By popular request, I've been working on some new enhancements to the downtime system. If you've been developing actions lately, you've probably noticed that the chances of success, failure, or botch are now listed along with the downtime activity. This is in preparation for using boon to guarantee the success of action development, which I plan to work on this weekend. I figure you guys will probably want to know there's an 60% chance to botch before you see that it costs five boon.
In the mean time, there's another boon-related downtime enhancement everyone can enjoy. You should now see an "Advance with Boon" link above your downtime queue. If you hover over the link, it explains exactly what it does: "Advance downtime by one day at a cost of one boon." Just click the link and your queue will magically advance as if a day had passed. As always, be sure that the top activity is active, or else it'll be a day wasted. Note that downtime deals with activities, not characters, so using this function will advance the queues of other characters who are learning from you, teaching you, or collaborating with you during that time.
I'll post a follow-up once I'm done programming the guaranteed action development. In the mean time, feel free to heap on the praise and adoration. :P
As promised, you can now guarantee success while developing an action. Just go to your downtime queue and hover over the "Guarantee with Boon" link under Manage next to the relevant activity. You should see a prompt that tells you the cost (e.g., "Guarantee success for 3 boon"). If you click it, that much boon will be deducted from your total and the action's chance of success will become 100%.
Note that the cost of guaranteeing an action is equal to 100 divided by your normal chance of success, minus one, rounded up, so the cost goes up as the difficulty of development goes up. If you only have a 16% chance of success, for example, it will cost you six boon to guarantee success, whereas it only costs one boon if you have a 50% or greater chance. This keeps reasonably nice actions within reach, while making obscenely powerful actions obscenely difficult to acquire, as they're intended to be.
Oh, and this system doesn't include the ability to partially improve your chances at a lower cost. It's all or nothing; either you pay to absolutely, 100% guarantee your success, or you roll the dice normally.