I think downtime, when you are allowing perhaps 3 Months to pass in an
evening can be very personal. By way of example, one of the players wrote
and published a pamphlet in the Town to describe his adventures and another
player activity was a court scene where they were trying to investigate a
lead from the main campaign bu. Our Cleric established a small temple in a
run down dockyard warehouse and hired a cleaner, then through a strange
selection of activities another player raised money to repair the roof and
attempted to fix it during the rain which went badly. We roleplayed snap
shots of the different activities they selected and linked them so the
Halfling character with his personal pamphlet on his “bounce back” life
story turned up in a few of the scenes for comic affect and made for some
interesting discussion of his previous exploits around the table. I would
propose that downtime can certainly facilitate the injection of quiet
roleplaying moments and I would guess it helped that there was no real
threat for that evening of play. Some of the player conversations still
ended in failure however it was in the spirit of developing some
interaction between characters.
So downtime is one way I inject little moments of quiet roleplaying into
fantasy game.
Other stuff I might do to slow pace is to pause the action through an
appropriate stop and then use an NPC to share a struggle of theirs. An
example here is in the Strahd D&D campaign I had one follower (a shadow
elf) with a back story that his sister was the last female in the line and
he was struggling with the fact that Strahd had charmed her and it was
looking like an end to his race in the realm. So around the table during a
long rest (they were all stuck in a wine cellar), I shared a dialogue of
his fears and encouraged players to respond to the sob story which allowed
them to explore any empathy they may have. It certainly made for a
dreary cold night in the wine cellar with some shared player thoughts and
feelings during the rest.
Other things I do is to create importance in small things that are then
picked up again later. An example again - Whilst on a river barge the
players met a travelling cobbler and a mystic. They befriended cobbler who
decided to offer to make a fine pair of leather shoes on the journey for
one of the players (which took several days but only 10mins of real play
time). At the end of this quiet period of play the player tried the shoes
and they were the very finest and most comfortable shoes they had ever
owned. Sadly events of a storm that followed resulted in the shoes going
overboard and were lost. These quieter themes of play with no real threat
created moments referred to during other later scenes in the game “The best shoes I ever
wore but lost”. A sort of unobtainable game myth that is not just
another +2 sword. It was also funny at the time.
Slowing things down to allow for comic or serious dialogue for plans and
exploring character motives, is not always successful for me and does
depend on the group for me. I know I always try to throw in moments in
rest/downtime or journeys but some players don’t respond well to it and the
fight. I usually respond to that with a fight if players are really
uncomfortable with dialogue. I had an experience with a recent new group
that after a few weeks of gaming a couple of new roleplayers said to me
that they don’t enjoy the “Am-Dram”(Amatuer dramatics) of the game and we
ended up parting ways as a group.
So in summary for my DM style, I might require a group that is happy to
explore quieter roleplaying moments (no good if players are gamers in it
for the fight only), I would also then inject downtime dialogue and action
in journeys, rest moments and I would remove immediate threats from the
scene. What I don’t usually do is use any particular rule for it and
instead focus on the narrative and throw in non-threating story snippets for them to chew on over the fire.
