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These house rules are a way to break down the downtime rules in Xanathar's Guide to Everything when you're working with more fine grained time intervals; when you're looking at the characters day-by-day or even hour-by-hour as opposed to week-by-week. A "workweek" becomes 1d100 hours.
When the characters are doing downtime stuff like looking for a magic item seller, or carousing, or scouting out houses to rob, note the time (in hours) and money they spend.
Each downtime activity becomes a quest.
You need to know the current attempt in hours, and the total amount of hours they’ve spent on the quest.
Roll a d100. Low is good for this one.
If they roll below or equal the current amount, they’ve found what they’re looking for and they can do the downtime activity. It took the amount of hours rolled; so if they were willing to spend 5 hours and you rolled a three, it only took three hours.
If they roll over their total time, they didn’t get what they wanted and need to spend more hours, maybe at a later time.
Otherwise, i.e. if they roll over their current time but they match their lower time, then reroll the d100. Keep rerolling until you get one of the other two results. (As an alternative to all this rerolling, especially for digital, instead subtract their previous time spent from the die size. I.e. they've previously spent 22 hours and now spend three more. A roll of 1, 2 or 3 on a d78 (since 100 - 22 is 78) means they've found it, and any other roll means they didn't. Note that the die-size–changing method uses "previous time" while the rerolling method uses "total time" (previous+current).)
For some of the activities (buying magic items, robbing houses) it’s clear that they are spending these quest hours preparing for the activity (finding sellers, finding targets). Once they succeed on the “quest” you move on to executing the activity.
Other times (pitfighting, carousing, research, maybe even gambling) they are doing the activity while on the quest. For those types of downtime quests, the idea is that you don’t roll to resolve it until they’ve completed the quest. A pit fighter is a good example. Xanathar tells us to make three ability checks to see whether or not we won any money or how much. You make those ability checks once you’ve spent enough hours fighting to complete the downtime quest rules on this page, but you are fighting all along. It’s just that you didn’t win any money yet.
They also need to spend money in addition to spending time.
Training, crafting, and scribing spell scrolls can take multiple weeks, or at least days. I prefer moving to the day-by-day time scale for them and to use the Xanathar’s rules straight up.
I like rolling the complications after the quest (as part of resolving the downtime activity) as opposed to during the quest itself.
Let’s say the player character is looking for a seller for a Wand of Yak Shaving she has found.
“I look at the other people in the tavern... Do I see any adventurers who might wanna buy a Wand of Yak Shaving?”
If that’s an hour, and they’ve already spent six hours on this previously, you roll a d100 and they find a buyer on a 1, you reroll (and keep rerolling) on 2 through 6, and they don’t find a buyer on 7 or higher.
“No, they don’t seem interested. But you feel a tap on your shoulder: ‘Maybe my cousin Worda knows a guy. If you buy me drink I’ll tell her to show up here tomorrow.’”
Sometimes the diegetic situation doesn’t lend itself to paying. That’s fine. Don’t force it. That just mean the next person is that much more expensive. Hey, times are tough all over, with these stingy delvers running around.
Worst case you can subtract it from the final price (if they’re selling, or add it if they’re buying).
It’s not good if your players keep abusing this. Delayed payment is a huge boon to them that messes with the economy of the game. Finding a sweet spot between preventing constant postponement and abuse vs unnatural, forced payment situations is difficult, and might require an out-of-character discussion with the group. If they know that it’s part of a rules system for finding an item seller, maybe they’ll accept it.
It’s an hourly rate—if they roll low they got it faster and cheaper. That’s my intent behind this. I don’t mind a li’l bit of luck in these games.
This system, especially with the kinda illusionistic solution for payment refusal in the previous section, is all stochastic, all Yahtzee, just like chopping at an ogre’s HP with an axe is. That’s true for this zoomed in version; there’s still the “meta-agency” of the system as a whole. For example, if you’re not happy with the price an item seller is offering, you can decide to try another week. Or, for the Crime entry, the player gets to select between different targets with different DCs, and that, of course, carries over well here. Or you can switch quests entirely (keep the progress accrued on the previous quests noted).
Buuut if you really want to, you can use the universal spray-on solution to this general problem, which is to reward clever interaction with the diegesis with advantage, or inflict disadvantage on strained interaction. “Advantage” in this situation means taking the lowest of the d100 roll (I have not mathed out the consequences of that), or grant advantage to one of the checks in the actual activity, like the Charisma check for the price once you’ve found a seller. I’m not sure I think that’s necessary, but don’t knock it as a solution just because it’s so general. It works.
So what happens if the players already know a buyer for magic items or a suitable mark for burglary? For example, maybe there’s one in the module. Do you force them to go through these hoops?
Of course not. If they already have what they want they don’t need to struggle for what they want, and that’s great. Specific prep overrides general “fact generators”; tier one truths are better than tier two truths.
XGE’s downtime system is an additional tool to create worldbuilding and rival events, it’s a big “tier two truth” machine, it’s not meant to make your life more difficult when the module or city or situation already has tier one truths.
The XGE rules were designed for one person; if several people split up then their hours can work in parallel, depending on what the mission is, of course.
That’s not a bad thing and these rules support that. They have their character spend one hour? It works. Eight hours? It works. 60 hours? It works. A lot of factors go into selecting the time granularity, like what the other characters are doing or how familiar the group are with a situation or a routine. But it can happen naturally.
As an analogy, the first night a party is in the wilderness, we’re like “Do you have campfire? How many tents? Who’s sleeping where?” but that quickly becomes routine and glossed over, as it should be, once it’s clear how the standard setup is. And then you can zoom in if something is different: “I’m going to try to sleep in armor tonight” or whatever.
Gradually zooming out was actually kind of a goal with this rule set—once characters are familiar with the routine, they might naturally wanna zoom out. But let your players have a lot of control over the pace of the game, only pushing forward when you believe they’re stuck waiting and vamping for something external to happen.
For example, for the “Crime” entry, the resolution method works well. It’s an easy frameout to unblorbily wing something around.
The character is gonna make three checks overall: One dex (“Stealth”), one thieves’ tools, and one of Int, Wis, or Cha.
Since failing all three checks means you get caught (and there’s even a formula for the fine & jailtime), that means that you can resolve the tension built up after two failures by having the last check be about whether or not they get away. Succeeding once means getting away with nothing, and succeeding twice means getting away with half the payout.
This means that you can... I mean, hold on, this is very unblorb but it’s within a framework that’s supported by the rules and the game’s economy.
You can wing/improv locations, people etc and if they:
As DM, you make up rooms, furniture, guards, locks on the fly etc, guided by those three rolls and the DC based on the stakes of the crime.
This is cheating, from a blorb perspective, but you’re in a subsystem, and, the good part is that there’s a lot of similar interface points to just any old adventuring. So if they do happen to pick a prepped house, prepped guards etc, you’re golden because you then just run that house as a dungeon instead.
A similar approach works for gambling, pit fighting, etc.
And then the best part: a chance to roll on the complications table.