I am running Season of the Ghost as my first pf2e campaign. Book 1 had some downtime activities to finish, and Chapter 1 of Book 2 is all downtime activities. As I had a new player this session, I had a concern that he would get the wrong impression of what D&D was, so I wanted to give the option to skip some of the downtimes at any point and then move on to chapters 2 and 3, which were more a explore/hack and slash style chapters.
I came up with the idea to turn the downtime activities into a worker placement board game. My players enjoyed this so much that they didn’t want to head to the monastery even after completing the research required to access the location. Here is the “board game” layout at the end of session 1.
Rules: Only 4 activities per week; any extra players could “aide another”. Each activity takes a week. Success or failure was determined by an appropriate check.
- Blue: Turn tracker showing the week, event, when Shinzo shows up and when the moon is in the right phase to do the ritual.
- Red: Hope, Food and Security tracker.
- White: Research progress.
- Yellow: Leftover activities from summer. If all these were completed, the town would level up to 5. These also had a chance of gaining a GP each week to make them “more appealing” to visit. These are one off.
- Green: The activities that produce Hope, Food or Security. Food and Security are repeatable.
PCs said they had a load of fun even though there was no combat or exploration.