Michael Esperum mentioned in another thread that he and his players use Downtime to explore the lives of their scoundrels outside of the meat of the story. It made me realize that my players do a little bit of that when they indulge their vice but the roleplay is usually no more complex than “I go gambling in Brightstone and work off… 3 Stress.”
I have two questions:
1. Compared to other phases of play, how much roleplay/narration do you folks encounter in your Downtime phases?
2. On average, how long is a Free Play-Score-Downtime cycle at your table?
I ask the second question because at my table it tends to be 2-2.5 hours. While I would like to get more roleplay into the Downtime phase, I’d also like to trim down the overall time it takes to play a session to a reliably 2-hour timeframe.
Any tips or wisdom from the community?
My cycle times varied depending on score complexity. I’d usually try to alternate complex and simple scores, aiming for two cycles a session, meaning 3-4 hours.
Downtime roleplay mostly came when players pursued personal long term projects, or acquiring certain abstract assets. I limited most Gather Info business and just encouraged flashbacks instead.
I actually saw the most character-defining roleplay moments through wonderful devil’s bargains (usually suggested by themselves or other players) that they ran with and turned into bigger deals. They’d end up expressing beliefs, background, heritage, and drives through Devil’s Bargains like “I realize too late that the woman I just pushed out the window was my sister” or “I suffer a crisis of faith in the sacred geometry”
I generally try to start each session by framing a scene or two of the PCs interacting with named NPCs. I try to use these to explore how the PCs actions have inpacted the NPCs lives, and foreshadow how events occuring off screen might impact the PCs lives. This all occurs in Freeplay.
We tend to have 2 hours – 2.5 hours sessions. Our usual cycle is to have a couple sessions of score + advancement, and a couple sessions of downtime + free play + deciding on next score.
Usually we tend to play out a lot the downtime activities, and adding a couple encounters on the way.
For example, one of the players reduces stress by meeting interesting people in the Centuralia, and flirting with them.
We tend to play collectively the various flirting scenes – quite often the romantic interest end up being caught in the net of friends and enemies of the cult.
Last session, Lord Ashford tried to get more information about vampirism from his quite-enstranged family – we played out the scene where he and his mother get separated by order of his draconic father (well, until he gets to become a vampire – then the father will ask him to share the secret in exchange of the family favor).
Our Whisper is a second generation Tycherosi immigrant who is not really able to fit in Akorosi society. To recover stress she went to her childhood home, to remember all the nice time when she still had a place in the world – the player described extensively her feeling and old belonging – then we played out a scene with the de facto leader of the tycherosi community, asking her favors for the upcoming traditional Demon Hunt.
The session before, Rafello of the Circle of the flame contacted Midas, our Spider, gently asking them to excavate relic from their newly conquered Turf… or else. It was quite a tense scene, since
both the Spider and Rafello were personally attracted to each other, but forced from their gangs to be in a tense situation.
I do 3-3.5 hour sessions. We have to finish a full cycle in one session as we don’t always have the same players week-to-week.
Our downtime tends to be mechanical with some light third-person narration. Very rarely do we go in character. This is me going on what my players want as I ask for more details and give opportunities to go in character but they like to keep it fast and loose, which I have no problem with (as long as they establish the narrative details, as I can use those to complicate their lives.)
My players’ downtimes are almost never what you described (indulge, clear stress, repeat/etc).
It’s worth mentioning at this point that it wasn’t always this, until I noticed that rules say that action rolls occur during downtime as well, and will often be a requirement when players do anything that they aren’t in a position to do already.
So if they want to repair the relationship with one of their friends that Was “close,” but isn’t anymore because they’re upset.. the PC might be able to Sway that friend to overlook whatever happened (with an action roll, and evaluation of position and effect as usual), then be able to spend a DTA to work on a long-term project to make them close again.
I.E. downtime activities don’t elide any of the fiction required to do things, they just guarantee you a forward result when you’re already in position to do them. Ultimately it is up to the GM whether an action roll is required or not based on what is happening, so that (hopefully) the fiction actually does come first.
re: your 2nd question
I’ve had 3 hour sessions that were all down time before, but this is rare (a lot was desired). Most of mine end up taking about an hour, hour and a half.
An hour and a half! Wow! I’d love to move at that kind of pace.
It’s surprising that yours move so slow. Unless you make the mistake I did.. early on I thought that players could combine teamwork with downtime activity rolls -they can’t (and really shouldn’t want to, since it costs them more than two players spending a downtime activity each on the same thing). This led to much unnecessary discussion, and once I reread, downtime decision-making was much smoother
Mark Cleveland Massengale I chatted with one of my players and this is our best guess for how much time we spend on each phase:
Free Play: 45-60 minutes
Score: 45-60 minutes
Downtime: 20-40 minutes
One of my players is a real roleplayer and he’s playing a Slide. The group usually runs aggressive Scores, so he uses Free Play as his moment to shine: conversing with contacts, revealing the character of the city, etc. The Score usually involves a few consultations of the rulebook but there’s a lot of descriptive narration and RP there too. The Downtime phase is “board gamey.” In terms of bookkeeping and amount of RP, it reminds me more of Arkham Horror than a full-fledged RPG.
oh, I misunderstood your posted question :X It’s way longer than I said..
Haha, I see! Did you think I was only asking about how long it takes to do Downtime?
Mark said his downtime takes 1.5-3 hours and I think you interpreted that as his whole free play/score/downtime cycle only taking 1.5 hours. 🙂
I assume your time is very tight but I’m surprised that you want to get your game cycles under 2-2.5 hours. That already seems pretty hectic to me!
Adam Bloom all my gamers tend to be either busy adults, very casual, or both, so quick play sessions are ideal. I love a good 3-4 hour game session, but I’m the exception among most of the people I play with. Being able to condense things down to 2 hours would do a lot to keep my players engaged.