The Design of BCS VIII: The Downtime Rules (Patreon)

The Downtime rules are only 3 pages and mechanically consist of a single Extended Action that spans the period between Episodes. Yet,  they accomplish a lot with very little. With one Test you can repair your robot, spy on the enemy or write a book that connects with thousands all over the world and makes you famous. The mechanic helps with long-term resource management, gives people who need it a direction to take their character in, and is a much better implementation of the faction management rules in one elegant little package.

Downtime Tests work a little differently from Intermission and Operation ones in that they do not have any negative or even neutral results, they're all upside. This is for two reasons: First, I want people to use them without fear that they're going to accidentally make things worse. Second, the Repair Mecha Action needs to be able to restore up to 4 Structure and I want all Downtime Actions and Resources to be roughly equivalent to each other, so I made all of them range from 1-4 points per use.

There are 3 base resources: Health, Wealth and Structure. These start out maxed (at 5, 5 and 10 respectively), and naturally regenerate at a rate of 1 per Episode. But additionally there are three optional resources in Training Points, Intel Points and Item Points (which I think I'll rename to Crafting points). Those start at 0 and the only way to get them is to go out of your way to interact with their mechanics.

Let's break down the list of Downtime Actions:

Heal Character

Test Intellect+Medicine to restore another PC's Health. The wording there is not accidental, as this Action does not work on NPCs or yourself. If you want to use Medicine on NPCs, you do that during the session itself. As for healing yourself? That's a different Action. I originally only wanted to only have the self-healing Action in the game but using the Medicine Skill to help other PC's is such an obvious idea I couldn't not put it in. It ended up overshadowing the other one, but that's how things go sometimes.

Having said all that, because Health recovers naturally and has a fairly low cap, this Action often ends up "wasting" points that go over the cap. I could fix this by making the cap higher, but PCs are hard enough to kill already. With a higher cap they'll become effectively immortal in any campaign that isn't actively threatening them with Health damage every Episode. It's not ideal, but honestly PCs being too difficult to kill is a better problem than them being too difficult to keep alive, so I don't mind this too much.

Repair Mecha

Test Fitness+Crafts to restore any PC Mecha's Structure. This is the Action that the whole Downtime subsystem was balanced around and the one that is likely to be taken the most often with the rules as they are written now. Structure has the opposite problem Health does, in that PCs are expected to lose 2-4 Structure every Episode, then regenerate 1. This means that, while Health recovery will only be occasionally something they have to worry about, Structure recovery is an immediate concern from the beginning of the game. The PCs will have to either spam Repair Mecha, build their PC to have appropriate countermeasures, or just deal with the fact that their robot will wear down and stop working eventually. Or the GM will have to make fights easier.

Speaking of which, one thing that I notice now is that I never really described any consequences for 0 Structure. 0 Health is well established, not just in how it impairs you but also how you fix the problem, but for 0 Structure you just wave your hands and get a new Mecha, or something.

Yeah no, I am going to write rules for that so that there are mechanical consequences for reaching 0 Structure, and I'll take the opportunity to make rules for changing your entire build by making a new mech.

I also need more ways to handle Structure recovery, which brings us to...

Fundraise

Test Charm+Contacts to restore your Wealth. In hindsight, there is no reason you can't use this to also give someone else Wealth, I just wrote that in autopilot. 

Wealth is the least important of the three base resources, as it is only really spent or lost in Twists. At a maximum cap of 5, with a natural recovery rate of 1 per Episode and zero expected losses per session, it's effectively infinite. I need to add more and better ways to spend Wealth, starting with using Wealth to buy supplies and hire techs that can repair your Mecha for you. This kills two birds with one stone.

There are no consequences for hitting 0 Wealth but, well, what could I write here? The game doesn't have rules for being able to feed yourself and keep a roof over your head, which is what this would threaten. The more I think about that, the more I think it is a feature and not a bug, honestly.

Rest & Recovery

Test Fitness+Athletics to restore your Health. This is what you're forced to do when you hit Health 0. If you're wondering about the use of Athletics here, as opposed to the more obvious Medicine from earlier, it's partly because there's no pure Toughness skill, and partly because athletes know how to rest effectively. Look, the alternative was it having no Skill attached to it and that made it a strictly worse option than the others. I think we can all agree this is a the better option compared to that.

Training Arc

Test any Skill to gain Training Points attached to that Skill. PCs are expected to be training during their time off, so I wanted to include it in the Downtime rules. It's probably the least interesting and least rewarding of the mechanics here, but it's also perennially useful and works regardless of your build. So, it kinda works out in the end.

Training Points can be spent to improve the result of a Test using a Skill you already know, or to temporarily learn a Skill (as a Specialist) you don't know. The second use gives you 2 Advantages on the fly to a Skill you don't have, which is pretty powerful (Jack of all Trades only makes you a Generalist, for comparison), and is the optimal use of this otherwise kinda weak Action. The other use of Training Points is to improve a failed Test by turning Training Points into a +1 to the result, and you can spend as many of them as you have. It's weak, but useful particularly to low PL characters who are most at risk of Twists with their Skills when applied to a secondary or tertiary stat. 

Gather Intelligence

Test Fitness+Stealth, Intellect+Interfacing or Charm+Contacs to gain Intel Points. These can be spent to gather information about the world at large, to spy on the enemy or even on your organization. It's excellent in games that have more of a political bent to them or have room for intrigue and is worthless otherwise. I think that's fine.

There is a part of me that thinks it would be cool to allow these to be spent on gaining some kind of tactical advantage before a fight with the  enemy. The problem there is that this doesn't just break the rule of not allowing Character Skills to affect Operations, but it's potentially extremely broken. Consider that the most obvious use of such an ability, setting up an ambush and granting a free surprise Turn, is powerful enough to make a difficult fight into a very easy one. I will probably make a sidebar explaining this problem and why I chose not to support this admittedly cool idea.

Item Crafting

Test Intellect+Crafts or Charm+Crafts to gain Item Points. Item Points are spent creating, well, Items during Episodes. The Items created this way are all Volatile, and range from manufacturing goods to sell in exchange for Wealth, to improving equipment so that its use grants an additional Advantage to the next Test made to use it, to forging an ID to sneak somewhere you don't belong, to becoming a world-famous artist that moves the hearts of thousands.

It does so much that it takes a full page to explain, and even then I think it could use more detail or better examples, but crafting systems are rarely simple and this is honestly very robust for how little space it takes. I think this is the best implementation of crafting I've ever worked on and I'm glad for it because I, for one, love making characters who create things. 

I know, you're very surprised that a game designer would enjoy roleplaying a creative person. You're gonna be even more shocked when I tell you that I like science fiction more than fantasy. It's wild how you can never really know people, man. 

Conclusion

And that's the Downtime Rules. Despite how much I may gripe about their imperfections, I like them and I think they serve their purpose well. That said, I think they could use a bit better explaining in general and both Structure and Wealth need better ways to restore or spend them in particular. 

I'll be working on that for the next system update, along with a clarification that you can do Downtime Tests at the end of a session, the beginning of the next one, or if you're playing online can be to happen between sessions with a dicebot in just a few minutes.  Because I never really explained that anywhere.

Next time, we begin character creation. Brace yourselves, because we're gonna be talking about math, baby!

Gimmick Out.