I’m a huge fan of Ryuutama, a natural fantasy TTRPG that’s sometimes described as “Hayao Miyazaki’s Oregon Trail.” (This blog is named after one of its main mechanics, if that tells you anything.)
You can use this system to run anything from cutesy, combat-free stories to “D&D-light” style adventures, and once you get into the rhythm of the dice rolls, it’s a breeze to run.
The general idea is that all of the classes are oriented around “NPC jobs”–minstrels, hunters, artisans, nobles, herbalists, and the like. Sure, there’s combat spells and Attack Type builds, but you’re not going to min-max your way into a combat juggernaut. (In fact, a lot of fans will tell you combat’s the weakest part of the game–but if you like homebrewing that’s a blank canvas you can play with.)
The four rolls
What Ryuutama does well is downtime, and it does that in a series of four rolls:
- A Condition check in the morning, which tells you how you’re feeling. This may give you bonuses or penalties to certain rolls if you roll extremely poorly or well, and it tells you how resistant to status effects and magic you are.
- A Travel check as you set out on the road, which tells you how comfortably you travel. A bad day of travel will cost you half your current HP.
- A Direction check as you travel, which tells you how well you find your way. Getting lost means you lose up to a day of travel.
- A Camping check as you bed down for the night, which tells you how well you recover HP and MP. A good Camping check can help offset a bad Travel check.
In a bad Ryuutama game (I’ve run some of those), it’s a slog through a series of four rolls that arbitrarily hurt or help you. In a good Ryuutama game, it’s four opportunities for improv prompts.
The three stages of an in-game day
These four rolls create a pattern for each in-game day, breaking them up into three stages:
- In the morning, you roll Condition. During this time, Healers can also leave camp (presumably as the rest of the party tears down) to forage for healing herbs.
- Traveling itself becomes a mechanic, where time on the road is a risk especially in more difficult terrain. A good night’s sleep in a warm inn bed suddenly becomes incredibly valuable.
- In the evening, you set up camp. Players have a chance to think about how they want to set up camp. During this time Hunters can leave camp to hunt–but if they do, they can’t support the Camping check.
In the Campfire Collection fan zine, I expanded the pattern set by the Hunter and Healer into a series of morning and evening downtime activities. Using these categories, you can slot in new downtime activities, such as a Noble or Minstrel translating an ancient tome or identifying a magic item.
I also expanded the Artisan’s Crafting skill into a more general framework for ongoing projects. Each project has a complexity (a number of steps required to finish) and a target number (the roll required to gain a step of progress).
These aren’t revolutionary concepts–D&D’s travel and crafting subsystems do similar things. But seeing the pattern explicitly laid out in Ryuutama’s rules and then building a framework around it really helped me be intentional about the way it affects a game’s rhythm and mechanics.
Using these concepts in other games
These are exactly the steps that tend to get passed over in a game like D&D. Sure, as a DM we’ll often ask players how they want to keep watch, but we often lose the more human moments of sitting around a campfire.
By making these discrete mechanical steps, Ryuutama helped me build a rhythm around these moments. In the process, I slow down a beat and think about how camp might look and feel for the night.
What are the PCs working on in the evening around camp? Who’s setting up camp? Are they building a fire? What kind and how big? What are they cooking? (That last one has been helpful in my recent campaign where hunting and cooking are a personal quest for one of the PCs.)
Now, I’m not going to suggest you implement Condition, Travel, Direction, and Camping checks in every TTRPG you run. Those can be a slog if you’re not using them as improv prompts. But they’re tools in your toolkit you can bring out when it’s helpful.
For example:
- Crafting on the road: I allow my D&D party to attempt crafting checks in camp for the night (assuming it makes sense for the project), but they do so at disadvantage since they’re only spending a few hours on it. A lower roll means they might not get many (or any) steps of progress, but over a week of travel it adds up.
- Teaching skills: My D&D party has been teaching each other Goblin, and they can use their evening to gain steps of progress.
- Travel and Camping checks for extreme terrain: While traveling through a rarely-traveled stretch of wild forest, I had my players make Constitution (Survival) checks each day, gaining 1 level of Exhaustion if they failed. I also had one player make a Wisdom (Survival) check when setting up camp, potentially limiting how much HP, spell slots, and condition recovery they could gain from a long rest.
Even further inspiration
Ryuutama isn’t the only game that makes downtime a first-class mechanic. The more of these sort of games you play, the more tools you have to run better downtime in other games.
Another good source of inspiration is the Land of Eem roleplaying game (which could be described as The Muppets crossed with Lord of the Rings).
Specifically, LoE divides the day into four “travel turns”: two in the day when it’s easier to travel, two at night that are better for downtime activities. (The free quickstart guide includes these rules, if you don’t necessarily want to commit to a whole new game right now.) It’s a bit crunchier than Ryuutama, but it attaches some different incentives and disincentives to downtime.
In a typical Eem day, you might spend one of those night turns on hunting and gathering ingredients and other materials. Or you might spend it doing Story Time around the campfire–talking about your character’s backstory or future hopes, potentially gaining you extra XP.