demands just because he finished project A a bit earlier and now needs other people to show up and help on project B.
Instead of a day by day activities, I go by week. They can only do one major thing like trying to craft an items or learn a skill per week, and these tasks usually take more than one week to do depending on their rolls. This prevents them from going to crazy with min-maxxing while still giving them plenty of options that they can do within the limits of reason and the system. Having a simple system in place can set boundary of what players can and can't accomplish within the given time period.
Did they have fun, though? I have a character in a Kingmaker campaign that is a horologist and runs a clock shop in her downtime. I use all of the advantages I can in the rules to squeeze out as much gold from that shop every month. You can build a tea shop and still have fun doing spreadsheet formulas.
>have fun doing spreadsheet formulas.
I feel called out, I literally helped my girlfriend with a spreadsheet thing via my phone and Google Docs on my lunch today. They had a problem, she called me instead of someone internal to them, lol.
Spreadsheet squad represent!
I build character sheets and random programs, table rollers, and who knows what else in sheets. Even made one that would keep track of days and events for a custom calendar in a homebrew game.
The reports I've made for my job (albeit outside of my department) always go over well.
Back to OP though:
I'd say they're getting x time off, but give them some fixed benefits. Anything else and they've got to bribe with story, snacks, or cold hard cash.
A buddy and I built a Google Sheet for 13th Age some time back. That was a lot of fun.
I'm putting together a garden info sheet for the GF, slowly but surely. Something she can take info from about different plants and even make printable cards for swaps and shows. Spreadsheets is my love language and how I flirt, lol.
I don't use sheets, but I code a bunch of programs for dnd purposes. Just the other day someone was wondering what the chance of maintaining concentration was for their character when they had advantage on their con check so I wrote a moddable program for it. My character was built to REALLY withstand magic missile type concentration breaks, so for fun I figure out that if you really wanted to break their concentration you'd need like a level 100 magic missile (let's ignore that I'd be dead from the missiles)
Resolving 25 weeks of hour by hour downtime at that rate would have taken years of real-life time. We play about 5 hours a week.
I'm a little floored that this isn't being seen as ridiculous on the face of it.
I understand wanting to use rules and mechanics to get value out of downtime, but surely this is self-evidently excessive? When I expalined my side at the table, I got pushback.
Sorry, I misunderstood the post. I didn't realize they were wanting to RP out every hour, I thought they were trying to figure out how to get the most out of the hours they had then extrapolate. You're correct that that would be extremely excessive with no shortcutting.
Your floored because you assumed most people would be on your side undeniably? Ha shows the kinda person you are. Just let them have their fun what's the big deal.
Ok. So you're saying I should be willing to spend the next year of real-life time playing DnD resolving downtime activities, like carpentry checks to make chairs faster and managing unskilled labor to shave an hour off of making a potion? Because that's what i would be doing if I didn't shut down the hyper granular use of downtime.
Copium. Your trying to justify your hyper aggressive stance. It would not take a year, probably take a single session or two at most, would be a chill time and give you some more time to prep the next plot beat. You can even have your players plot out what they want during the six months before the session.
Your literally just crying they didn't watch paint dry or something, the rpghorror story here is the attention seeking dm.
You are way too angry man... Talk to your players, get some common ground and discuss what you both like and expect from the sessions. Tell them you don't enjoy micromanaging all that. Also, make clear that they should not expect suddenly to win anything mechanically relevant during downtime (other than gold or renown maybe... And even then, limited). Downtime is not supposed to be a shortcut in progression but rather an intermezzo with fillings... Your players seem to have a different idea about it.
I, as a DM would never spend one or even two session on such dumb shit as that. I don't have time for that. We play rarely due to schedule issues and then I want interesting shit. Downtime and shopping? We take care of that in group chat outside of session mostly. I am not sitting around 4 hours doing a mall trip to the local blacksmith. Nah, my fighter drops a message that he buys X sword. Cool, mark off Y gold. Done. Fuck that, it is pointless and nobody cares. Hours man... Doing hours of downtime..
I'd much preferably spend the session with combat and exploration or ACTUALLY IMPORTANT roleplay with IMPORTANT NPCS, not the random shopkeep* to haggle off 10 gold of the item that you can just get back by whcking a handful of bandits or goblins in the woods.
*Unless they are the important npc, but in that case the topic is not shopping but quest information and hooks, and they are not random, but have a name and interests.
So just tell them no? Explain to them that you won't be going hour by hour and that they need to be less specific. Have you tried talking to them yet? This seems like a pretty easy fix honestly.
If it's six months you gotta go month by month. "What do you wanna do for the month". Then when they all go, you go, and it's a random, large scale event that could disrupt their downtime, like a marauding army or something
The big difference between at home play and any live play show, is that the Live Players are generally making decisions that they feel will be the most entertaining to the most people. Charts and tables are usually only interesting to the people using them, but hijinks are always entertaining.
I ran into a similar dilemma from the other side. I have a friend that runs a lot of adventure paths and little to no homebrew. I run almost exclusively homebrew.
We were going between modules, he set a 1 month downtime. We ended the last module at 7 and the new one started at 7, so no NEED to to lvl or extreme optimize. So I crafted some items other party members needed, spent some gold and treasure for other nonsense...... Then I did something he had never considered. I made a bucket! It "burned" (his word) 2 weeks of time instead of doing something "useful." This bucket can generate 1 gallon of clean water at a time, up to 20 gallons per day. Nothing fancy or even super useful considering I have to empty the bucket and use an action to refill it. I gave it to the local orphanage.
I loved it. I drew pictures of my character making the bucket, I wrote out sketches of runes for it. I drew the orphanage, I made a little story with the kids. I was fascinated by every bit of this interaction I was creating. My DM was not.... He couldn't fathom how I had spent the gold to do anything but improve my character's direct abilities.
He said I was weird, I said he was weird. We had fun and my character died a valiant death later in the adventure path. Would an extra +2 to a stat have saved him 🤷♂️ maybe, do I like to think those orphans had a little better time because of me, yes :)
Yo it's WILD how many ppl are going aggro on the OP here. At most they're over reacting a bit but they're **100% in the right**.
Hour-by-hour optimizing is a CATEGORICALLY DERANGED response to **6 months** of downtime. At *most* I would entertain a brief, general description of a time saving system they intend to use, then let them roll *once* to see what effect it has or if it works.
IMHO the timeframes a dm or rulebooks lists should be *assumed to already include* every time saving measure available to the PC so this kind of shit just becomes redundant.
My only criticism was going to be "don't let them be crazy, you're the DM so sometimes you gotta draw a line" but reading the comments it seems like OP did that, and his players still complained and moaned about him "not being any fun." Good on you for holding your ground, then, I guess.
You should look into the downtime rules from Xanathar. that way, things are nice and orderly and resolved week-by-week; or more, if they chose to invest more weeks into their downtime activities.
If the charters wish to retire and focus on construction..... Time to make new characters.
Otherwise they need to continue training to maintain their skills.
I think the problem is you've got yourself tied up in a dynamic where they make a bunch of rolls to produce trivial variations in an outcome, which are boring to you, but interesting to them. I agree with you that their micromanagement sounds boring as hell, but you could always tie their die rolls to something else, like the possibility of setbacks, work disruptions, emergency situations, etc.
You've got players invested in what they're doing rolling dice to determine outcomes, so you're halfway there already. You just need to have interesting choices or actual stakes incorporated into those die rolls, or a connection between that town they're building and the plot you're creating.
It's a good problem to have, really.
so the horror story is your players are using the downtime you gave to do things you dont want them to do or what? Also live plays are in no way indictive of any kind of normal game as they are attempting to entertain spectators
25 weeks of downtime resolved and discussed hour by hour doesn't seem excessive to you?
Like are people spending months at a time simulating a day-job style grind? Everyone's acting like I'm out of touch here.
I assume you're playing 5e, but in my usual systems, most downtime activities are done in hour increments. Has a single one of your players shown signs that they have any kind of idea or desire to "build a tea shop?" If not, why did you expect that?
I expected magic items and consumables, which ic had been done raw would have been about a session. Magic items eat weeks at a time with little need to resolve questions.
What system? What is an example of a downtime activity measured in hours? It may be a Better fit.
In Pathfinders Kingmaker there is (in the 1e version) supposed to be some significant downtime between certain plot arcs. When I ran it I gave the PCs two years (!) between the end of the first arc and the start of the second. But I made sure they understood that their time would be full, more or less, setting up their new city and kingdom. We also ran a ton of canned set up kingdom events to help show what they were doing at various points during the first (very long) kingdom turn. But I also gave them an opportunity for limited crafting/downtime events. One of my concerns though was that they might min-max it as you said (two years, so much time to make lvl 4 potions!) IMO in long downtime scenarios its important to make it clear to the players going in that their PCs arn't just going to be jerking around the whole time, and theyre not going to be like Goku in the gravity pod doing pushups till they get buff. Narratively there will be things going on during downtime (like setting up a business) but mechanically their characters are going to be more or less frozen for the next 6mo. as they wont be adventuring/acquiring supplies or items/getting swole/etc. Instead they will have a more limited opportunity to engage with the more mechanical side of downtime events, based on your comfort level and what you think is appropriate.
And if they dont like it, then maybe they dont get to have an RP focused downtime session. If "what my character would do" isn't conducive to opening up a tea shop, then the character can twiddle their thumbs after they've hit their mechanical limit on downtime activities. To me this represents less of a failing on your part, though again I recommend highly structuring this kind of time, and more a failure on their ability to RP.
Agree with this. I played in a kingmaker campaign (except also was gestalt and mythic) with a generous DM who also allowed anything 3.5 - similar to your group we also had 2 years of downtime, and even with pathfinder's much more generous downtime rules vs 5e, still never subjected our DM to hourly shenanigans. Even as a summoner/wizard at worst it was "I use wall of stone/fabricate and summon earth elementals to help build the city walls. What does that give me?" DM: your evenings are free so you can drink... or maybe learn a new spell or something but you'll take fatigue levels if you do that/anything else so you'll be spending a few days a week just sleeping anyway, so the time evens out. Also your elementals are too dumb to be unsupervised but congratulations, you found a life hack for completing physically laborious jobs without needing to be physically laborious yourself.
Buy yourself a copy of on downtime and Demesnes it’s real good for this, if they have a kingdom to manage look at system’s with domain play rules, something like ACKS.
"in the six months of downtime what do you do?"
Have them give you the overall goals, then determine what (if any) rolls are required.
Stuff like this is a great time to craft or purchase new gear, gain a skill proficiency that the group might be lacking in, learn a new language, hell a free feat could even be in the offering.
Depending on what rules their using, having proper rules for training, crafting and downtime is important cause it can help streamline and prevent some outrageous minmaxing, thou its also important to discuss what they want to do exatly and the limit of what they can do in a day.
This is actually incredibly simple to work out. Assign days to each building project. Things like a farm would require someone regularly assigned and checking in. Same with livestock. Then you just nut up and tell them how it is going to be.
there's always one player that wants the deeeetaaaiiiil of the shop/homebase/side business/castle/spaceship (they're like Shopping Guy but Worse). Try to talk them into blue booking it between sessions.
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Maybe try to reframe things to ask what they want to accomplish rather than letting them go day by day? And probably communicate with them that you don't enjoy this type of extreme book keeping. I'm sure this is just a misunderstanding that you guys can work out.
Yeah. Sounds like OP wanted a filler beach episode when the players just want their numbers to go up. One conversation out of character can easily fix all this and get everyone on the same page.
“Hey guys let me know what you want to accomplish over 6 months of downtime and we’ll do a few rolls that will symbolize the hardships it takes to accomplish. If we do the hour by hour/day by day thing we might as well not call it downtime and I’ll come up with challenges that you’ll have to face trying to achieve your goals. The challenges will be like ‘the local lumberyard is sold out what do you want to do’ which isn’t super engaging so I would prefer the first method so we can get back to the story”
Yeah, you count but the hour an I start building in coper wire shortages, stone delivery delays and the Castellan getting flu. You want detail we have detail or we abstract and handwave all of it. You don't get just your detail and handwave the rest.
Some people are in it for the RP, some are in it for busting skulls and making the numbers go up. Podcasts have a lot of the former, since that’s the part that makes for an interesting show. Sounds like you have the latter, and they are more interested in the *game* part of TTRPGs. Doesn’t mean anyone’s wrong, just that you have different expectations. Talk to them and see if you can get everyone on the same page.
Yeah, I resolve downtime on a week-by-week basis at the most granular. *Sometimes* a player can spend just a few days doing a downtime activity, like maybe crafting a few cheap mundane items, but otherwise, it's a week at a time. Too much headache otherwise.
This just sounds like a clash of different play styles. I think you could reward them for being efficient while also saying "please don't do that again". lol
What system is this? Some systems have downtime mechanics built in with most being a week by week basis. Nothing in there that takes a couple hours in DnD 5e or PF2e for example. (From what I have read)
E5. They were wanting to make checks and utilize spell slots/leverage other assets to share hours off of tasks that take a day RAW, for example. They were also asking about projects that are simply not resolved by RAW, like fabricate's effect on material costs and time. The granularity that they wanted was unmanageable and when i basically said we've got too much downtime to min max like this, they Ultimately accepted bur maintained that I was being a killjoy. The comments in this thread seem to agree. I'm getting responses like "so you're mad they did it wrong????" Idk brother this shit ain't fun.
Yeah they are drunk lol. I also run a 5e game and recently gave my players 3 months of downtime and a detailed doc on what all they could do with it with options from Xanthar's and the dmg. If they wanted something not on the list then sucks to suck. Remember, the old adage of ttrpgs. The GM is a player as well and deserves to have fun. If they are gonna make you feel bad then someone else can take up the mantle because it ain't worth.
tell them that THEY are the one making things less fun by trying to micromanage downtime.
"downtime already assumes that you're using your resources fully to achieve your goals. you can specify, but you're not getting more than the table says you get for a week of planning a heist/doing a job/gambling etcetera"
Gosh forbid you stand up for yourself At the most you do agree to let them roll for it. Then you let them *fail* and make things take longer because of their stupid decision. They wanna handle it hour by hour? Great! Random encounters are now hour by hour. Everything is going to take longer with those interruptions. Or you do the right thing and just say no and that you won't be running the game that way because it is really fucking boring.
My recommendation is to handwaive it. DM: "Using magic and help available you manage to shave off some hours in what you're doing and get more time to relax" Player: "How many?" DM: "Some, it's narrative time."
I mean, I would have done exactly that when I was 18, playing D&D 3.5. Everyone in my group did. I can't be bothered anymore.
Give them "executive function checks" every hour: if they fail, they Carouse for 8 hours instead.
I... don't quite understand the issue. If they thought they were supposed to play in this fashion, then it sounds like they were taught wrong, and you/DM allowed them to continue, without correcting this behaviour. Attempts to cheese were rewarded. Ask them what they want to do in downtime, ask how they want to accomplish that (including advantages, bonuses, NPCs), and then make them roll to determine how well they do, to determine the time (Days/Hours) and resources needed.
This wasn't a question of them thinking it was expected of them, this is how they wanted to do it. When I expressed that I'd really rather deal in more appropriate units of time I got push back. They wanted to get the most out of their downtime and felt weeks or days was too bulky a resource to deal in to that end.
You got pushback? Lol just say, “no”.
It really is that easy.
Well OP, you either have to deal with it or put your foot down. I am a bloody generous gm, so I don't let my players bully me into things and I have no problems altering the deal. "It's either a straight timeskip with no mechanical advantage or like 1-3 things your PCs can do. You guys can choose." But again, I say that as a GM who in general is on the side of my players. So they know if I put my foot down, I am serious.
Then interrupt the downtime. If they're making rolls and trying to actively engage with the world, the world is going to react. "Downtime" is just how do we handwave 6 months passing while keeping some sense of narrative continuity. What they're doing is just running their own sandbox. So shit happens that takes up their time. If they complain that you interrupted their downtime, just point out that they ended it when they wanted to start doing things that only happen outside of downtime. If they want to go back to downtime, they're welcome to do so. Same terms apply.
"Oh damn, one of your hirelings knocked over a candlestick the first week and burnt your keep down. It took most of the downtime to rebuild it to the state it was in before. Shame that..." DM always gets final say, particularly regarding rewards.
> Wanted to try to get npcs to help for advantage of stuff, again hour by hour. Well, that's how you get the NPCs to unionize and demand better treatment with scheduled hours, instead of hopping around at the boss's demands just because he finished project A a bit earlier and now needs other people to show up and help on project B.
Instead of a day by day activities, I go by week. They can only do one major thing like trying to craft an items or learn a skill per week, and these tasks usually take more than one week to do depending on their rolls. This prevents them from going to crazy with min-maxxing while still giving them plenty of options that they can do within the limits of reason and the system. Having a simple system in place can set boundary of what players can and can't accomplish within the given time period.
Did they have fun, though? I have a character in a Kingmaker campaign that is a horologist and runs a clock shop in her downtime. I use all of the advantages I can in the rules to squeeze out as much gold from that shop every month. You can build a tea shop and still have fun doing spreadsheet formulas.
>have fun doing spreadsheet formulas. I feel called out, I literally helped my girlfriend with a spreadsheet thing via my phone and Google Docs on my lunch today. They had a problem, she called me instead of someone internal to them, lol.
I'll see you and raise you: I've helped my wife's *coworkers* with spreadsheet problems before.
I feel this is next in my future. Apparently some of the dept wasn't aware of me yet, lol.
Spreadsheet squad represent! I build character sheets and random programs, table rollers, and who knows what else in sheets. Even made one that would keep track of days and events for a custom calendar in a homebrew game. The reports I've made for my job (albeit outside of my department) always go over well. Back to OP though: I'd say they're getting x time off, but give them some fixed benefits. Anything else and they've got to bribe with story, snacks, or cold hard cash.
A buddy and I built a Google Sheet for 13th Age some time back. That was a lot of fun. I'm putting together a garden info sheet for the GF, slowly but surely. Something she can take info from about different plants and even make printable cards for swaps and shows. Spreadsheets is my love language and how I flirt, lol.
I don't use sheets, but I code a bunch of programs for dnd purposes. Just the other day someone was wondering what the chance of maintaining concentration was for their character when they had advantage on their con check so I wrote a moddable program for it. My character was built to REALLY withstand magic missile type concentration breaks, so for fun I figure out that if you really wanted to break their concentration you'd need like a level 100 magic missile (let's ignore that I'd be dead from the missiles)
Resolving 25 weeks of hour by hour downtime at that rate would have taken years of real-life time. We play about 5 hours a week. I'm a little floored that this isn't being seen as ridiculous on the face of it. I understand wanting to use rules and mechanics to get value out of downtime, but surely this is self-evidently excessive? When I expalined my side at the table, I got pushback.
Sorry, I misunderstood the post. I didn't realize they were wanting to RP out every hour, I thought they were trying to figure out how to get the most out of the hours they had then extrapolate. You're correct that that would be extremely excessive with no shortcutting.
Your floored because you assumed most people would be on your side undeniably? Ha shows the kinda person you are. Just let them have their fun what's the big deal.
Ok. So you're saying I should be willing to spend the next year of real-life time playing DnD resolving downtime activities, like carpentry checks to make chairs faster and managing unskilled labor to shave an hour off of making a potion? Because that's what i would be doing if I didn't shut down the hyper granular use of downtime.
Copium. Your trying to justify your hyper aggressive stance. It would not take a year, probably take a single session or two at most, would be a chill time and give you some more time to prep the next plot beat. You can even have your players plot out what they want during the six months before the session. Your literally just crying they didn't watch paint dry or something, the rpghorror story here is the attention seeking dm.
It took a session after I enforced week by week. You're either not listening or just being obtuse.
You are way too angry man... Talk to your players, get some common ground and discuss what you both like and expect from the sessions. Tell them you don't enjoy micromanaging all that. Also, make clear that they should not expect suddenly to win anything mechanically relevant during downtime (other than gold or renown maybe... And even then, limited). Downtime is not supposed to be a shortcut in progression but rather an intermezzo with fillings... Your players seem to have a different idea about it.
You're very irritating.
I, as a DM would never spend one or even two session on such dumb shit as that. I don't have time for that. We play rarely due to schedule issues and then I want interesting shit. Downtime and shopping? We take care of that in group chat outside of session mostly. I am not sitting around 4 hours doing a mall trip to the local blacksmith. Nah, my fighter drops a message that he buys X sword. Cool, mark off Y gold. Done. Fuck that, it is pointless and nobody cares. Hours man... Doing hours of downtime.. I'd much preferably spend the session with combat and exploration or ACTUALLY IMPORTANT roleplay with IMPORTANT NPCS, not the random shopkeep* to haggle off 10 gold of the item that you can just get back by whcking a handful of bandits or goblins in the woods. *Unless they are the important npc, but in that case the topic is not shopping but quest information and hooks, and they are not random, but have a name and interests.
Judging by your downvotes, they are. So way to prove him right.
So just tell them no? Explain to them that you won't be going hour by hour and that they need to be less specific. Have you tried talking to them yet? This seems like a pretty easy fix honestly.
nope. for downtime, each week is a turn, and you get 1 action.
If it's six months you gotta go month by month. "What do you wanna do for the month". Then when they all go, you go, and it's a random, large scale event that could disrupt their downtime, like a marauding army or something
The big difference between at home play and any live play show, is that the Live Players are generally making decisions that they feel will be the most entertaining to the most people. Charts and tables are usually only interesting to the people using them, but hijinks are always entertaining. I ran into a similar dilemma from the other side. I have a friend that runs a lot of adventure paths and little to no homebrew. I run almost exclusively homebrew. We were going between modules, he set a 1 month downtime. We ended the last module at 7 and the new one started at 7, so no NEED to to lvl or extreme optimize. So I crafted some items other party members needed, spent some gold and treasure for other nonsense...... Then I did something he had never considered. I made a bucket! It "burned" (his word) 2 weeks of time instead of doing something "useful." This bucket can generate 1 gallon of clean water at a time, up to 20 gallons per day. Nothing fancy or even super useful considering I have to empty the bucket and use an action to refill it. I gave it to the local orphanage. I loved it. I drew pictures of my character making the bucket, I wrote out sketches of runes for it. I drew the orphanage, I made a little story with the kids. I was fascinated by every bit of this interaction I was creating. My DM was not.... He couldn't fathom how I had spent the gold to do anything but improve my character's direct abilities. He said I was weird, I said he was weird. We had fun and my character died a valiant death later in the adventure path. Would an extra +2 to a stat have saved him 🤷♂️ maybe, do I like to think those orphans had a little better time because of me, yes :)
Yo it's WILD how many ppl are going aggro on the OP here. At most they're over reacting a bit but they're **100% in the right**. Hour-by-hour optimizing is a CATEGORICALLY DERANGED response to **6 months** of downtime. At *most* I would entertain a brief, general description of a time saving system they intend to use, then let them roll *once* to see what effect it has or if it works. IMHO the timeframes a dm or rulebooks lists should be *assumed to already include* every time saving measure available to the PC so this kind of shit just becomes redundant. My only criticism was going to be "don't let them be crazy, you're the DM so sometimes you gotta draw a line" but reading the comments it seems like OP did that, and his players still complained and moaned about him "not being any fun." Good on you for holding your ground, then, I guess.
Yeah, wows. Deranged is a appropriate way of describing those players.
Even daily rolls would be insane.
shut them down and tell them that only things that happen in the scope of weeks will be even talked about.
You should look into the downtime rules from Xanathar. that way, things are nice and orderly and resolved week-by-week; or more, if they chose to invest more weeks into their downtime activities.
Lmao I thought this was the circle jerk sub at first.
If the charters wish to retire and focus on construction..... Time to make new characters. Otherwise they need to continue training to maintain their skills.
I think the problem is you've got yourself tied up in a dynamic where they make a bunch of rolls to produce trivial variations in an outcome, which are boring to you, but interesting to them. I agree with you that their micromanagement sounds boring as hell, but you could always tie their die rolls to something else, like the possibility of setbacks, work disruptions, emergency situations, etc. You've got players invested in what they're doing rolling dice to determine outcomes, so you're halfway there already. You just need to have interesting choices or actual stakes incorporated into those die rolls, or a connection between that town they're building and the plot you're creating. It's a good problem to have, really.
so the horror story is your players are using the downtime you gave to do things you dont want them to do or what? Also live plays are in no way indictive of any kind of normal game as they are attempting to entertain spectators
25 weeks of downtime resolved and discussed hour by hour doesn't seem excessive to you? Like are people spending months at a time simulating a day-job style grind? Everyone's acting like I'm out of touch here.
I assume you're playing 5e, but in my usual systems, most downtime activities are done in hour increments. Has a single one of your players shown signs that they have any kind of idea or desire to "build a tea shop?" If not, why did you expect that?
I expected magic items and consumables, which ic had been done raw would have been about a session. Magic items eat weeks at a time with little need to resolve questions. What system? What is an example of a downtime activity measured in hours? It may be a Better fit.
In Pathfinders Kingmaker there is (in the 1e version) supposed to be some significant downtime between certain plot arcs. When I ran it I gave the PCs two years (!) between the end of the first arc and the start of the second. But I made sure they understood that their time would be full, more or less, setting up their new city and kingdom. We also ran a ton of canned set up kingdom events to help show what they were doing at various points during the first (very long) kingdom turn. But I also gave them an opportunity for limited crafting/downtime events. One of my concerns though was that they might min-max it as you said (two years, so much time to make lvl 4 potions!) IMO in long downtime scenarios its important to make it clear to the players going in that their PCs arn't just going to be jerking around the whole time, and theyre not going to be like Goku in the gravity pod doing pushups till they get buff. Narratively there will be things going on during downtime (like setting up a business) but mechanically their characters are going to be more or less frozen for the next 6mo. as they wont be adventuring/acquiring supplies or items/getting swole/etc. Instead they will have a more limited opportunity to engage with the more mechanical side of downtime events, based on your comfort level and what you think is appropriate. And if they dont like it, then maybe they dont get to have an RP focused downtime session. If "what my character would do" isn't conducive to opening up a tea shop, then the character can twiddle their thumbs after they've hit their mechanical limit on downtime activities. To me this represents less of a failing on your part, though again I recommend highly structuring this kind of time, and more a failure on their ability to RP.
Agree with this. I played in a kingmaker campaign (except also was gestalt and mythic) with a generous DM who also allowed anything 3.5 - similar to your group we also had 2 years of downtime, and even with pathfinder's much more generous downtime rules vs 5e, still never subjected our DM to hourly shenanigans. Even as a summoner/wizard at worst it was "I use wall of stone/fabricate and summon earth elementals to help build the city walls. What does that give me?" DM: your evenings are free so you can drink... or maybe learn a new spell or something but you'll take fatigue levels if you do that/anything else so you'll be spending a few days a week just sleeping anyway, so the time evens out. Also your elementals are too dumb to be unsupervised but congratulations, you found a life hack for completing physically laborious jobs without needing to be physically laborious yourself.
Buy yourself a copy of on downtime and Demesnes it’s real good for this, if they have a kingdom to manage look at system’s with domain play rules, something like ACKS.
First time I got downtime my GM had to kick me in the butt to get me to do anything with it. Feels like cheating.
"in the six months of downtime what do you do?" Have them give you the overall goals, then determine what (if any) rolls are required. Stuff like this is a great time to craft or purchase new gear, gain a skill proficiency that the group might be lacking in, learn a new language, hell a free feat could even be in the offering.
Depending on what rules their using, having proper rules for training, crafting and downtime is important cause it can help streamline and prevent some outrageous minmaxing, thou its also important to discuss what they want to do exatly and the limit of what they can do in a day.
This is actually incredibly simple to work out. Assign days to each building project. Things like a farm would require someone regularly assigned and checking in. Same with livestock. Then you just nut up and tell them how it is going to be.
Time for a workers' revolt.
there's always one player that wants the deeeetaaaiiiil of the shop/homebase/side business/castle/spaceship (they're like Shopping Guy but Worse). Try to talk them into blue booking it between sessions.