For me, when I was running a monthly Changeling larp in my uni town, downtime was sometimes awesome, a great way to deepen the game world and to encourage character development and angst. This was when it went according to plan and people downtimed by the deadline, which was a week before game.
What generally happened was that nobody met the downtime deadline, and then the day before game, while I was trying to make sure there would be plot the next day, my inbox would explode with people sending me downtimes that I would have to talk to other GMs about and would take ages to actually process. That was irritating, and soured my view of the whole process.
It can be awesome and wonderful and fun, but handle with care.
Downtime is effort; sometimes for the players and definitely for the organisers. Its strength is that it fleshes out the gameworld and makes it feel like it exists beyond Time In. Its weakness is that can distract and detract from the Time In Experience
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Downtime runs into issues when an individual's downtime activity adversely affects the course of another character's game, whether that be directly ("I burgle X's house, seduce his wife, steal his lammies and nail his budgie to the wall"), or indirectly, ("I rob Fort Knox and thus have all the gold in the world"). If you have a downtime, you therefore either need to be extremely restrictive about what can happen in it, or have some sort of way for deciding what happens when the paths of two characters cross. - and whether that system is the refs chatting to one another or a highly complex computerised system involving mathematical formulae, you'll get complaints. Personally, I liked the old TT system - talk to refs and they decide what, if anything happens, but if you choose to use a downtime system of any sort, I think that there are two points which you need to bear in mind: 1) whilst what happens in downtime could have an impact on uptime, it should support the live roleplaying not determine it - nobody should be able to gain an
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I agree a bit on point 1 except that there will always be some people who have an advantage over others because they have worked out how to "play the system", but thats a problem for uptime as well as downtime (see also: how some people get better ritual results than others at LT). I am not sure you can entirely regulate that - but the point about downtime informing uptime rather than resolving it is absolutely spot on.
I absolutely and 100% agree with Gareth about point 2. However, it is a problem for the "talk to a ref and get a result" type of TT model when, unless it is Very Well Documented, you may have two different interpretations as to what something looks like or how easy/hard a specific task is. The worst case is players trying to work out which referee to talk to in order to get the downtime outcome they want.
Regarding the money and facilties thing in TT, after me complaining about that a lot and then eventually leaving for unrelated (mostly) reasons, the same people who'd ardently supported it then turned round and started complaining about it because they realised it was impacting on their ability to just have fun while very busy in life outside TT
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I don't suppose you can give more detail on what Empire is planning, can you? I haven't been following it.Empire aims to cater for 700+ people at least 3 times a year. I do not think that what they have in mind would suit your model, but seeing as you asked
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What generally happened was that nobody met the downtime deadline, and then the day before game, while I was trying to make sure there would be plot the next day, my inbox would explode with people sending me downtimes that I would have to talk to other GMs about and would take ages to actually process. That was irritating, and soured my view of the whole process.
It can be awesome and wonderful and fun, but handle with care.
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Personally, I liked the old TT system - talk to refs and they decide what, if anything happens, but if you choose to use a downtime system of any sort, I think that there are two points which you need to bear in mind:
1) whilst what happens in downtime could have an impact on uptime, it should support the live roleplaying not determine it - nobody should be able to gain an ( ... )
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I absolutely and 100% agree with Gareth about point 2. However, it is a problem for the "talk to a ref and get a result" type of TT model when, unless it is Very Well Documented, you may have two different interpretations as to what something looks like or how easy/hard a specific task is. The worst case is players trying to work out which referee to talk to in order to get the downtime outcome they want.
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