Requiem/Downtime

This is a short rant, and not in any way aimed at any character or player in the system. It is rather written with the goal of making sure that next year's ref team can produce a living, breathing world for the players rather than a series of arguments, five fully-fleshed-out downtimes a week and a bunch of one-line answers.

A controversial downtime takes up all the refs for a quarter of the ref meet.

I reckon I have wasted - and I mean wasted, because nothing constructive emerged - six to twelve hours of my life arguing with the other refs over six-odd downtimes. As a conservative estimate. So why is this the case?

I remember that at the AGM you mentioned spell research/balance queries as something particularly likely to take up time. Are there any other things that tend to be more time-consuming that expected? --Jacob

Length, as in, number of actions performed

We regularly receive downtimes of over a thousand words. Fantastic, the players are interested in the setting and system and want to do things! Great! But if those thousand words consist of closely-typed bullet points detailing every detail of your character's life, your job, your investigations and your researches - and all of those points involve plot, needing us to respond to every single one of them individually and remember them when dealing with other downtimes - then it slows us down somewhat.

I know that some people's characters have day jobs that are in effect 'Plot Hound Extraordinaire to the City and Environs'. I would rather, however, have downtimes containing "I do my job competently, taking into account [factors and interesting things]" than long long ones which basically say the previous statement with more words and more ref time required.

I love long downtimes that are works of art and detail in great detail things that we just need to nod through. I love long downtimes all about interesting things your character has done or intends to do in uptime. And where there's a specific reason for a downtime with many actions as opposed to doing the same things in uptime (I'm thinking of the illicit priests here) - well, in exchange for a character who enriches the world by existing, you get more love from the refs.

Complication

So you decide you're going to cast a couple of Talk To spells? We'll probably run it before Time In and give you cool answers. So you decide you're going to spend a few hundred mana / 50 spirit on investigations? Like hell can we run it before Time In, so we have to give you an overview. At which point we argue, because we have to do so to make sure the answer is fair on you and on the other players.

So you investigate 50 things where someone else investigates one? The ref doing your downtime feels obliged to give you at least something on each, even though you're not going to get everything on any of them. There's never going to be a hard cap on the length of a downtime. But basically we might have to go to a system where rather than (as currently) giving less about each thing because you're spreading yourself thin, you get instead a couple of good answers followed by "You have no time for anything further this week without consequences due to abandoning your job or not sleeping". That is much easier and quicker for a ref to write, but it means you don't end up doing what you wanted to be doing.

So what do I actually want?

• I know that sometimes plot dictates you must be long and accurate about your downtime. That's not a problem. Doing it every week is excessive.
• We are running an uptime system here. With the exception of deep dark secrets that would be very damaging if found out, and metaphysics (cause I really enjoy writing that), we do not want plot that does not come back into the bar or linear.
• We want to know what you are trying to achieve by your downtime. Unless you're really plotted over the head, this should fit in a short bulleted list.
• We mean what you, OOC as well as IC, are trying to achieve. Please do not ask a series of leading questions a la Assassins. Silly buggers is not a game we wish to play, Nomic is not a game we wish to play.
• If you describe your downtime in great detail you will not do things you did not say you did. If you describe your downtime in less specific detail you will get what the refs think you ought to get. The latter is more how I would like things to be.
• Ideally I would like your downtime to be shorter than the answer to your downtime, unless the extra length is fluff.
• I would like to see more players having different goals from their characters. It's so much more fun to get something like "OOC, I want this endeavour to fail in this, this and this way" in a downtime.

There may be more here.

Some bonus stuff.

That's it! I'm hijacking this rant to add some opinions (if that's okay) - ahdok

• We also really want to know what you want out of your roleplaying. If you are feeling left out, or bored, or intimidated, let us know -please- it helps us respond better to what you want to see. The same goes for if you are having a great time. It's equally really helpful to get "That was fantastic, I really enjoyed it."
• If you are running after some plot because your character is interested in it, but -you- as a player are bored of it, let us know. We want to concentrate on plot that is interesting, and running an extended paper trail through several uptimes for someone solely because they thought their character had a duty to follow it, and not because they as a player want to follow it, is a waste of everyone's time.
• When you are researching something such as "I want to create a spell to steal people's socks" - provide examples of what you think would work. "I look in the library for spells" is a question that directs a lot of reffort at results you may not be interested in. Similarly, if you are searching someone's house, or tracking them around the city, or spreading rumours about some guy, or whatever, tell us what you want to achieve. It's much easier to answer these things if we know what you want.

Koryne adds her tuppence... Yup, exactly. For goodness' sake if you're going to metagame do it in an interesting way - it is in no way BadWrongFun? to hijack PCs to work for you (rather than NPCs) in the full knowledge that, provided their players submit their downtimes, they'll be far more effective than equivalent NPCs. Plot that runs out of uptime needs only a short epilogue - or something to get it back into uptime. If you're genuinely interested in a plot get other characters involved, the quickest way to kill something is to grab it and stop any other PCs finding out about it. As a Ref I'll quickly lose interest in something unless it potentially effects more than one PC. And I should stop here, since I've already ranted about most of this in Koryne/DowntimeThoughts.