Hobby Corner: Downtime Rules for 5e

 A lot of credit for this goes to my gaming group! Their ideas and feedback over several years are the main reason the ruleset exists as it does. The other major influences are Frostgrave and Five Leagues from the Borderlands (both solo-playable skirmish games), which have downtime systems designed to be run without a DM. 

Making this set of rules similarly player-facing was a core design goal. Almost all of the activities can be administered by the players themselves, and can even be taken care of between sessions if you trust your group to report their dice rolls. This doesn’t mean that the system is meant to discourage RP during downtime. I try to be reactive to player preferences in this respect, and these rules can absolutely be the basis for a roleplay exchange overlayed on them.

The downtime system is also not meant to preclude non-listed activities, just to provide clear rules for the most common activities. There are a handful of additional activities that I’ve tested versions of, which may make their way back into future iterations of this ruleset. These include carousing, relaxation, and business investment. 

I do want to note a couple of specific activities that diverge from standard 5e rules, rather than expanding on them: (a) Mithral, adamantine, and adamant armor are somewhat different because of in-setting lore that played a central role in a campaign I ran. (b) Wizards can cast scrolls into their spellbooks, rather than scribing them in; this is because my downtime rules treat scroll-purchases as the mechanical expression of spell research, and I didn’t want to double charge wizards for it. 

Well, those are all the credits, explanations, and other meta-ramblings I can think of! I hope, if you try this downtime system, that you have a good time with it!