Roleplaying Games
RPG Campaigns at a Slower Pace
These days many RPG campaigns I’m playing seem to run at a breakneck pace. Especially in D&D the characters can reach tenth level in a year of weekly play, but in the campaign world barely weeks have passed. This can lead to a feeling of exhaustion as the action is compressed. There is no time for reflection, discussion and growth for the characters.
The pace can be justified for a game seeking the intensity of “24”. There is no time to think, and even though we as participants can enjoy the game at our leisure, the life of our characters is continuous drama, action and pressure. At the same time it can lead to a temporal disconnect similar to “web comic time”. We as players grow and explore life, but our characters are stuck in the same week session after session. In longer campaigns the rate of time flow can become widely separated. The character remains the same age as we grow older.
Slowing Down
A slower pace can be beneficial. It gives us a chance to see the characters and their world grow and change without having to stay in the same campaign for years. To slow down the game we can use, for example, the need to travel, longer recovery times and other needs for down time. In a world without flight or teleportation, getting from place to place takes days and weeks. Using options for slower healing, magical recovery and repairs, the characters will have to spend more than a night to get ready for their next adventure. And of course there is no need for the next adventure to begin straight after the previous one. Even in a “monster of the week” type campaign, the characters deserve some time off from dangers.
The Importance of Down Time
Classics like Pendragon and Ars Magica have built-in structure for pacing; There’s an adventure every year and then the annual down time for research or growing your demesne. With a yearly adventure time, the campaign passes fast and generations can change in a reasonable time. The characters evolve and their relation to the world and its other inhabitants evolve too. And their actions change the world around them, shaping it to better or worse.
Practice
Last year I started two campaigns deliberately on this model. Even though both are episodic and the adventures aren’t related to each other, down time lets the characters experience them as parts of a continuing saga.
In “Dawn of Arcanum” (19th Century Mage: The Ascension) there is a strict rule of one adventure per year. The adventures take only a few days, but their fallout can last for years. As the characters are amateur researchers, they spend months in libraries finding clues to explain their experiences. They’ve had time to learn new skills, to travel and to get married. At the same time they know that something important is going to happen at the turn of the Century and can prepare for it.
“Tristhmus Adventurers’ Guild” has it’s down time set in synchronization with real time; Every day between sessions the game time advances by one week. This has allowed for several one-session adventures between down time. The characters have had a chance to find more rumours and facts about their quests before engaging in them. They’ve also spent time doing mundane work to earn extra gold and spent it inscribing spell scrolls in preparation for the adventures.
Experience
Both campaigns have succeeded in turning the usual temporal shift the other way round. Now we don’t have to play each week and still worry about real life running ahead of the game world. The number of activities the characters can participate in during the down time should be limited. Not in variety, as there are infinite things they can get to, but just the number of discrete things they can concentrate on. Otherwise running the down time itself will take more than one session.
If you want to handle the down time in the same session as an adventure (either after the previous one or before the new one), you should allow only one major activity and one or two minor ones. The major activity is what occupies the character for most of the down time. Minor activities are those that don’t take more than a few days.
How many activities per character you can handle in a down time session depends on the number of players and how much role-playing is involved. I tried setting the limit to five major and five minor for “Dawn of Arcanum”, but often the characters would push for more even if their chances of success were penalized for it. There just seemed to be so much to do. With more than 20 of each activity to handle, one down time session was never enough. The minor ones could take more time to play than major activities, as there was often more role-playing in them. If you need to keep the down time to a single session between adventures, I would suggest limiting the total number of activities to five per character. That limit should be strict and the players should think about having less if possible.
Discussion
In summary, how you allot the time in a session is something that you should discuss with your gaming group. With some groups, handling down time between adventures is something they want to concentrate on. Other groups can be happy with a single activity resolved with a single dice roll at the beginning of a game session. If only some players want to spend time in down time, maybe you can handle those together outside of game sessions through Discord.
