Downtime is where the campaign shows its priorities

One design problem I keep circling around in Trismeria is downtime. At the table, downtime is rarely just a time skip. It is where players quietly tell you what they think the campaign is about. One character repairs a shield instead of buying a new one. Another spends three days asking about a missing priest. Someone else wants to train, recover, build a contact, or deal with the debt they picked up two sessions ago. If an AI GM treats all of that as a summary paragraph, it loses the point. The interesting part is not that a week passed. The interesting part is what the characters chose to protect, ignore, improve, or risk while nobody was kicking down a door. That matters a lot for authored campaigns. A written adventure can have strong locations, factions, clues, and dangers, but the party still needs room to make the story theirs between scenes. Downtime is one of the cleanest places to do that, because the choices are slower and more intentional. So I do not want downtime to be a decorative recap in Trismeria. I want it to behave more like a pressure valve for the campaign: a place where player priorities become future hooks, resources change for clear reasons, and the next scene starts with consequences the table can recognize. The hard part is keeping it playable. Too much detail turns into accounting. Too little detail turns into prose that sounds nice and changes nothing. For me, the useful question is: after downtime ends, what is different at the table?