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this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024
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I see people talk about running downtime like this,and exploration like this, too, and I scratch my head.
It's always been pretty clear to me that these sections of the book are for the GM, to give them tools to consistently adjudicate player choices, not to give players a value menu to order from
So, you do your roleplay, the GM sees what you're doing and maps it on to some Activity, and the Activity tells them how to decide how effective you were, mechanically.
Like, if a player ever told me that they were going to "use Avoid Notice", I'd just tilt my head at them and ask them again what their character was doing, and that I'll figure out what that means, mechanically. Because maybe they don't get to Avoid Notice because they've tailed for the last 20 miles by someone they themselves didn't notice.
This was maybe one of the bigger downsides to having both player and GM facing material in the same book, I think.
The way it's presented in the Core Rulebook pretty strongly implies to me that it is meant to be used that way by players. But I agree, regardless of what the designers intended, a better way to do it is for the GM to make a ruling based on the players' descriptive actions.
The problem for me is that actually, even if you do that, the downtime rules aren't very useful. Downtime activities have specific requirements for time spent to count as that activity, usually measured in days. But I've never had a situation where I have multiple days of downtime. My players and I don't say "I want to spend 2 days making money by sneaking into places and robbing them". More normal would be for the rogue to describe themselves sneaking into one specific house and asking what they find. The way they describe what actions they want to do is on the order of something that lasts a couple of minutes at a time. It's just far more fine-grained than the Activities listed in the Downtime section of the CRB is designed for.