On BitD p158, it says
“Choose downtime maneuvres and advance clocks for the factions you’re interested in right now … Later, when you turn your attention to a faction you’ve ignored for a while, go ahead and give them several downtime phases and project clock ticks to “catch up” to current events.”
I interpret that as “Each time the PCs take downtime, each faction should advance all its clocks and take one or two downtime actions. But for factions you’re not interested in right now, feel free to do this only in retrospect, when you think it would be interesting for them to do something now.” (i.e. for any programmers in the audience, it’s suggesting you do lazy evaluation of faction development).
A less rigid interpretation is that GMs should advance some factions each downtime, and try to advance all of them sometimes, but not worry too much about making sure they get their “fair share”.
Former will give more consistent behaviour of factions; latter is more tractable, especially given a large active set (e.g. the BitD book has detailed writeups for 26 factions).
Do we know John’s intent here? How is everyone else doing this?
Do the ones that matter now; when others eventually matter, play catch-up with what they’ve been doing off-screen.
Don’t advance all of them all the time. That’s, like, three different bad GM habits at once — getting caught up in minutia, don’t over complicate things, don’t let planning get out of control. (Yeah, those are written aimed at the players, but what’s good for the goose is good for the gander!)
Some of our GM best practices say you’re also meant to be a curious explorer of the game, who leads an interesting conversation with questions: you can’t do these things if every week you decide what everyone else is already doing off-screen. That’s not exploring, and there’s no room for inquiry.
Among our principles, we’re reminded that everything flows from the fiction, the shared narrative, imaginary space at the table: don’t create the world alone, in a vacuum, which is what will likely happen if one took Downtime actions for every faction every game session.
All that said, I think “each faction should advance all its clocks and take actions but feel free to do this in retrospect” is backwards. The default is, as said in the book, do a few — the ones that matter to the fiction, leaving room to inquire and explore at the table and not making too much work for ourselves and getting tunnel vision. Then, later, when others matter, get them caught up.
/sub
Anyone else do this differently?