I have now been running my open table Marmoris game for closer to a year and a half, a game that started out as me setting out to make a small dungeon to introduce a friend to osr-style dungeon crawling or at least the version of that that I have inside my own head.
Those who know what has been going on with Marmoris are likely already aware that the dungeon ended up as anything but small, and the scope of the game eventually left the dungeon and now extends to the players choosing which of the local points of interest they have learned of to launch a new delve into whenever an earlier delve comes to an end. The game has very much broken out of the dungeon and exists as this weird not-quite-west-marches open table arrangement.
What the people who have only heard of the game from the sidelines might not know however is what happens between those delves.
Due to "at-table" play being limited to the act of dungeon crawling or other such "active" activities, during that time we can't really go over all the non-delve things that players might want to set their PCs up to such as performing magical rituals, going into detail on selling the more interesting and potentially magical loot they might have recovered, getting involved in faction play and so on and so on. Doing so would only serve to make people dropping in to the game more difficult even with the open table nature of the game, as well as drag an already slow paced game to a crawling halt.
And then we get to the topic of the post itself, downtime and how it's been handled in that game.
Unlike with more "traditional" west marches style game, the party is not expected nor encouraged to leave their delve at the end of a session. Rather, if they are in the middle of something that requires active participation like delving a dungeon then time gets suspended between the end of the session and the beginning of a new one. As such a delve that lasts six hours within the fiction could very well last three sessions in irl time.
However when the players do decide to return from their delve, be it to recover from their wounds or to sell off found treasure or restock their gear or for any other reason, we enter downtime. From here things get handwaved and simplified but the game is still taking place in the time between the sessions. Here is the behind the curtains look at the whole downtime process in all of it's simplicity:
- If there has been downtime between sessions, everyone recovers to full hp by the time of the next session for the convenience of keeping the game moving.
- We do not track expenditure for food and drink or lodgings, it is assumed that the PCs are able to provide for themselves in at least some manner between delves be it through odd jobs or whatever. This, again, is for the sake of keeping the game running easily due to it's drop-in/drop-out nature so that a player who hasn't joined in for several months doesn't come back to find their PC in severe debt from not being able to pay for their lodgings or starved to death from being unable to pay for meals in the time the PC has not been played.
- During downtime, time within the fiction passes 1:1 with irl time. With our scheduling, it means there are two weeks to perform downtime actions between delves.
- During downtime, each player gets three downtime actions that they can spend as they wish. For my own sanity this is per player rather than per PC, as a single player may have several PCs they switch between depending on where the party is delving or even who are in the active party at a given moment.
- There is no exhaustive list of any kind for the type of accepted downtime actions one could choose to pursue. The classics of looking for rumours and quests, carousing, training etc are good, but even more specific ones are perfectly acceptable. In fact the more details a player gives me when they submit their list of downtime actions they wish to get up to, the better I can figure out how such actions end up resolving.
- If the outcome of a downtime action is not immediately obvious to me the GM as I go to resolve it I'll roll a d100 to figure out what the chances of it succeeding are, adding any potential modifiers from the circumstances and the details surrounding the action. Once I know the "difficulty rating" of the action, I'll roll another d100 to see if it succeeds.
- This is a very simple oracle that can not only inform how the action resolves, but also one that I can ask questions from if I need to figure out further details having to do with any given downtime action.
E.g. "Okay so the PC is trying to find rumours, are the ones they find about the place they look to delve next?" I roll d100, adding +10 to the result because the player specified they're asking for rumours in one of the taverns frequented by other treasure hunters. Result of 34, +10 makes it a 44. Okay, now roll another d100 and let's see. Second roll comes up as 76, not managing to roll under the difficulty set by the earlier roll, no rumours regarding the place the players plan to delve next. And then I'll proceed to ask the oracle this type of questions until I either get an answer or figure out out myself. - Buying new gear or restocking on gear does not take up a downtime action, only money. This is specifically mentioned in order to allow people to spend their downtime actions in actually interesting things rather than having to appoint someone to get taxed on their actions to go buy new gear for the whole party, as well as to allow last minute purchases at the beginning of a new delve.
I hope the simplicity of the procedure comes across, seeing as as far as I'm aware this gets very close to the minimum viable downtime procedure.
Some may abhor and gasp at the absence of a predetermined list of available downtime actions but I am of the belief that having a list like that runs the risk of stifling player creativity if they have something they wish to get up to during the downtime. Yes, having a list might lower the threshold of participating in the downtime part of the game for the players that aren't as inventive or invested in the game but that is a tradeoff I am entirely willing to take here.
Here's the player-facing part of the downtime procedure:
Lastly, an example from the game. This is from the latest batch of downtime actions and I'm only including these here to better demonstrate how this ends up working out, so I'll not provide context or explanation for why certain actions are being taken 😅
The actions, as submitted by a player: 
And the resolution of said actions:
