Been thinking of ways to fit some of the really neat interlocking mechanical bits from Blades in the Dark into a looser play structure without clearly delineated phases of play. Here’s a few ways to maybe keep downtime actions without needing a capital-D Downtime phase. I’m mostly listing them here so I won’t have to dig through my notes app if I ever decide to pursue the idea further.
- Put a cooldown on it.
Every day/week/month/session you can take two downtime actions. It works for D&D 5th (well, for certain definitions of “works”), so why not here? I can envision a similar system of “rests” giving you access to different sets of downtime actions depending on location/duration/whatever. Use the Deprived rule from Into the Odd/Electric Bastionland for some real dungeon-crawly vibes without strict resource management. - Replenish on a fictional trigger.
When you return to the City, clear half your stress and take up to two downtime actions. Adjust specificity or difficulty to manage how often downtime actions happen. For bonus points, give each playbook a unique trigger that resets their downtime actions. - Increase risk of complications on multiple actions.
No real limit on how many downtime actions you can take, but you have to push your luck—each action has a risk of entanglements in addition to the result of your roll. Risk increases for each downtime action you take. Include some condition for resetting the risk or simply reset it when a complication occurs.
You could probably straight up steal the Entanglements roll from BitD using “number of downtime actions” instead of Heat to ramp up the risk as the number of actions increases. Reset the number whenever an entanglement occurs or when some time has passed. Alternately, build a dice pool based on the same number and roll it whenever you take a downtime action. If the entanglement roll is higher than the result of your downtime roll, an entanglement occurs. - GM makes a move after downtime actions.
Every time someone performs a downtime action, the GM ticks a clock, expends crew resources, brings a threat to bear, etc. Only limit is how much you’re willing to hurt. - Pay to use downtime actions.
Basically the existing 1 Coin/1 Rep per downtime activity but from the get-go. This probably turns Coin into Downtime Fuel™, plan accordingly. - Expend specific resources for actions.
To Acquire an Asset, expend a resource with the Commerce tag. To Indulge Vice, expend a resource with your vice purveyor’s tag. Heart: The City Beneath does this really well with “haunts” which let players “sell” resources with certain domains to clear specific types of stress. Haunts of a certain type also aren’t guaranteed to be present in every settlement, which seems easy to port to your Blades hack.
These obviously mix and match. For a D&D style game, I might give PCs access to a handful of “short rest” downtime actions (tick the healing clock, clear a small amount of stress, tick simple project clocks if it makes sense) for quick rests and “long rest” actions (heal completely, clear more stress, pursue more complicated long-term projects) once per day when they make camp. If you make camp somewhere unsafe, the GM makes an appropriate move for every downtime action unless you expend a resource with an appropriate tag to represent taking precautions.
I’m almost certain some combination of these already exist in FitD games out there. Let me know and I’ll link them!
NMBJ 