5e Downtime & Travel

These are a pair of homebrew intertwined gameplay systems for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition that I’ve been recently iterating upon! As an avid TTRPG player who has been running Dungeons & Dragons for more than half of my life, I’ve always found myself struggling to effectively run one important aspect of the game— exploration.

Dungeons & Dragons has three gameplay pillars, as defined most recently in the 2025 Dungeon Master’s Guide: combat, social interaction, and exploration. Fifth Edition includes well-defined rules for combat and robust guidance for combat, but comparatively little in the way of rules or guidance for exploration or travel. Also missing from the core rulebooks are mechanics for downtime— the time between adventures that the heroes of a Dungeons & Dragons campaign might enjoy.

Though the 2017 supplemental sourcebook Xanathar’s Guide to Everything provides rules for downtime, I found that they didn’t quite fit for my style of play— the options for downtime activities were very rigidly defined, a list of predetermined options rather than a system for emergent play.

The goal of these intertwined gameplay systems is to provide a robust but very open framework for Game Masters to run a montage of player-driven downtime— whether that be the time between quests, or time spent traveling to the next adventure— wherein players have a high degree of freedom. I hoped to create a system that allowed for emergent and improvised play while still leveraging existing gameplay systems like character abilities to create drama. These rules are works in progress, but have so far been a great exercise in systems design for tabletop RPGs!

These rules are inspired by the Uncharted Journeys supplement created by Cubicle 7 games, as well as the downtime system used in Dropout’s actual play show Dimension 20: Fantasy High Junior Year.