Game Theory – Learning from Blades in the Dark Downtime

So I recently ranted about the weakness of downtime in Mothership and I’ve seen many a D&D blog offering alternatives and redesigns for downtime there. I haven’t sat down to read in detail the D&D 5.5 take, but I’ve been hearing what others have had to say about Bastions. Meanwhile, Pathfinder in typical crunchy fashion has an entire handbook to campaign design right down to building that kingdom and how to determine the taxation system to pay for a new wizard’s tower and a trade road.

When looking at downtimes, I’ve become a huge fan of how Blades in the Dark (BitD) approaches it. Somehow it manages to be abstract yet very mechanical in it’s approach and the recent Deep Cuts supplement has retooled aspects to smooth out some of the bumpier bits. In past, for D&D I tried a couple of different homebrew rules and third party products for crafting, pick up work, building up bases, and making connections. Mostly I used a skill challenge model, breaking down things into skill roll successes towards one of these goals, modified by gold or PCs working together. It was a mish mash that I still pull from for systems that seem to best fit the campaign I’m running. So yet again, I’m looking at taking a system I like and trying to shoehorn (or at least pick bits from) into another system it was never intended to be part of.

Through many years of RPG games, I recognize how many players are intent on filling every last moment of character time with activity. Handling it as an abstraction may be very artificial but it simplifies matters immensely. Blades limits it to two activities (though by paying coin or reputation a PC may perform additional downtime activities) so it’s no longer a mage spending 8 hours copying scrolls to learn and seeking to squeeze in some gambling for gold, crafting a potion, and researching the next dungeon to be explored before being forced to take an 8 hour overnight rest. The mechanics driven video gamer in me does really like the “put X hours and Y gold in and produce item Z at the end” formulas follwed by the majority of crafting supplements out there, but sometimes it’s better to leave the crunchy math to a minimum …

Forged in the Dark (FitD) is the family of games that took the BitD mechanics and applied them to various settings like space opera (Scum & Villainy), the weird west (Fistful of Darkness), dark fantasy armies (Band of Blades), courtly intrigue (Court of Blades), and pirates (Sea of Dead Men) to name a few plus a whole bunch of partially finished home brews that you can find once you start looking. Despite these differences, the downtime phase still stays pretty constant across them.

• Acquire Asset: Spend time and coin to get something needed, be it an object, an expert, or vehicle for temporary use. Deep Cuts modifies it a bit (for the better IMHO) but still the essence is to get a temporary benefit. I appreciate the abstraction for something special or not normally available instead of an hour spent in roleplaying the haggling with a merchant.
• Long Term Project: Spend time and coin to work towards finishing something big and permanent, like researching a new ritual or gaining a contact or crafting an object. It will probably take a few downtimes to see this to the finish. Some systems are very crunchy in approaching this (Pathfinder) which is great for really concrete set ups rather than the GM and player creating a unique step by step creation method each time.
• Recover: FitD games are not games of drinking magic potions to recover. It takes time and resources to recover from harm, be it physical or magical or even social. In D&D and similar games, healing health happens automatically during the adventure though some restrict how much regular healing can happen during an adventure and only allows full healing when at a safe place of rest. Things like curses, damage to stats, loss of limbs, and recently dead usually requires something more than a night’s sleep.

• Train: Invest time into getting better at something. BitD is all about gaining experience in doing desperate things and roleplay triggers (also see Powered by the Apocalypse for a similar experience mechanic). D&D for a short while had something like this to gain XP towards the next level, learning new skills, and sometimes for levelling up. It’s not the only way to improve but allows for some additional character development outside an adventure. In a d20 style game, I could totally see this being used towards some bonuses to a specific skill for the next adventure.

Blades in the Dark and company have a few extra activities available that are appropriate to the setting and mechanics, Reducing Heat and Indulge Vice (Reduce Stress). Heat being a mechanic that if allowed to get too large will lead to entanglements and complications like being wanted by the law, and Stress as a resource that can be spent to improve rolls or gain advantage but too much will burden the character with Trauma and eventually retire the character if downtime isn’t spent to reduce it.

I am strongly considering for Mothership introducing a mechanic to gain stress for advantage on rolling because it doesn’t have much in the way of gaining an advantage beyond the GM saying that a Player gains it for some sort of narrative reason like a surprise attack or multiple characters working together. Alien RPG has something like this as I understand it, using special dice to improve the odds of success but also carrying their own risk of stressing out, something very appropriate to the genre.

At the heart of FitD and Powered by the Apocalypse are progress clocks, segements to track how far along each of these activities has gotten. The more complex or involved, the more segments required. At your table, this might be coin spent or successful skill checks to fill in another segment (double for crits). You might already be using something like this for skill challenges (3 success before 3 failures in a simple skill challenge, 5 successes before 3 for something more complex, and so on).

The risk of trying to port this into a simple system like Mothership or D&D is that it’s yet another mechanic to remember, a common critique of FitD feeling like there are three mini games with their own rules being played. However, being not satsified with the existing mechanic in these games, I’m gonna try it out and see how it goes.