Resources / Downtime

[elf23]

Interesting. What's the downside to failing the Wealth check, if it's not enough to make you lose Wealth?

Yeah, that's something i wasn't sure about. I guess you can try again at a lower living expense (eventually anyone can Take 5 to succeed at Destitute level - actually Poor should maybe be more than Difficulty 5 then). But i'm not sure if there should be some additional penalty for failing.

I also wondered if this could tie in to Reputation, somehow...

[The Shadow]

I'd think it would make more sense to just do it as "taxes". ie, for every 10 Time points you're awarded, you lose 0 Wealth if you're living within your means, and 1 if you're not.

However, I wonder if this subsystem is really needed. The whole point of having a Wealth system is that it abstracts away things like living expenses.

By the way, I've added this thread to the Narrative True20 Project.

[elf23]

I'd think it would make more sense to just do it as "taxes". ie, for every 10 Time points you're awarded, you lose 0 Wealth if you're living within your means, and 1 if you're not.

Yes, i did consider that... Though i thought that using the existing purchasing rules (where the amount of Wealth you lose depends both on the cost of the item, and how much it as above your current Wealth) seemed appropriate.

A simple tax would be easier though, for sure.

The thinking behind this is that i began to forsee an endless Wealth gain spiral, with Heroes spending Time for profession checks *and* getting Wealth awards. It seems to me that the Wealth system is *very* generous - that it's really easy to buy very expensive items, even when you don't have much Wealth, so there's not the accompanying Wealth decrease spiral. (To be honest i'm not convinced that the Wealth system really works that well. But that's another discussion...)

However, I wonder if this subsystem is really needed. The whole point of having a Wealth system is that it abstracts away things like living expenses.

I wonder too... But i also wonder whether Wealth is *still* abstracted away in the same manner, with the new downtime system.

One point is that in the RAW the assumption is that Heroes are using their downtime for a mixture of all the things we've codified in this thread (healing, recovering Conviction, perhaps level training, etc) - including a certain amount of general "making a living" (which doesn't result in an increase in Wealth, it's just enough to pay whatever living expenses they have and get by). But now we've made all this explicit a player *can* choose to not spend any of their downtime on gaining Wealth. Indeed i think players are quite likely to choose to do this - if you've got a Wealth of say 7, and you don't have any specific big purchases in mind, there's not much point spending Time on profession checks, things like Conviction recovery or re-rolls are much more interesting.

[dataweaver]

By the way, I've added this thread to the Narrative True20 Project.

Thank you for doing so; I missed this topic because it wasn't in there.

A few thoughts off the top of my head:

Reputation - this shouldn't necessarily be profession-related. To me, Reputation is an abstract measure that includes how much social networking your character has done. As such, I'd prefer the option of basing Reputation development on Cha checks (or perhaps Cha-based skill checks?) rather than professional skills. (Or should this be a separate resource, representing how much Influence you have? Perhaps Influence is a more general concept that Reputation, with Reputation with "Influence with the general public", as opposed to "Influence with the police", "Influence with the military", "Influence on the street", etc.)

And like Wealth, there's the downside that if you don't spend time maintaining friendships and contacts, they tend to fade away. I'm inclined to levy taxes on Time based on how much Wealth and Reputation you have, representing how much of your downtime you have to devote to paying the bills or staying in the public eye. You can't spend Time to develop new Wealth or Reputation until you've paid the tax; and if you don't pay it, the appropriate resource atrophies. If your Wealth ends up getting too high, the amount that it taxes your Time might even end up exceeding 100%, at which point you clearly have unsustainable Wealth.

You might have feats that lower or eliminate these tax rates, such as a Wealth-related feat that represents having a trust fund or a CFO who handles the day-to-day affairs of your finances, freeing up your Time for more productive pursuits; but without them, you could very well end up spending most of your Time trying to hold onto what you have - which could be a very useful plot point. (Conversely, you might have a M&M-like Drawback or Complication that represents a crushing debt that someone's holding over your head.)

You might conceivably even have a tax relating to your Conviction, on the basis that "all work and no play, yadda yadda yadda." In particular, the more your banked Conviction exceeds the limit set by your level, the more of your Time you need to spend keeping it up there.

IMHO, Resource-related Feats (and Drawbacks, if you include the concept) should operate independent of Level every bit as much as the Resources themselves do: acquiring them should be a matter of Time and roleplay.

The trick would be to do all of this without getting overly complicated...

--

And I definitely like Shadow's suggestion from a few pages back to include an optional rule that lets you spend Time to advance your character's level. As I mentioned in Other "Advancement" Motifs, one major reason why experience levels tend to plateau in reality is that time spent training for a job is not time spent on the job, and vice versa: most people train up to the level of competence needed to be competitive at their chosen vocation, and then dedicate their time to being competitive. And after a while, you end up at a point of diminishing returns, where the time and money involved in improving your skills isn't worth the comparatively meager increase in productivity that comes from it.

--

A final idea that I'd like to suggest is the possibility of spending Conviction to supplement Time, usually through some sort of montage where the character ends up completing the "downtime activity" (such as Crafting or training) in an (almost?) unbelievably short amount of time: an example (in terms of training) would be the protagonist from Star Dust, who starts the movie almost unbelievably incompetent (he gets beaten in a fight by a ninety-year-old man), finds a mentor, and trains up his skills to the point that he's swashbuckling with the best of them - all in the course of a few weeks.

OTOH, this could be handled by the GM being exceedingly generous in awarding Time to this guy, and/or by granting him free levels during the montage; so maybe not.

[elf23]

And like Wealth, there's the downside that if you don't spend time maintaining friendships and contacts, they tend to fade away. I'm inclined to levy taxes on Time based on how much Wealth and Reputation you have, representing how much of your downtime you have to devote to paying the bills or staying in the public eye. You can't spend Time to develop new Wealth or Reputation until you've paid the tax; and if you don't pay it, the appropriate resource atrophies. If your Wealth ends up getting too high, the amount that it taxes your Time might even end up exceeding 100%, at which point you clearly have unsustainable Wealth.

I very much like the idea that all resources can decrease unless you put effort into maintaining them!

Taxing Time instead of directly taxing the resource is an interesting idea as well. Talking about Wealth, i think this does depend on the kind of Wealth you have though - whether your wealth is produced by a flourishing business empire (which obviously takes time and effort to keep going), or whether you just have a huge pile of gold pieces in a chest.

You might conceivably even have a tax relating to your Conviction, on the basis that "all work and no play, yadda yadda yadda." In particular, the more your banked Conviction exceeds the limit set by your level, the more of your Time you need to spend keeping it up there.

That could work really nicely if Conviction was uncapped. (I'm currently keeping it with the normal limit, so as not to be caught in a Conviction explosion!)

You might have feats that lower or eliminate these tax rates, such as a Wealth-related feat that represents having a trust fund or a CFO who handles the day-to-day affairs of your finances, freeing up your Time for more productive pursuits; but without them, you could very well end up spending most of your Time trying to hold onto what you have - which could be a very useful plot point. (Conversely, you might have a M&M-like Drawback or Complication that represents a crushing debt that someone's holding over your head.)

Also a very good idea!

A final idea that I'd like to suggest is the possibility of spending Conviction to supplement Time

This could partly be modelled by using Conviction to perform a Fast Craft challenge (say) without the penalty to the skill check.

Spending Conviction during downtime, that's something we've not touched on yet. Instinctively it feels like you shouldn't be able to, unless an actual scene emerges from some downtime activity.

But the principle of putting a lot of your energy (Conviction) into some downtime activity sounds like it could open up some interesting possibilities.

[dataweaver]

The thinking behind this is that i began to forsee an endless Wealth gain spiral, with Heroes spending Time for profession checks *and* getting Wealth awards. It seems to me that the Wealth system is *very* generous - that it's really easy to buy very expensive items, even when you don't have much Wealth, so there's not the accompanying Wealth decrease spiral. (To be honest I'm not convinced that the Wealth system really works that well. But that's another discussion...)

Yeah; that was my thinking, too.

However, I wonder if this subsystem is really needed. The whole point of having a Wealth system is that it abstracts away things like living expenses.

I wonder too... But i also wonder whether Wealth is *still* abstracted away in the same manner, with the new downtime system.

One point is that in the RAW the assumption is that Heroes are using their downtime for a mixture of all the things we've codified in this thread (healing, recovering Conviction, perhaps level training, etc) - including a certain amount of general "making a living" (which doesn't result in an increase in Wealth, it's just enough to pay whatever living expenses they have and get by). But now we've made all this explicit a player *can* choose to not spend any of their downtime on gaining Wealth. Indeed i think players are quite likely to choose to do this - if you've got a Wealth of say 7, and you don't have any specific big purchases in mind, there's not much point spending Time on profession checks, things like Conviction recovery or re-rolls are much more interesting.

Agreed.

Perhaps one possibility would be to say that every character has sustainable levels for each of his Resources (Wealth, Reputation, and Conviction, for the time being); we assume that the usual Time awards abstract out the time that would be needed to maintain these levels. But if the character is operating outside of those levels, then Time explicitly comes into play. If the character's current level in one of these areas is higher than his sustainable level, he has to pay a fraction of his Time to maintain that higher level, with the portion getting larger the more he exceeds his sustainable limits. Conversely, the character may choose (or be forced) to operate at a lower level in one of these areas, risking the possibility that his sustainable level might drop (e.g., he might lose his job) in order to free up some more Time for some crucial project.

This replaces my earlier suggestion about Feats and Drawbacks that affect the amount of tax; instead, you raise your sustainable level in the resource in question, to represent being able to do more in the same time. This does leave the question about how one would increase one's sustainable Wealth or Reputation, of course. Conceptually, it's easy, as with my examples in the aforementioned suggestion; but what about the mechanics? (Conviction is another matter, which I've recently addressed in Rethinking Conviction.)

Note that this also addresses the issue of the Conviction cap: it's no longer a cap, per se; but the more you exceed it, the less you'll be able to do with your downtime (because you're spending more of your downtime "carousing" in order to maintain the higher-than-normal level).

Taxing Time instead of directly taxing the resource is an interesting idea as well. Talking about Wealth, i think this does depend on the kind of Wealth you have though - whether your wealth is produced by a flourishing business empire (which obviously takes time and effort to keep going), or whether you just have a huge pile of gold pieces in a chest.

You have a point there. IMHO, Wealth represents cash flow more than it does a pool of money; it wouldn't represent a chest full of gold pieces. Likewise, you might make a distinction between the ongoing relationships represented by Reputation and one-time "favors owed". Things like buried treasure and favors would be outside the scope of the "sustainable resources" issue, possibly better handled as items on the equipment list that can be traded in for temporary bonuses to Wealth or Reputation, if they get tracked at all.

[The Shadow]

Some really interesting ideas here, guys! But I think they would benefit from a KISS. :)

(Oh, and dataweaver, I'm not sure if you're aware of the extended discussion we've had in these parts on Improving Reputation.)

The difference between a pot of gold and a trust fund is that a trust fund is the gift that keeps on giving. If you invest your gold in stocks or whatever, it gives a consistent, if lower, return.

So let's say that every time you get a Wealth award, you can either add it to your Wealth as-is, or you can double it and spend it on individual Wealth checks, dividing it up as you choose. ie, if you get a +4 Wealth award, you have a +8 bonus to play with - you could put all +8 on one check, or +4 on one and +2 on two others, or as you please.

The same could be done with Reputation. If you get a +4 Reputation award, you can use it to boost your fame hither and yon... or you could get +8 to capitalize specifically on the event that gained you the award, in specific Reputation checks. (I personally would require that the specific event be referenced, and it wouldn't work if the guys you're using the Reputation on have no way of knowing about it.)

Now, on to over-generous Wealth. I have long suspected that the Wealth-by-level system is excessively generous. However, in this existing Time system, I don't think it is. There are *so many* interesting things to spend Time on besides Wealth! Unless someone opts to specialize in being rich, I don't see it coming up very much.

dataweaver's "sustainable levels" strike me as being much better than a tax. (There's a limit to how much tracking of Resources I want to do.) They have the added benefit of being easily tweakable for genre, campaign, and by feats and such.

However, doesn't Wealth already do this? I mean, if you make big purchases, your Wealth decreases.

EDIT: Oh, and if we uncap Conviction, how will this affect Heroic Archetype levels? I'll bring this up over on the appropriate thread.

My initial thought is that Archetype Level might influence your "sustainable level" of Conviction, rather than give a hard cap. And/or make it easier to Recover Conviction.

[elf23]

By the way, does anyone have an opinion on whether the "points" would be better known as:

• Time points
• Time
• Downtime points
• Downtime

We've been going with the first so far, but i feel like i actually favour the last option. The game generally tends to avoid calling things "X points", so it'd be nice to stick with that convention.

[The Shadow]

I'm cool with Downtime.

[elf23]

Actually i am wondering now whether Downtime, rather than being a pool of points, would work better as a bonus used to make checks to "purchase stuff" - in the same way as Wealth and the new Reputation work? It seems like it's getting a little bit too much book-keeping, the way we've got it phrased at the moment.

So you'd make Downtime checks to purchase:

• Wealth or Reputation gains (probably the gain would be equal to one fifth your professional skill rank)
• Conviction
• Recovery from conditions
• Crafted items (same Difficulty as Craft check?)
• Wealth check Take 20s (mirroring the use of Reputation to Take 20 on an interaction skill)
• Re-rolls on checks (...or this could be rephrased as a +10 bonus to a die roll of 10 or less - to avoid the situation of rolling a check, rolling a Downtime check, then re-rolling the original check! Or maybe it could even just allow a Take 20 on a check?)

And in the same way as with Wealth and Reputation, your available Downtime would be reduced for purchasing expensive things.

Then the Narrator could just award points of Downtime in a more abstract manner, without them necessarily having to tie into some literal amount of time having passed. It seems like it'd be a simpler system, more in keeping with the general movement towards Narrative True20, with less book-keeping, and more shared mechanics with other systems...

[ValhallaGH]

It seems like it'd be a simpler system, more in keeping with the general movement towards Narrative True20, with less book-keeping, and more shared mechanics with other systems...

All of which tells me that it's probably the way to go.

[The Shadow]

Can you clarify what you mean, elf23? Give an example, maybe? I'm not sure where you're going.

[elf23]

I'm afraid it's a total rethink! (But i think it'd be a much nicer system, as i said...)

Here's a couple of examples:

Craft
Current system - Downtime as a pool of points
You want to Craft a sword. It has cost 11, so it's materials cost is 7. You make a Wealth check against Difficulty 7 to purchase the materials. A sword is a Moderate complexity Craft check, so it requires materials cost / 2 * Downtime = 3(.5) Downtime. If you've got that much Downtime available you spend it, otherwise you wait till you've got some more.

Alternative - Downtime as a bonus for checks
The materials cost and Wealth check to Craft the sword are the same. Now, instead of Downtime being a pool of points representing (pretty literally) how many days of free time you've had lately, it represents generally how much free time you have available, and is used to make checks. (This is in exactly the same way as Wealth not representing literally how much money you have, but generally how able you are to purchase things.) So you'd have to make a Downtime check, perhaps (pulling numbers out of thin air now) against a Difficulty of 10 + (Complexity * materials cost). (Simple = 1, Moderate = 2, Complex = 3, Advanced = 4, maybe?) So a Moderate complexity sword would require a Downtime check of Difficulty 24. If you succeed you get the sword, if you fail you've not had enough time recently to make it. (You couldn't Take 20 on a Downtime check, btw.)

Purchasing something
Current system - Downtime as a pool of points
You want to buy a sniper rifle (cost 22). You've not got much money at the moment, so you think you'd better spend fair bit of time shopping around for a good deal (Take 20). This requires you to spend Downtime equal to the items' cost (22 days, assuming a sniper rifle is uncommon, say). If you've got that much Downtime available you spend it, otherwise you wait till you've got some more.

Alternative - Downtime as a bonus for checks
(Numbers, thin air...) Instead you'd make a Downtime check against Difficulty 22. If you succeed you have enough time to find a good deal and get to Take 20 on the Wealth check, if you fail you've not had enough time recently to find a deal. (Parallel with making a Reputation check to Take 20 on an interaction skill.)

(Note that in all cases making a Downtime check can cause you to lose Downtime, in the same way as making Wealth & Reputation checks. If the check Difficulty's above your Downtime you lose some, and if the Difficulty's above 15 you lose 1.)

The real advantage i see (apart from unified mechanics with the Wealth and Reputation systems) is that the Narrator can now say things like "ok a couple of weeks have passed where you've had some free time, you all gain +2 Downtime", rather than "ok 11 days have passed, gain 11 Downtime". The real nightmare (in my mind) being "a year has passed, gain 365 Downtime"... I mean, any reasonable Narrator would find a justification to not give out Downtime that literally, but i think the fact that (in the current/old system) it does have a literal measure is going to cause problems. Much nicer to make it deliberately abstract to allow for Narrator hand waving.

Parallel this with the Wealth system: "you get paid for the job, gain +2 Wealth" as opposed to "you get paid for the job, gain $99.99 each". It's a lot more vague, flexible and Narrative.

I'm not sure how recovery checks would work in this propsed new system. I think it might work better just tied in to the scene structure, rather than requiring Downtime (also as it's the one thing where you can't spend Downtime in retrospect). Perhaps with the addition (for less cinematic styles of play) of the idea of rest scenes which players can try to take to recover injuries. A lot of the time really you just want to say: "some time has passed, you all recover your injuries etc".

[The Shadow]

...I'm having trouble coming to grips with this.

Once you make a tough Downtime check, do you lose Downtime? Similar to how you lose Wealth?

I'm just not seeing how this is any easier; if anything it seems the opposite. But perhaps I'm just not getting it yet.

[elf23]

It's exactly like the Wealth and Reputation systems. (Which is also what propably makes it easier.)

It's also potentially easier as it doesn't require the same precision / literalness of book-keeping as the points based system.