Okay. Okay. I admit it. I have to change the downtime rules in my Mummy: the Resurrection port. I still think the idea behind them is sound – they’re mechanics for when the party settles in for a few days to learn new spells, do surveillance, work on projects, whatever.
The problem is that the PbtA gameplay loop makes it very hard to create a natural time to take a few days off. PbtA encourages you to keep throwing stuff at the players, to prevent those endless, boring moments when the plot can’t progress because the players are failing to do X, Y or Z that would lead to the next setpiece. In PbtA, if the players just sit around doing nothing, then the GM springs a GM move on them that forces them to take some kind of action. That’s a good thing – in fact, it’s a great thing. But it does mean that the action never really comes to a natural halt. The players never want to stop for several days, because there’s always something they need to deal with today.
Still, I think most of this can be solved by making downtime represent, say, half an hour instead of several days; not enough time for the shit to really hit the fan for lack of player attention. While I’m at it, I might as well make it so that rituals must be cast as downtime moves; that ties the two paces of the game into the magic system neatly. It does mean that mummies now heal downright scarily fast, but fine, fine – they can literally reconstitute themselves from a single speck of ash when resurrecting, it isn’t too far-fetched that they heal pretty fast the rest of the time too, just not to the point of wounds closing instantly the way they do for werewolves.
It still bugs me, though. Shouldn’t there be some way to make characters take breaks, even in PbtA? Dungeon World has “making camp” rules, I’m not sure why that works – yes, it’s an inherent part of standard fantasy, but urban fantasy (especially the sort that involves caster types) surely has “time to run to the library and look stuff up!” as an equally natural ingredient. So why do players never want to do that?
Oh well.
I’ve also started sketching on a Pendragon port. Which is also going to have downtime moves, because that’s a big part of the game. If I can’t figure out a way to get the players to return to their manors for the winter there, it may just be hopeless… Anyway, my starting point is to use the thirteen Trait pairs – Energetic/Lazy, Valorous/Cowardly, Trusting/Suspicious, etc – as the basis for all moves, making what sort of person you are matter more than your training (which will be more or less the same for all characters, after all – they’re all knights!). I’ll get back to you with any developments.
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