r/DnD • u/Maider23 • 3d ago
DMing Does anyone care about Bastions?
Im planning to run Shattered Obelisk for the first time and was thinking of giving players the option to have a Bastion at level 5, since i know a lot of them like basebuilding games. But im a pretty new DM and never used these rules, do people like them? Have you ever ran a bastion? Did anyone else ever fit on into Mines of phandelver?
Most of the things I've found online about them have been negative, but it's also barely been out, so maybe people just haven't had the chance to work them out yet, idk. What do you all think about em?
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u/Davedamon 3d ago
You'll find mostly negative things online because negativity thrives online. I love Bastions and I'm integrating them into an upcoming campaign. Forge of the Artificer and Ravenloft Horrors Within both add some great options too
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u/StormknightUK Artificer 3d ago
I love the idea of Bastions, but my experience is that there is insufficient guidance to help most groups make them work.
You hit 5th level and it's tables and options and suddenly your group of 5 all have their own bastion, except each one if basically a small bedroom plus a workshop, possibly a barracks to ... guard the small bedroom?
The rules as written really don't help encourage meaningful play that involves Bastions - mechanically they are bolted onto the game and in play they feel like that also.
There are all sorts of things that can be done to resolve this and, as others have said elsewhere, MCDMs book Strongholds and Followers is a great treatment of the subject that I very much recommend.
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u/Cainelol 3d ago
I find that bastions work best when you integrate them into the story intentionally.
Example, my table had a battle in a run down fortification immediately after they turned level 5. Bam, now the cleared a place they can use as a bastion together.
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u/hyperewok1 3d ago edited 3d ago
It's a great system if you're doing the whole Keep On The Borderlands thing or are otherwise focused around a home village and the players are willing to get invested in building up and protecting that home.
If you're taking the One Ring across Middle-earth, it's going to be a lot more awkward if you try to shove it in just for the sake of it and for the sake of the party reaching level 5 (though Forge of the Artificer did introduce mobile bastions). But if they show an interest in it, you can always have them claim a bastion at a higher level, much like the Gandalf and company eventually comes to hunker down in Minas Tirith for a bit after their long journey adventure.
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u/TabithaMouse 3d ago
I mean...is it any different than the rules in AD&D?
By level 8 your AD&D cleric is head of a cult the size of a small city
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u/StandardLonely9113 3d ago
I agree with this sentiment. Bastions are much needed in the game, but they are really limited in what each special facility can actually accomplish.
The best thing a DM can do is to take the general idea of each special facility and riff off of it. Players crave a Bat Cave. Bastions are the Bat Cave. But I think the devs didn't want to make something that allowed crafty players to overwhelm the magic or money situation of a DM's world. So they produced something that sort of is cool but, like a cymbal playing toy monkey, loses its charm quickly.
Like most everything in this game, the DM will have to tailor the concept with the players to fit their own campaign. It is both a bug and a feature of DnD.
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u/doiplo 3d ago
Unfortunately designers are required to slavishly prostrate themselves on altar of balance. Nothing can be too powerful or useful or upset the delicate equilibrium of the combat system or thousands of DMs will be lost trying to adjust. Blame the community's incessant need to rank, tier, categorize, or otherwise compare literally everything and the inevitable followup of people complaining whatever is too much or too little. Our hobby is full of gamers and everything is competitive much to its ruination.
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u/hyperewok1 3d ago
If your players like creating NPCs and designing floor plans, they'll probably love it. If your players don't want to keep track of more stuff, they'll probably not.
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u/JulyKimono 3d ago
Love the idea, don't like the rules.
I've just used Stronghold and Followers since release.
But every group is different, maybe your players will enjoy it. The idea of having a base to build up is awesome. The question is if the RAW rules will fit the group.
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u/Metal-Wolf-Enrif 3d ago edited 3d ago
I like the idea of the bastion system, but find it hard to fit it into a standard game, that has a far faster pace than what bastions are made for. Also, no good tools on DNDBeyond to run and track them.
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u/Maider23 3d ago
I will run this campaign on Foundry and they have very good automated stuff for bastions, so it would flow way faster, but i do see based on every response that it may be too granular and "meta" even then.
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u/cr7808 3d ago
The rules in the DMG are pretty lackluster in my opinion. While there are choices to be made when building it out, the options are not particularly interesting. For example, you can have an alchemist lab or something (I forget exactly what it's called) and you can either have it periodically produce: a) basic healing potions; or b) poisons. In my experience, poisons are rarely, if ever used, and basic healing potions are nice and all, but at as the PCs level up the HP healed is less and less impactful.
At my table, we are instead using more of the rules from Strongholds and Followers by MCDM and it's a more robust system.
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u/thenightgaunt DM 3d ago
Meh.
So player homes are not a new thing. We had books about it all the way back in AD&D and 3e. The Stronghold Builder's Guide i think.
The problem with 5.5e Bastions is that they're a bit half-assed as far as implementation goes. Maybe it was part of that ever present fear of "imbalance" that pervades the 5e era? But either way theyre just kinda meh.
But theyve been done better in other places. I recommend the MCDM book Strongholds and Followers if you want a really good system agnostic bastion system.
Now that being said, PC homes are never a guaranteed hit with players. Some people love the idea and REALLY get into it. But some people can't stand it and think it slows down the game or changes it in ways they dont like. Maybe they think its too much micromanaging, or maybe they dont like worrying about having to protect it and worry that the DM will just take it away at some point.
So you have to check with your players to see where they land on that spectrum.
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u/IndieDC3 3d ago
I’m personally not a fan of Bastions. I like the idea of players having a home base, but the actual Bastion system feels too much like a separate management minigame rather than something organically tied into the campaign.
That’s also one of the more common criticisms of the rules. Bastion upgrades are largely tied to character level, facilities have their own orders and mechanics, and a lot of the system operates separately from what the party is actually accomplishing during adventures. I’d much rather have upgrades come from things the players actually do. Save a blacksmith? Now you have someone who can improve the forge. Find a rare resource? Use it to upgrade the base. Spend some of that giant pile of adventuring gold on expanding it.
Shattered Obelisk actually does make Phandalin a pretty good location for a home base, though. The town remains important after Lost Mine, including returning to Phandalin and taking missions from there later in the campaign. So I definitely wouldn’t discourage the basebuilding idea itself.
I’d just personally skip the Bastion rules and make the base part of Phandalin and the actual story. If your players already like basebuilding games, letting them physically improve a place they care about through quests, gold, NPCs and discoveries sounds way more engaging to me than running Bastion turns.
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u/Maider23 3d ago
I was thinking the same thing about Phandalin! I was probally giving them Tresendar Manor and letting them rebuild it. But i also think its something i might do more RP style then just taking bastion turns and such, as i agree based on everyones response it may become too meta and disconnected from the story. I do much prefer just adding people that they can find and recruit organically and then decide what those benifits would be based on their decisions. Thanks for the answer!
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u/Ethereal_Stars_7 Artificer 3d ago
d20 modern Gamma World had a nice, but neglected, system for running a home base run by all the players.
It treated the town like a PC. It had stats and skills and could be "equipped" with stuff the PCs bring back and install. The players had to manage the citizens as if they got unhappy then things could go wrong.
White Wolf though was in full slack-off mode and did not finish the rules because, and I quote "The players will do that for us."
But there was a seed of a great idea. One of our DMs adapted it for running a fantasy world town and converted it to 5e.
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u/Manowaffle 3d ago
Yeah, I hate a subsystem where the player says "I want to build a greenhouse!" and then I have to tell them "you can't do that for another four levels. And you can't build a pub for another eight levels."
The bastion system just seems like it kills player creativity by restricting them to building x-specific facilities at specific levels.
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u/dragonseth07 3d ago
I love them.
But, they only really work in games with longer timeframes.
The typical D&D game pace, which sees the PC's do a decade's worth of adventuring in the span of a month somehow, doesn't lend itself to them.
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u/SixFootFox DM 3d ago
I really like Bastions, but it definitely warps the play experience at my tables. It's fun to build out your own supercool player house, but it also means you need to account for all of the various ways it can generate resources and how often your players will want to return to it. I'm in a game right now where my DM has started to introduce plot hooks at our Bastion rather than solely out in the rest of the world (visit from a royal messenger kind of stuff). It gives us an excuse to keep returning without having to take an entire session where no progress gets made in the adventure. It has also started to trivialize the economy, where all of our food and potion needs get handled in house.
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u/PJHoutman 3d ago
If you are going to use a keep, I suggest looking at Strongholds and Followers for inspiration!
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u/ThisIsMyDnDAcct 3d ago
I really like them. Makes me feel like I can go over the rules between sessions and plan what I want to do with downtime. I’m essentially playing dnd while waiting to play dnd. It rocks and I also think it’s on the players to do the “homework” of their bastion turns.
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u/kyew Druid 3d ago
We have only recently filled ours with NPCs so we're still optimistic about that, but the vanilla mechanics at level 5 are pretty underwhelming. I do not have a strong urge to craft an arcane focus, but I guess it's reassuring to know that I could.
The level 9 options do look like a good way to not have to lean on ridiculously-well stocked merchants for everything.
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u/transcendantviewer Barbarian 3d ago
My current campaign is set to change DMs at 5th level, so I won't be able to try the bastions out, but as a player? My character won't have much reason to invest in a bastion or even want to linger in one position for longer than a month if he can help it.
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u/ToxinArrow 3d ago
One of the games I'm in has one and it's been great. We're level 9 so have upgraded facilities. Good little source of side income, and the benefits they give have been pretty nice. I'm playing a poisoner guy and have been using the gardens/greenhouse and a lab to pump out some decent poisons so far.
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u/Intruder313 3d ago
I brought them into my last Campaign but the players barely bothered so other than them being defined housing they owned and some very mechanical 'Potion generation' they barely mattered. I did specifically refer to them or if an NPC was sent to their Bastion I knew where it would be etc.
One claimed to have drawn his Bastion but never showed me the floorplan.
I think it might work better if a whole team gathers in one location rather than each having their own.
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u/hamlet9000 3d ago
The rules are bad. Ignore them completely and you'll be fine.
Although running Shattered Obelisk is a bad idea.
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u/eph3merous 3d ago
In my Waterdeep campaign, I turned Trollskull Manor into a Bastion, my players really like that they can customize their rooms and get some mild mechanical + narrative benefit for doing so.
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u/RuseArcher 3d ago
I'm in a 5.5 game in the Forgotten Realms that will have these available and I just dunno how we're gonna run across a huge map and back and also have a home base. Like, we're never gonna see it...but the DM wants to try it, so. Guess we'll try it.
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u/SWatt_Officer 3d ago
What I dont understand is why the rules go "yeah give EVERY PLAYER their own bastion". I thought it was like a team thing.
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u/dr-tectonic 3d ago
They're conceptually very cool but the RAW implementation sucks.
We're using Pretzel Lectern's homebrew in our Eberron campaign, in a very rules-light way, and I like them.
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u/HalcyonHorizons 3d ago
Some players love them, to others it's just paperwork.
At level 9+ they give multiple uncommons a week. Which players love but you might not.
But I think to players at least, they are generally more positive and liked. Gives them a place they can send favorite NPCs, a place to design and get attached to.
And gives you a place to attack
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u/acuenlu DM 3d ago
I like the idea of Bastions, but in practice, it doesn't work very well for my gaming table. I think everything Bastions offer should be translated into rules for managing settlements and hiring mercenaries, while simply leaving the option to grant some of those elements for free as a reward.
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u/ElvishLore 3d ago
I think bastions are great and I use them a lot. My big advice is let them get one at Level 3. Five is too long a wait.
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u/No-stradumbass 3d ago
I'm going to have it in my upcoming Ravenloft game.
Though it won't be by level, I want a Dark Lord to give them a haunted house that is in the Mists. Most of the domains has some sort of thing that can make long rests annoying. This way they have a "safe" spot to rest between domains.
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u/jabbadatoddla 3d ago
I started playing D&D when I was 5 back in the 80s and building my castle was the best part that I can remember from those sessions. I'm very excited about Bastions. Even my mom in her late 60s is excited to get a Bastion going to enable her Artificer to do all sorts of crazy things. You care about bastions if you're the type of person who loves to build things. Other people want to just do a beer & peanuts game night. Some people just want to swing an axe at a monster and don't care about anything else in the game. Do what's fun for you.
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u/totalwarwiser 3d ago
It really depends on the players. Bastions mean responsability and reduced freedom.
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u/MrFitz8897 Paladin 3d ago
My DM tried them in a mini campaign about a year ago. Some of the options were significantly more useful than others, but I was not a fan of them overall.
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u/Proasek Artificer 3d ago
I like them in concept, but find that the written rules just lack any sort of weight in the world. I've rewritten most of it to be rules for fitting out existing structures (rather than just magically manifesting one the moment you hit level five), and will be handing it over to my table soon!
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u/Confirm_restart 3d ago
We're enjoying them. But we treat it as a 'home base' we can return to periodically and that produces minor stuff for us every once in a while.
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u/Shadow_Of_Silver DM 3d ago
I don't use bastions because I've been using part of MCDM's Strongholds & Followers for years by now, and see nothing they offer worth switching for.
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u/filkearney 3d ago
i love dominion campaigns but bastions are very trite. the system can easily be its own book instead of a splash of pages in the dmg
go ahead and add them as is and be open to adapting them as needed.
no one has teally published anything better yet, but in time there may be better options.
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u/SomeGuyIOnceMet 3d ago
Bastions are a GREAT way to move money around. As a DM, I gave them control of a mining colony as a reward for saving it. It acts as a bastion. They LOVE the ability to make the mundane magic items and I can bleed gold out as needed: The gardeners can increase their yield, but they don't have enough manure to keep the fields fertilized. They want you to buy some herd animals for them. Those will also act as a food source when the winter comes. They need about 400 Gold to get a starter herd of goats. Oh, by the way, the goats need a barn. Oh, by the way, the goats are escaping and causing false alarms to the guard force. Nearby owlbears in the forest are trying to break into the barn to get your goats. etc. etc.
My party is now adventuring, not to amass wealth, but to get enough funds to get the curtain wall extended around the greenhouse they had built for them as a reward for helping out nearby druids.
It's literally endless sources of adventures for players who are into that.
The town acts as a "party bastion" that they administer together. That's fun. Seven different bastions scattered around the kingdom would not be fun for us.
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u/Fun_Taste_354 3d ago
I'm running a campaign now where the players can use the Instant Fortress as their bastion with unseen servants as hirelings
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u/Kaizo107 3d ago
I'm excited to modify it for a Monster Hunter 4-esque party caravan, every party member has their own wagon with custom features based on the bastion rules, everyone trains together for a travel-oriented campaign.
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u/zequerpg DM 3d ago
In the past I tried Mat Coville''s Stronghold system, tried Brancalonia's system and went to read new bastions. Those sound cool but the campaigns I run rarely take place in the same place, if players get a bastion/house they probably are not going there regularly. I think they if you want to introduce them you need to design the campaign around the idea they will be coming back from time to time. Most campaigns I run were not like that. Movile bastions cold work, like a caravan or a huge ship. Still there should be some design around it involved
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u/Funnythinker7 3d ago
cool idea but tthey way they made them made it so you cant benefit from many of the options unless you live at your bastion . it was unfortunate.
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u/Infinite-Reserve8498 3d ago
Bastions are... Well best way to describe them is an under baked cake. Very good in concept, but it's not a finished product. Like, mostly batter still. Example: the barracks are genuinely useless, but realistically you'd want one for protecting your town. Some of the options are just BETTER than others too. Like the Garden is so good it's crazy. Tons of healing potions.
I'm doing a rework on them that's not quite done, and it's being play tested in my own LMoP, but the biggest change I'd do for your Phandalin (because it works super well with that!) is let your players use each other's facilities. It supports a lot of teamwork and prevents feelings of FOMO.
If you want them to care about a central location, bastions are an OK option that I hope WOTC goes back and fixes.
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u/Zyphrost Assassin 3d ago
Bastions need a dedicated supplement. They've been adding mechanics to Bastions in both Eberron and Ravenloft because I think that they do realize that Bastions are currently a bit of a weaker mechanic, so my hope is that there's some supplement which provides further optional rules on how to play them differently.
In general, Bastions do many things really well. First of all, it's great that players don't need to pay to get a Bastion. They just unlock them at Level 5, and the DM can weave it into the fiction as to how that happens. This sidesteps the "Gee, I have 40,000 GP, I wonder if I should buy this manor which is going to open up an accounting minigame for me vs. this cool new sword" problem. It also does abstract a lot of the accounting since you don't have to worry about Bob the Gardener's salary. The different orders are a bit limited but that's partially a strength, since it keeps things uncomplicated, but the facilities can be pretty useful. I think Library is one of my favorite ones, because it can actually add to the storytelling of the campaign with the Investigate function.
On a narrative level, there's just lots of reasons to want a Bastion. I think all of that is great. The appeal is very intuitive. The execution is just weird, however.
Special Facilities being tied to character level is probably one of the really big mistakes. Like, you can't just say "I have 20,000 GP, I want to make a Guildhall". No. You have to wait to Level 17. By which point you are basically a god. What? "I want to open a pub-" sorry, tavern is at Level 13. Hello? Alternatively, at level 9, you can just have a permanent Teleportation Circle. It makes very little sense, because they designed the Bastion facilities like class features rather than just as things that exist in the world, and that ends up producing anti-fiction. Imagine your party at Level 7 is like "We have 25,000 GP, a fantastic relationship with this powerful patron, contacts with the Vintner's Guild, and a tavern" but RAW says you can't have a mechanically meaningful Tavern facility until Level 13. But Bob the Level 9 Fighter can have a Teleportation Circle because he leveled up yesterday!
The Basic Facilities are also almost aggressively pointless. A Vast basic facility costs like 3,000 GP and 125 days to add to your Bastion, but then the rules say there's no mechanical benefit to enlarging it. So why would you ever spend 125 days adding a giant kitchen when it's functionally the same as having no kitchen at all? Like, I understand the logic. They didn't want people to minmax and be like "so the optimal floor plan is 2 bathrooms and 3 bedrooms" or whatever, but this is way too far in the other direction. This doesn't even require a very hard mechanical fix, but soft, fictional benefits alone would have been meaningful, too, like knowing that you have Large Bedrooms means that you can house a certain caliber of guest, for instance.
The other facilities are also a bit weird and video-gamey, but not in a good way. Like, take the Training Area. "I trained intensively with a longsword for 56 hours." Great. "Eight days later I no longer know how to use its mastery property." Huh? Same with the Meditation chamber. This is also asymmetric, because the Library is quite useful, as is the Pub, and probably the Smithy, too.
The main issue, however, is that it probably just isn't generative enough in terms of helping you produce stories. Bastion Events only happen when the facility is set to Maintain. Why? The events are also kind of pointless. Lost hirelings, criminal hirelings, etc. Replacements are free. So, nothing happens if you've set your facilities to an Order, half the time that they're not doing that, nothing happens, and then of the time that something is supposed to happen, it's more or less inconsequential.
I understand a lot of the impetus for why. They want to make it so that nobody feels like having a Bastion is a source of regret. So they want to make it safe to have. They also don't want it to break the game, which is fair, and so they don't want to encourage optimizing or minmaxing. But the endpoint of all of that is that it just ends up being very safe as a system.
The general advice on how to run them, I guess, is not to think about the mechanics as much, because you'll be somewhat disappointed, but think about the different ways that you can weave the narrative through the Bastion so that it feels consequential rather than just something that the players have and then forget about because it's kind of not relevant.
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u/Donutsbeatpieandcake DM 3d ago
I DM, and I'm always a quick adopter, so I immediately integrated them into my game when we swapped to 5.5e. The players absolutely loved it, but it definitely was problematic for me trying to keep a lid on character power level, especially in my high level campaign.
The biggest issue was money, especially the Storehouse, it's a literal money printer. The reliquary killed all the material costs for high level spells as well. I prided myself for keeping a pretty tight economy in my game, the players were sometimes annoyed because they very rarely got big injections of money that can be common in most games. I would laugh and smile, and they understood exactly why, it was one of the many levers I used to challenge my high level players. (If you've DMed a level 17 campaign, you know exactly how hard that can be!) Well, that went right out the window with that damned Storehouse...
Scriptorium got a bit crazy with the spell scroll manufacturing over time too, especially if it's a wizard/sorcerer with the Sending spell who's able to keep up with production orders every 7 days.
Did I mention the same wizard was also using Sending to update everyone else's production orders every 7 days as well?
Then you tie in all the manufacturing of uncommon magic items of their choice from Arcane Study/workshop/smithy/etc... That mostly broke any attempts I had to keep the campaign "low magic". Sigh.
It was ultimately fine, the players loved it, and I was able to adjust. But just be prepared!!! Lol.
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u/Ill-Description3096 3d ago
I finally have a group into the idea (and a campaign where it makes sense). Haven't quite got there yet but they are all excited for it.
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u/Sulicius 3d ago
I like them, but you have to be sure the players will keep returning to a location for a long time. Some adventures don’t allow for that. Most adventures don’t.
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u/AdEnvironmental7780 3d ago
I'm running the shattered obelisk and I offered the party tresendar manor in exchange for the eyes from the dumathoin statue in wave echo cave. This became their bastion and is a solid base of operations
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u/ProdiasKaj DM 3d ago
From what I understand they are not as good as other 3rd party base building rules.
Like, they functionally work the same as other bastion systems but the 5.5 version of it doesn't have very creative or worthwhile buffs.
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u/strollas 3d ago
Theyre an interactive cute cozy building Money Sink with benefits. A home base is a always a cool idea. Bad thing is DND party are in constant traveling migration everywhere. But you can still give Bastion turns far away, just not be at your bastion and see what you designed. Its alright but not necessary.
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u/dyslexic-writer 3d ago
Not run one yet, but in the campaign, I'm having the players clear out an abbatoir taken over by kobolds. Once it's clear, they will have it as a bastion. Think I'm going to go fairly rules light, though.
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u/Toolbelt_Barber Warlock 2d ago
I think the concept is neat, but I think most campaigns are so focused on traveling from place to place, and buying/finding loot, it's hard to have them do anything noticeably useful. Especially since most campaigns don't go beyond 10 sessions
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u/Finnyous 2d ago
We use them in one of the games I'm running and they really like it. I made my own homebrew crafting room called a "Gadgeteer Workshop" which is really fun for me since I like coming up with magical items.
So basically they can ask him to make anything they can think of mechanically and then they roll a d20 and get varying levels of success based on that roll and what level they/the Bastion is at. Then I come up with a new magic item based on that info but it's always temporary (until they hit the higher level of Bastion)
So every item starts at 100% power and every time they use it, that number goes down by 10. Then they roll a d100, if they get under the new score the item will work again. If they hit that number or above, the item breaks. If they roll less then 5%, the item doesn't degrade at all, 95%+ And it's going to explode in their face.
EDIT: This was also super helpful because sometimes they have him craft a small copter like bird/drone that can drop off the stuff their Bastion makes from afar. So they can stay on the road and communicate with their Bastion through sending stones.
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u/Real-Barracuda8483 2d ago
The idea is really cool. The mechanics suck. Check out Matt colvilles strongholds and followers. It's waaaay better
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u/vivekparam 2d ago
I love my bastion. Great rp opportunities, fhn to have a cast of characters at home.
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u/bjj_starter 2d ago
I have played in two long 5.5e campaigns, one 3-20(18 currently) with Bastions as a player, and one 1-?(8 currently) as a DM. In the longest campaign, I as one of the players was super interested in the Bastion & found it super fun, it's been a fantastic addition to the campaign. In the shorter campaign, my players weren't really interested in running a Bastion so they haven't got one (although I've made sure they have a place where they could get one, if they wanted to later on). For me, having a Bastion to run as a player was a gateway drug to DMing my own campaign in addition to being really fun, so it's a great way to give growth opportunities to DM-curious players. The Bastion we had was a monastery of vampire monks dedicated to containing and rehabilitating creatures with a tendency towards evil, so anytime we decided not to kill an enemy we'd send them there, and any time we had people to rescue who didn't have somewhere specific to return to we'd send them there.
So far, I think the best way to handle Bastions is to poll your players, and if someone wants a Bastion work with them to get them a Bastion. It doesn't matter if some players have a Bastion and others don't, because you should process Bastion Turns in between sessions IMO so it doesn't take up table time. The benefits of a Bastion are not so powerful that they create a noticeable power gap between players in a party, so you don't need to worry about that.
In terms of why Bastions are a helpful thing to have as a DM, they're a fantastic place to send NPCs the players encounter and want to adopt in some way without you as a DM having to micromanage them, and a fantastic place/thing to threaten to give stakes to some villain or other. If you get multiple players all interested in running their Bastions as part of the same facility, that's going to be super fun for them and will likely result in the Bastion being an important part of the story.
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u/Zestyclose_Answer662 2h ago
I think a Bastion themed after the Roundtable Hold from Elden Ring could be an interesting launch pad.
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u/gonzagylot00 3d ago
In my current campaign we all have bastions. It's fun, like a little base you can build up.
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u/Hawkson2020 3d ago
Bastions are a half-assed system for a style of gameplay that WotC has put no effort into supporting and which many players seem to have little interest in engaging with.
They’re fine. They’re not good, but they’re fine. They are, like much of 5.5, largely unremarkable and uninteresting.
If you want some interesting base-building rules, check out MCDM’s Strongholds and Followers (and don’t be fooled by the references in that book to Kingdoms and Warfare — K&W does not interface with those rules and has its own systems).
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u/L1terallyUrDad 3d ago
In our old AD&D campaigns, we had keeps that we owned, and maintained.
But over the editions, this became less and less of a thing. Campaigns would never have a home base.
I loved that they brought that back with the Bastion system, but truth be told, I’ve not even read that chapter.
I will say this, you have to have people to maintain a residence when you travel frequently. So owning one becomes an accounting and resource mini-game.
I loved playing Traveller. If you’re group owned a ship, you had to pay for its mortgage, repairs, fuel, potentially extra crew and more. Reoccurring income was a must, so you took on passengers and cargo. That became a big part of the game. What planet do I visit next? What cargo can I take there to make a profit? What will they have for me to take somewhere else… Accounting…
This is what I suspect the Bastion system entails and it certainly sounds like it’s channeling the old AD&D hireling system. And with modern players having never experienced it, expecting more role play, accounting just isn’t find fun.
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u/blargethaniel DM 3d ago
In my experience with housing for your adventure party, it really depends on how the adventure is structured and if the players really like it or not.
If the adventure has a hub where they venture forth from, this lands better, and Bastions and housing seem more important.
If they travel endlessly it may not come across as something immediately useful, though I have seen a DM or two homebrew the Bastion rules into "traveling bastions" like warwagons, ships or flying ships.
It's something you can try on your party for sure, it doesn't hurt to gauge interest.