My Life As A Gamer: Time, Downtime, And The Campaign (Part Three)

(Citing the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition (AD&D1e) Player's Handbook (PHB) and Dungeon Master's Guide (DMG) as needed.)

(Monday's post is here, and yesterday's is here.)

Building Your Infrastructure

If you paid attention to the posts on recovering from injury and illness, as well as yesterday's post on spell research and item creation, then you should have noticed that all of this presumes a certain level of infrastructure. Scroll creation alone requires a sanctum to do the work, the means to produce the mmaterial it will be inscribed upon, and the skill to make the special quill and ink required to transfer the spell into the scroll.

There is no reason for why this cannot be done piecemeal by characters as they go, rather than presume that it is the sole province of high-level characters. Spell-casters can set up a sheep farm for a regular supply of vellum for scroll creation early on. Fighters can secure an armorer and install him into their camp or fort. Assassins can secure the services of an apothecary. You get the idea.

Infrastructure is not just building structures and travelways. It is also securing the personnel necessary to make certain things possible, or work to best effect; a hospice works best with an herbalist, an apothecary, and a chirurgeon on staff in addition to any Clerics or Druids- each of which needs to be fed, clothed, housed, and supplied.

This isn't the sexy side of the game. Unlike making items or training, the effect on your man's effectiveness is neither direct nor immediate. Instead, the players that pay attention to this are the skilled and savvy players that grasp the necessity of ensuring that their men have what they require to achieve the campaign objectives that they set out to achieve- again, logistics.

Time And Opportunity

Unlike training or crafting, construction's downtime commitment--like its benefits--are indirect. Your man needs to spend the time to find the personnel and recruit them. (DMG p.28-34) Then he needs to sees to their housing and provision, and secure transit for them from the point of recruitment to where they are to work if necessary.

This is repeated with securing the raw materials needed to do your construction and, if necessary, securing transit from where those materials are gathered to where they are needed.

You see how this, by itself, can commit your man to being locked down for days, weeks, even months at a time by itself. The savvy will recruit a Henchman or relevant expert Hireling first and delegate further recruitment to them so they can focus on other concerns.

The consequence is that a player will begin to think in terms comparable to a senior officer or similar official; "What do I need to handle myself, what can be delegated, and what are the timelines to completion for various elements of the project?" DMs need to prepare for this mindset shift.

DMs also need to be forthright and honest with players when it comes to infrastructure; if a player wants his Illuionist to be able to make a wand, then the DM must tell that player what resources and assistance will be required to make it happen so that the player can devise a plan to satisfy those requirements and execute it.

Rare materials, esoteric acumen, raw manpower, etc. are all things that come up in this discussion; players should be prepared to spend time away from the table having their men handle this issues by some means or another.

So, how long does the actual building take?

DMG p. 106 answers this in a most useful manner. It splits baseline figures by Soil, Stone, and Wood. Base time is in weeks; X weeks to build Y amount of structure given Z manpower and gold paid. This baseline acts as an equation that the DM can use to figure out the specific construction time requirement for a specific structure; throw men or gold at it to make it faster, make it bigger to take longer. Sample timelines for common strongholds are given (in years and months; these are not easy projects.

Note that, as is often the case, the time and costs are abstractions that account for a lot of little details; attention is put on major mission-critical elements such as the presence of a necessary professional or a favorable location. A Roman legion using its personnel to construct a wood palliside and moat is still going to shell out a lot of gold to see it done in game terms because the treasure expenditure accounts for much of what goes into that work.

Commentary

As I said above, this is not the sexy stuff. This is what needs to be done to be able to do the sexy stuff. DMs are wise to encourage the use of downtime for these ends, and to do checks as necessary to see if hostile parties notice infrastructure projects moving apace that threaten their interests; those hostile parties' responses are going to generate playable scenarios, meaning that this not-so-sexy downtime stuff can and does organically and emergently generate happy fun gameplay at the table.

Orcs try to raid your mining camps to steal the ore--be it gold, silver, iron, tin, or whatever--and take your men as slaves. Treants take exception to your logging camp, so you go forth to see if you can make a deal (or just cut them down). The Magic-User needs the quill from a roc and the blood of a dragon to inscribe a scroll of the spell he's researching, so off you go into the mountains.

If there is "one easy trick" to making the most of this sort of action it is to look for playable scenarios and pounce when they come up- especially if they are playable, but are opportunities afforded to characters other than the one(s) that initiated this infrastructure project. Your Paladin decides to start hunting down a sage that can direct him to a Holy Avenger, and a Gnoll tribe appeared on the other side of his freehold? Time to send out the B Team. You get the idea.

This is part of the overall Perpetual Scenario Generator mechaism that this game has at its heart. Do not disdain it.

And as I am talking a lot about things that, in the real world, fall into Intelligence work I think it's time to talk Spies, Heists, and Assassination tomorrow.