Indefinite Campaigns and Downtime in 5e

This week: A quick thought about 5e campaigns.

The (2014) 5e DMG presupposes that a campaign that has a more or less novelistic structure. It has a beginning, middle, and end, with different adventures linked together by the overarching story of the campaign.

That is far from the only possible or legitimate campaign structure. In general, I call campaigns "finite" when they focus on a fairly fixed group of PCs working together to accomplish a campaign-defining goal or solve a campaign-defining problem. An alternative campaign type is the indefinite campaign.

If a finite campaign is like a novel, an indefinite campaign is like a soap opera. It has multiple, overlapping and interleaved storylines, multiple central characters, but no fixed protagonists. Plotlines resolve or get abandoned, and characters come and go, but the campaign itself persists.

Indefinite campaigns can be highly immersive, and they only get better as they continue. They are like open worlds or sandboxes, taken to the next logical step. Not only can the characters do anything they want, but their decisions leave their mark on the setting and can influence the what other characters do.

For an indefinite campaign to work, characters who need to be resilient enough to be played over a long period, and interesting enough for players to want to play them for a long time. Yet, characters also need to leave play, either temporarily or permanently, often enough for the campaign to have a varied cast. Not all characters will be available for play at all time. Some will be engaged in downtime activities, such as healing, training, or crafting magic items. Some will retire, and some will die. Character death should be rare enough that the campaign isn't a frustrating churn of low-level PCs, but it should be common enough that surviving and gaining a level feel like achievements rather than forgone conclusions.

Additionally, players in an indefinite campaign need the freedom to try out varied character concepts and to pursue diverse character goals. All that freedom, however, needs to balanced with the DM's need for a coherent and believable milieu that supports the whole indefinite campaign. DMs running indefinite campaigns needs to be able to say no to their players, and their players need to be able to hear it.

Under the standard 5e rules, PCs have good survivability. There are, if anything, too many character options, so the challenge may be for the DM to decide what not to include. 

There are also some variant, optional, or often-overlooked rules in 5e that will be important to an indefinite campaign. They are, mainly, the rules that force characters to take downtime, give them things to do with their downtime, and turn time into a meaningful and limited resource for characters. Here are some of the important ones:

• Every race has a lifespan in its description. If nothing else, characters know their time on the Prime Material plane is limited.
• Living expenses need to be assessed regularly in an indefinite campaign, though "practicing a profession" can make them irrelevant in some cases. It may be a good idea to require characters to maintain a minimum lifestyle based on their level or tier, as some other games do.
• Training to gain levels is essential. It puts the brakes on adventuring, avoids the ridiculous 40-day progression from 1st to 20th level, and forces characters to be more aware of what is happening in their world.
• Slow natural healing is a variant rule that changes how long rests work. Instead of regaining all your hit points at the end of a long rest, you can spend Hit Dice. As usual, you regain half your previously expended Hit Dice at the end of a long rest.
• Injuries that occur when a character has been reduced to 0 hp (or when they fail a death saving throw by 5 or more) can require a character to take at least a little bit of time off to recover, or to find someone who will cast regenerate on them.
• Downtime activities give characters reasons to voluntarily take time off from adventuring. The exception is "Practicing a Profession," which is really just an excuse to ignore living expenses, but even it gives characters something to do while others are engaged in other downtime activities.

If you have a lot of players, you can run an indefinite campaign in the West Marches or open table style. But in that case, keeping track of everyone's multitude of characters might be a headache. You can relieve the headache somewhat by using 1:1 time. For every day that passes in the real world, one day passes in the game world. Characters who do two weeks worth of activity in a game session, then, aren't available to be played for another two real-world weeks. But that only relieves the headache, it doesn't make it go away.

With only a handful of players, there is less to track. It's a good idea to use a spreadsheet or calendar to indicate when each character's last activity was, when "today" is in the campaign, and when various future events (including the conclusion of downtime activities) will occur.

You also need to make some decisions about downtime activities that take a very long time, such as crafting magic items, building strongholds, and training for levels. All of those can take a character out of the campaign for months or even years at a time. (Worst case: a solo crafter making a legendary item requires 20,000 days, or almost 55 years, of downtime.) Players will be be rightly reluctant to do downtime activities that take too long. If a character has to be out of play for 200 days to make +1 armor, is it really worth doing at all? Even the 20 days required to train for levels 5-11 can seem like an eternity for characters who have adventuring goals. Who wants a castle if it takes you out of the campaign for 400 days to build it?

To mitigate this problem, you could simply reduce the downtime required for these activities. Xanathar's Guide to Everything dramatically reduces the time and cost of crafting many magic items, for example. You may also find, though, that it's convenient simply to advance the timeline by jumps of months at a time periodically. When some characters are involved in long downtime projects, you don't have to fill every moment of that with adventuring opportunities for everyone else. You can push the timeline forward as far as it needs to go whenever that's convenient and makes sense for your milieu.