Carousing Rules
I've just started a new campaign, and my players told me they wanted leveling up to feel a bit more significant. Our goal is to incorporate the rhythms of everyday life, rather than just have the characters bounce from one conflict to another on permanent adventure. We came up with three rules. In order to level up after an adventure, the characters must:
Return to their home base (the city of Iskandar)
Undergo two weeks of training (the players have to write some flash fiction explaining what they learned and how)
Complete a night of carousing
In this post, I want to discuss step 3, carousing. I don't know when carousing rules were first codified in D&D-style games. The earliest blog article I found is Rient's "Party Likes It's 999," but there may be references further back. I've seen several carousing systems lately, most recently in Shadowdark.
Some might object to codifying this activity. Why not just say, "You go to the tavern after you return from the dungeon - what do you do?" Pure roleplay! That works well for a group of skilled improvisers, but many of us need more structure and prompting.
In my system, carousing starts when the characters go to the tavern after the most recent adventure. There are four simple elements I prepare before the session, most of which I can reuse multiple times:
NPCs
Secrets
Activities
Phases
NPCs
The tavern needs some NPCs for the characters to interact with. Eight is a good number in this type of situation - it's enough to give variety but not so many that the players are overwhelmed by choice. I like to mainly include NPCs they have already met, with just 2 or 3 new faces. I also find that having a graphic with an image of each NPC is essential:
Secrets
Following Sly Flourish's advice, I also keep a list of 10 secrets and clues handy. These consist of gossip, revelations, and adventure seeds (e.g., "The Lord Warden of Tanbour seeks adventurers for a dangerous task"), which I sprinkle throughout the conversations as needed. There is no need to use all of them.
Activities
I've codified some standard activities to encourage roleplaying and to give the players a little prompt. Between them, the characters have to perform at least six of the following twelve tasks in order to “complete” a night of carousing:
You learn some hot gossip and share it with an NPC
You throw a drink over someone in disgust
You recite a poem or song to a small crowd
You share your goals and hopes for the future with someone
You share a drinking-related anecdote from your past
You and another PC have a conflict that gets resolved later in the night
You get badly drunk and vomit
You have a meaningful discussion with an NPC you have never met before
You discuss another PC with one of the NPCs
You play a prank on another PC
You share a funny story from your childhood
You share a raw secret with another PC
Phases
Finally, I divide the evening into phases. These don't have any mechanical impact; the purpose is just to give the characters another roleplaying prompt and also supply the session a feeling of progress. In play, I explain the phase and then ask who wants to talk to someone. For example, during the dinner phase, "You are all seated in the common room as dinner is served - steaming pork stew with hot, crusty bread. Ok, who wants to talk to someone?" When two players have spoken, I move on to the next phase. When the six requisite activities are complete, the characters retire for the evening.
Here are the phases, which reflect the ebb and flow of a night out:
Dinner
Lining Up At the Bar
War Stories
Singalong
Bathroom
Confessions
Chaos
Closing Time
Munchies
Drunken Antics
I've dabbled with precursors to this system before, but last month was the first time we ran the entire ruleset. It was a huge success! There were a couple of clunky transitions, but otherwise, it ran smoothly and enabled lots of interesting interaction. Everyone got some spotlight and was able to develop their character a bit. They also learned several rumours and bits of gossip that may later come into play. There were also several laugh-out-loud moments and some surprisingly heavy interactions (like the cleric comforting a grieving widow). At this point, I'm planning to make this a regular part of our game.