Downtime Use

The default DnD 5e guidelines just looks at a stock amount of gold investment based on time spent vaguely on the activity. Some may have dice rolls for the outcome. If you want something a little more immersive and engaging, that's what this is for. I also wanted something that characters could pursue during the adventure in bits and pieces during the story. This should be fine for almost any activity. Learning a language, generating a spell, learning a new skill to proficiency, pursuing a 'free' feat, or more. This seeks to more accurately cover that process by bringing it into the narrative. It has three factors which should be considered between the DM and player seeking to engage in an activity.

Required material: Book, tools, teacher, notes, etc.. This is material that allows the character to do the thing they want to do, by providing the functional ability to do so, information to study, or research material to inform what the character will have to do. This may require initial gold investment, searching, or questing. The required material may not be initially known, and is discovered in the process. The player should be aware of what is required, and/or if there is a point in progression where material will be required.

Ability checks: An assigned ability check which expresses their progress on the activity. This may be a skill, it might an ability check, or it might just be a straight d20, depending on what is being attempted. The d20 usually accounts for a day's worth of effort (8 hours). The player should know what check is being used for the activity.

Value Goal: Ability checks made to reach this goal will be summed together. E.G. if the DM has determined the value goal is 200, and the player, over the course of an in-game week made 3 rolls, 12, 18, 2, then their progress would be 32/200. The next roll they make is a 14, their progress then becomes 46/200. Once they have reached or exceeded 200 in this case, they have accomplished their goal and should receive the benefit of their activity. The player should be roughly aware of whether this will be a long term goal, or a more short term goal, and narrative hints should be provided so the player can gauge their rough progress."Example: The character wants to learn to speak Dwarvish. The DM and Player decide that learning it is fair, but a little lengthy and challenging. There would need to be a teacher or book or some form of resource that provides the character with the information. The DM and player decide that books definitely exist for this type of thing, so the first step would be the character shopping around and looking for this book. Once they purchased or found the book, they can then study it in their spare time or downtime. They would make an intelligence check when studying. Each intelligence roll the player makes to study the book would be added to any previous rolls until the sum of the rolls meets that value.""Example 2: The wizard wants to design a spell. The DM and Player decide on what the spell is, how it will function, etc.. To design this spell in-game, the character needs to have more specialized knowledge on a certain element, spell school, mechanic, or whatever, and that this can only be obtained a specialist. The character then would have to ask around and make the effort to find this specialist. Once found, either doing some training, obtaining a book with the knowledge, or establishing a means of regular communication would satisfy the 'resource' requirement. The character would need to research and develop this spell by making Arcana (Intelligence) checks. They add their ongoing rolls together until they reach the value determined by the DM after which, they have that spell. (Note: This example would assume this new spell is something beyond the wizard's usual spell gains at each level, and could work for learning a homebrew spell or pre-existing)"Additional considerations in this system are available to make things more complicated and segmented if desired. As long as the DM and player both agree. For learning a language, it could be broken into multiple goals, speaking, reading, writing, and listening. For the spell, there could be the initial research phase, followed by a separate development phase. Whatever the process or method, the player should be aware of what to expect from the process and have a rough idea of a timeline, or at least the existence of additional phases.

Further additional considerations in this system exist for progressing. For more opportunities for characters to pursue their activity, consider allowing checks for smaller time frames by shrinking the dice (2 hours - d4, 4 hours - d8, 6 hours - d12, 8 hours - d20). Or for more consistency, use passive scores and forego rolling (the average of a dice is typically the higher of the two middle values (3 on a d4, 5 on a d8, 7 on a d12, and 11 on a d20, before any modifiers).