KP Blog – Downtime is the Adventure between Adventures
There comes a time when every hero finishes a quest, gets back to town to collect their hard-earned reward, and needs to take a breather. It’s fine; it happens to lots of adventurers.
In the before times, some TTRPGs would have you use this downtime to spend gold to gain levels or just skip past it completely. Not so in the Tales of the Valiant RPG!
Let’s check out what your character can do between adventures with the downtime options for ToV!
What is Downtime?
Downtime is the stuff your character does between adventures. In most campaign settings, you have as many options as you might find in real life. You could hit the taverns and carouse, scribe magical spells into your spellbooks, craft powerful weapons, do a bit of shopping, rob people doing a bit of shopping, kick back and relax, or a thousand other options.
Why Not Just Skip to the Next Quest?
To be sure, you could play TTRPGs like a video game where the heroes bop from one exhausting adventure to another without caring about things like logic, realities of physical activity, or setting immersion. You could wave your hand and say, “My character drinks himself into oblivion for three days until it’s time to leave.” Perfectly valid. But could we do better?
In the past, games treated downtime as filler material. But all too often, unanswered questions popped up, such as “Does my character get anything out this?” or “Did anything unexpected happen while I was doing that?”
To aid GMs and improve the play experience, ToV gives you a set of rules to guide you through some common downtime activities.
Downtime Activity Basics
Let’s look over the general rules for downtime. Go, go, bullet format!
- Downtime is typically measured in segments equal to a 5-day week of activity.
- Each activity has an amount of time you spend working on it to accomplish the task.
- Some activities can be accomplished sooner, but most take at least 1 week of work.
- During each 5-day week, you’ll spend at least 8 hours a day pursuing the activity.
- Many activities require you to spend some coin.
- At the end of the required time, you resolve the activity.
- Resolution usually features an ability check and a table of resolutions.
Okay, that was a bunch of info, but it’ll make more sense with some examples.
Tales of the Valiant Downtime Activities
Downtime activities cover a range of options including fun nights out, making things, and earning money. and players can always work together to come up with their own downtime activities using these options as examples, and more are on the way in future books (and blog articles! —Ed).
Let’s take a look at two of the more popular ones.
Carousing: Roll to Swill!
Ah! The tavern. Source of booze, information, bardic singing, and shadowy cloaked figures distributing quests. Some say it is the adventurer’s second home. Others say that’s because adventurers shouldn’t be allowed out on the streets.
With the carousing downtime activity, your character spends time having a good time. In the process, you can make new contacts, gain favors, and interact with people you don’t intend to murder. You spend at least one week of downtime preparing for and then going to taverns, social events, and public gatherings.
The week-long bar crawl sets you back a pouch of coin equal to the class of folks you want to hang out with. As you might expect, slumming down at the docks is far less expensive than hobnobbing with nobility. It also comes with a higher chance of lice, go figure. Slumming it costs 10 gp, a typical middle class outing costs 50 gp, and high class shenanigans cost 250 gp. These prices reflect the entire week of carousing, and if you go with your pals, each of you must pay that cost.
At the end of the week, make a CHA (Persuasion) check (or a similar ability check approved by your GM) to see if you gain any new contacts or favors. A high result (over 21) nets you three new contacts, three favors with existing contacts, or some combination of the two. A low result (like a 1 to 5) might mean you lose a contact you already have, or you now owe a favor to someone!
A word about contacts and favors: there is a back-and-forth exchange of favors between your character and a contact. When you gain a new contact, they arrive owing you a favor that you can call in. Favors are the NPC’s aid on a task that doesn’t put them at risk and isn’t against their nature. So if you have a contact who is a city guard, you couldn’t ask her to fight for you, but she might be a source of information about the local barracks or could sneak a small item to you if you were arrested. As always, the GM has final say on what constitutes a favor.
Researching: Behold the Power of My Brain!
Envision this. You turn to your GM and ask if your character can do some research into the creatures, myths, and mysteries of the game world. Perhaps you’re a bit nervous about asking. Will your GM be annoyed? That you’re being a tad ungrateful considering all the work that’s been put into the campaign?
You work up the nerve anyway, and ask if your character can delve deeper into the lore of the game world. We’ll pause here while your GM cries tears of joy.
Public Service Announcement: Every GM wants you to be more invested in their game world.
With the researching downtime, you can root among dusty bookcases, page through scrolls, and wallow in lore. This process begins with a conversation with your GM where you discuss what exactly you are looking for. For example, knowing that you will soon face off against a lich, you might try researching the life of the lich before it went all undead in hopes that you might learn where it hid its phylactery, or gain some other advantage.
Your GM determines if the info is available in the local area (doing research in a major city or prominent academy is going to be more fruitful than doing so in a basketweaving village), and how much time you need to spend to find it. This decision can encompass other limitations or hurdles, but in general the GM shouldn’t be too harsh here. The goal is to make research fun and epic, not a slog ending in disappointment.
Once the GM tells you the time involved, you spend at least 50 gp for each week spent researching. During this time, you attend lectures, leaf through libraries, conduct interviews, and gather your info. The cost of your research might increase depending on the nature of the information. The more secret the info, the more it’s gonna cost you.
At the end of the week, make an INT check using the skill closest to the type of knowledge you are looking for. This could be Arcana, History, Nature, or Religion. The GM can choose other areas as appropriate. A high result means you learn three clues, while a low result may mean you learn a clue you think is true, but leads to a dead end!
You can spend a clue immediately to have your GM give you one a concise, specific, true fact about the thing you researched (typically a creature, place, historical event, or item). You can also hold onto that clue, and spend it later to automatically succeed on an INT-based check about the research topic.
The whole goal of downtime activities is to increase your immersion in the game world and to make your time between adventures just as exciting as your actual quests!
Read more about downtime and all the Tales of the Valiant RPG innovations in the Player’s Guide!
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