Facilitating PC's downtime activities

Over a year ago my group and I were in the middle of playing a large, sprawling game of Exalted. As it is with such large games, there is a lot of going on in the world - a lot more than can be portrayed in a session. You also get characters that do a lot more than can really be played out without boring everyone else at the table. Unfortunately, I haven't even seen that many games try to address this issue. So I figured I can chip in with some examples and ideas to help give players and GMs some useful tools to draw from.

Solo sessions

One approach to the problem of having too much stuff going on in the background that only some players / PCs are interested in is to run some solo sessions every now and then. While it's not an ideal situation, requiring either the GM to facilitate extra gaming nights or letting everyone take a break for awhile to have one-on-one sessions, it is a solution to the problem.

For example, during the above mentioned Exalted game, our group had a few sets of solo sessions (S4E4 A, B, C, D was one of them). Our GM had some spare time, we all lived close by, so we could have some week of solo sessions between two normal sessions. In this time each PC could pursue the goals they were interested in, but the rest of the group wasn't - dealing with some trading, diplomacy, gaining intel and making babies. A good chunk of them were personal goals, and another chunk set up future plot devices - one character was looking for infiltrators, another for an ancient treasure, and yet another - studying a mysterious cursed artefact.

One problem we found with solo sessions however was the fact that only some players could carry the game on their own. They either had clear goals in mind, or came prepared with a number of things they could do. This sort of approach won't be for everyone unfortunately.

Downtime Actions in Mind's Eye Theatre

Years back I was involved in a Mind's Eye Theatre LARP for Vampire the Requiem. Due to the amount of players that were involved, the game naturally had to allow for players to be able to perform actions outside of the relatively fixed sessions. The rulebook provided some good guidelines for how to do Downtime Actions that covered such mini-adventures. Moreover, the system went one step further, allowing players that want to focus more on such Actions a way to do more by the proxy of their minions and other Merits.

This system worked pretty well as far as I can remember. That is, as well as it could given the system it was tied to (MET had in my mind some mechanical issues that normal nWoD handled better). It gave every player an opportunity to bring something new into the game sessions and it was structured enough not to be too big of a burden on the GM like the solo sessions would've been.

Idea - downtime goals and point buy

I've had this idea while playing Exalted using the Godbound rules. The system had a mechanic of Influence - a measure of PC's interest they can exert in the downtime. It's usually used for them upkeeping some structure or project that doesn't matter in the long run, like bolstering some rebellion, keeping the peasants suppressed, etc. However, since it's basically a measure of what PCs do with their spare time, it would lend itself naturally to allow the players to set goals for their characters and using those points to accomplish them.

For example, you could have goals to "spread misinformation about our last battle", "gather intel on the political situation of the royal houses", or "find information about a long-lost treasure". Neither of those goals are an actual Change you would normally use Influence or Dominion for (the state of the world doesn't change, only character's knowledge), and the actions themselves are rather boring in themselves to roleplay. However, the outcome of said actions is a meaningful thing for the character or the party.

Now, you may think that you could just give the players such things without the extra steps, but that makes them a bit less meaningful to the players themselves. Just being given an intel the party needs carries less weight than having to spend the last X sessions devoting resources to obtaining that information. The latter gives the player some sense of accomplishment, that it's their actions and sacrifices that got them that information.

Mechanically, the players would give GMs the goals they want to accomplish and in what order, the GM would assign them some point value based on how much time needs to be devoted to them, and each period of time (a session, a month), the players' unused Influence would be put into those goals until they are completed. This works especially well if the players are using Influence on regular basis (making NOT committing the Influence a meaningful sacrifice), or if the players purchase Influence with their XP (which was more meaningful in our Exalted Godbound conversion than vanilla Godbound).

At some point I'd be interested in playing a character that is focused on such background machinations...

Conclusions

Sometimes, especially when playing longer games, the players will want to do things in the downtime withotu eating into the actual game time. It's generally a good sign - the players are really engaged with the game and are invested in what they are trying to accomplish. It might be worthwhile for the GM to facilitate such aspirations in some structured way to allow for this expression and not play favouritism to one player.