Downtime

Most characters in fiction don't complete one adventure only to wake up the very next day and start a new one. Unless a major story is rushing toward its conclusion--like at the end of a season of a television show--there's usually a little time between episodes for characters to heal their wounds, replenish their supplies, pay their electric bill, and replace the car windshield that got shattered when they drove through that crowd of zombies. This portion of the characters lives that happens off-screen is known as downtime. For obvious reasons, the downtime for a typical television program is about a week, with a longer break between seasons. For more episodic stories--the Bond franchise or Robert E Howard's Conan series, for example--the downtime is generally unspecified, but in most cases enough time has passed that the events of he last story are no longer relevant to the one that's just beginning. Still other stories vary downtime according to story needs: the downtime between the early books of the Harry Potter series, for instance, is the summer break between school years. Later, as Harry becomes more involved in the greater wizarding world and the threat of Voldemort overshadows the goings-on at Hogwart's, the downtime between the events of one book and the next grows shorter. 
During downtime, characters rarely just sit around the house collection dust. Instead, they have their own adventures that don't involve the rest of the group, work on personal projects, meet new people, learn new skills, go on vacations, and otherwise lead full if unexamined lives. As a result, characters often return from downtime--especially long stretches of it--with new resources, skills, information, contacts and stories. To help determine how much a character can accomplish between adventures, players are awarded Downtime (DT) points hat they can spend on things that are going to be helpful, noteworthy, or relevant when the next adventure begins. 
At the end of each adventure, the GM should decide how much time will pass before the next adventure begins. In some cases downtime will be a known quantity based on player plans ("we'll meet back here in two weeks") or story events ("we can't make our next move until Lord Fancypants returns from Paris in three weeks"). If not, we recommend coming up with standard way of determining downtime, either in the form of a set amount of downtime between adventures (1 week between adventures, 10 weeks between seasonal story arcs) or a standard die roll (roll 1d4 to decide how many weeks before the next adventure happens). Unless the PCs work for an organization that sends them on missions according to a predictable schedule, the characters usually won't know when the next adventure is scheduled to begin unless they've planned for it. However, it's generally best to let the players know at the end of the adventure so they can decide how they want to spend their downtime before the next game session begins so you don't have to delay the beginning of the next adventure to do what amounts to record-keeping. 
Characters get a number of Downtime points per week equal to their Hero Factor and may spend leftover Luck points at the end of an adventure to increase their Downtime at the rate of 1 Luck point per DT.

Using Downtime

Each game will have its own specific rules for how players can use Downtime, but most Downtime expenditures fall into a few general categories:

• Healing: Characters who are injured or traumatized have to spend some of their downtime for rest and recuperation if they want to avoid complications. 
• Fulfilling Obligations: In some games, certain hooks or templates may require characters to give up a portion of their downtime. For example, a character who belongs to a religious order may be required to spend some of their Downtime attending rituals, going to meetings, and doing work on behalf of the organization. Failure to fulfill such obligations usually has consequences. 
• Improving Traits and Learning New Ones: Characters can use downtime to take classes, enter apprenticeships, work out, and do other things that increase the rate at which they improve stat ratings or learn new abilities. 
• Crafting: Character with the ability to make items that are useful during adventures (like swords or strength-enhancing designer drugs) can trade DT for gear. 
• SCIENCE!: Characters with appropriate traits can use Downtime to conduct research, work on inventions, modify equipment, and engage in other long term scientific or engineering projects.  
• MAGIC!: Wizards can research new spells, construct magic items, make demonic pacts, and take other actions to expand their arcane repertoire by spending downtime. 
• Fact-Finding: Characters in search of dirt, proof, or answers can spend their downtime on investigative work: conducting surveillance, poring through public record, questioning people of interest, and the like. 
• Freelancing: A chracter can use their DT to make some extra cash between adventures. 
• Networking: Characters who want to play politics, improve their social status, become famous, or peddle influence can spend downtime to ingratiate themselves to powerful people, make useful connections, put people in their debt, build their brand, otherwise expand their monkeysphere in beneficial ways. 
• Shenanigans: Characters can also spend downtime putting themselves into situations that have a good chance of getting out of hand in entertaining ways: consorting with shady characters, indulging in vices, joining cults, engaging in illegal activity, hanging out in seedy bars, etc. This option usually involves the player spending downtime to roll on a table to see what kind of trouble they get themself into. 

Short Breaks

If the players don't have a full week between adventures, the GM can opt to give the players a proportional amount of downtime to spend. The mathematically consistent way to do this is to divide the character's weekly downtime by 7, but the math's a little simpler (and the results are usually only slightly different after rounding) if you just give them 25% Downtime for 1-2 days, 50% Downtime for 3-5 days, and full Downtime if they're only short 1 day. 

Downtime Montages

While downtime usually happens between adventures, there can also be long stretches within the adventure where nothing interesting happens. For example, when the players are waiting for the next full moon so they can perform the ritual or when they take an uneventful journey from one part of the game world to another. When this happens, the GM can give the players Downtime to spend during the montage that shows how the characters are passing their time during the boring part of the story. Depending on what's happening during the montage, the players' options for spending downtime may be limited or restricted by availability of time or resources. 
For example, if the players are taking a long journey on horseback:

• A character who wants to learn a language that another character speaks can spend DT normally, since their lessons can be conducted in the saddle. 
• A character who wants to improve their combat skills can only spend X DT per week since they can only practice when the group stops moving. 
• A character who wants to turn downtime into extra income is out of luck unless they can convince another character to pay them for something. 
• A character can't spend downtime at all to improve their standing with the Toblerone crime family, because they're not there. 
  

Picaresques

If the adventures in your campaign are tied together very loosely, it might make sense to ignore Downtime entirely and just give the players character points with which to improve, tweak, or even completely rebuild their characters between adventures.