Things I dig: Carousing
Today we’re talking about carousing! Carousing is one of the things players can do during their downtime - usually its at the end of the downtime so that the outcome of it can lead into more active play. ‘Carousing’ is the game term for that exact word in English.
Basically, characters can spend their downtime engaged in a variety of hedonistic activities like binge drinking, gambling, partying, seducing the local magistrate, or anything else that is the ‘play hard’ part of the ‘work hard, play hard’ motto. If you are looking for downtime activities for your table, this should definitely be considered.
So first of all, talking about carousing activities is definitely going to be a fun thing at the table and get some laughs. Mechanically, it can be a way for the party to spend money they’ve earned or potentially even regain sanity points. If the idea is that you are ‘taking a load off’ and ‘destressing’
Where the real fun starts is for you as a GM to roll on a table and see what the outcome of the carousing was. Have you ended up in the drunk tank and your friends need to bail you out? Did you commit some light treason?
Whatever the result was, it is bound to be a good time, and a bit of a departure from the main quest and story. It’s just a fun little detour. And has great potential for RP and character development through shenanigans. And the thing is you can do this with any system and any game where your players have the opportunity to have ‘down time’. Give them a chance to cause trouble - it’s fun!
If you play D&D 5E, there’s actually a small section about carousing as part of downtime activities in the Dungeon Masters’ Guide. There’s a table you can roll on but it’s pretty lame. If you search for it online, you can find tons of great carousing tables for various settings. Or of course, you can make your own. You can use what’s out there as inspiration to make more thematically appropriate tables if that’s better.
I’m linking two traditional fantasy ones that you can use for dnd or pathfinder or whatever:
D&D Carousing table: https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/3uunbt/the_bigger_badder_longer_uncut_d100_carousing/
Carousing table: https://grsdm.fandom.com/wiki/Carousing_Table
There is one major consideration though: You’ll see this when you see the charts people have made, but the chart results are often silly and could be a bit out of character for some of your more serious PCs. You may need to modify the results tonally if your group doesn’t have that levity or your players don't envision their characters as the sorts who might get blackout drunk even on an irregular basis, and wake up having spent money on funny things, gotten a tattoo, or slept with a stranger. Keeping with that, you may want to come up with alternatives for more serious or controlled characters. There should still be complications and for this, I actually do like the table in the dungeon master’s guide in 5e because that stuff is a big deal for more controlled and less impulsive PCs.
So yeah - carousing. Definitely not the only downtime activity but an often overlooked one that can be a lot of fun.
