Chaosmancer
Legend
So, I haven't read this thread yet or the general one, but have people noticed how ABSURDLY dumb some of this stuff is?
Example 1: You start with (likely) three Roomy facilities and a cramped one. Assuming you keep these on the ground floor and build everything else you get for your bastion up in future levels, do you want to take a guess at the cost of the Walls to enclose your bastion?
35,000 gold and 1,400 days (3.8 YEARS), as you will need 140 five ft squares. I literally drew this on graph paper and counted. And what do you get for this cost? On the weeks that you aren't at your Bastion, if you roll a 10 (5% chance) you can reduce the number of losses you suffer by rolling two fewer dice. That's it. Four years and enough gold to buy every Basic Facility at Vast with 14K gp left over. And this is at LEVEL 5! If you weren't planning on multiple stories right from the get go, and make the mistake of building broad? Then you will effectively never be able to afford walls.
Example 2: Other than magical items, there is only one other use for BP. Coming back from the dead! It costs you 100 BP to do that though. So, when will that happen?
Well, If you spend 8 weeks at your Bastion, getting 8 turns, you can create 40 bastion points. Meaning that, it will be until level SEVEN to get enough points to survive dying... once. At level 7. Do you know what else you have access to by 7th level? Death Ward. Which prevents you from dying. And by 9th level, you have Raise Dead. By 9th level a Bastion is going to be generating ~96 BP a level... still not enough to come back from the dead, and this is assuming you spend every single week at your bastion.
By the time you can reliably have the benefit of this once per level... the fear of death is practically gone from the game!
Example 3: Let us say that you are a 5th level wizard. You decide you want to build a Bastion. You look at the list and two things jump out at you, an Arcane Study and a Library. Perfect, right?
So you build your facilities. And what do you get?
The Arcane Facility has three benefits. 1) After sleeping in it you can cast Identify without spending a spell slot or using material components. That... is utterly worthless! Unless they have severely ripped Identify apart, it is a ritual spell (so it never uses slots anyways) and the material component isn't consumed. 2) You could create an arcane focus! Which you already have? But you can sell it for 10 gp... after a week's work... 3) You can create a blank book with nothing in it, which can sell for 25 gold... after a week's work...
You decide to look at the PHB, page 159, and see that you can sell your spellcasting services for 10 to 50 gp... PER SPELL. Of which you have far more than 3 per day, meaning that you can trivially make so much more money than this.
The Library? You can learn three facts you didn't know about something famous. For a week's worth of work.
And that's it. That is your entire benefit from you Bastion Actions, except rolling some dice and hoping to build up enough to get a magical item.
And this is fairly common. The highest gold per action at 5th level is the Garden (50 gp per action) with the second being the Storehouse (50 gp profit per two actions, as long as you invested 500 gp the first time), Everything else either costs you money, or gives no monetary benefit.
Example 4: Hey, wanna take a guess how easy it is to lose your Bastion Actions? Or even your whole Bastion?
1) At level 5 you can only be away for 5 weeks. I'm in a game right now that has us needing to travel from Neverwinter to Baldur's Gate. Wanna guess at how long that takes? About three weeks by foot. Meaning, if we had a Bastion in Neverwinter where we started, and we had to travel to Baldur's Gate, if we arrived, spent less than a day on the adventure, and immediately turned around, my Bastion would be destroyed and looted for being abandoned.
2) That's not all! Let's assume you are lucky enough to be gone only 4 weeks. There are four rolls on the d20 that can lose you hirelings from the Maintenance action. That is a 20% chance. That is about a 59% chance of hitting at least one of them over four weeks. With the Library and the Arcane Study, I have only two hirelings, and zero defenders. Meaning that if I get a single 10 (18.6% chance) or happen to get two of these events, I've lost all my bastion actions for the week.
And this is the sole purpose of the Barracks, Armory, and Menagerie. You have to get these facilities, out of your limit of 6 facilities, to prevent the attacks, and the other three events are simply going to wreck most facilities, as you generally only have one or two hirelings in the majority of them.
So, we have minor benefits, and defending those minor benefits come with MASSIVE costs completely out of line with the benefits you get. Now, sure, some of the high level facilities can give some big boosts. You Empower a Demiplane and you can start each long rest with five times your level temp hp. That's INSANE, but others are super niche/Useless (You can use an adventurers guild to put things in your trophy room for no benefit, or gain a new creature in your menagerie). The most money you can get is with the Storehouse, which at 17th level allows you to make 5,000 gp with two weeks of work. And other than the storehouse, most things get you a max of 500gp of value (except the stone masons, because they can make your stupidly expensive walls for free)
So, over all... there is a decent idea here. But none of the execution seems worth the hassle.
Example 1: You start with (likely) three Roomy facilities and a cramped one. Assuming you keep these on the ground floor and build everything else you get for your bastion up in future levels, do you want to take a guess at the cost of the Walls to enclose your bastion?
35,000 gold and 1,400 days (3.8 YEARS), as you will need 140 five ft squares. I literally drew this on graph paper and counted. And what do you get for this cost? On the weeks that you aren't at your Bastion, if you roll a 10 (5% chance) you can reduce the number of losses you suffer by rolling two fewer dice. That's it. Four years and enough gold to buy every Basic Facility at Vast with 14K gp left over. And this is at LEVEL 5! If you weren't planning on multiple stories right from the get go, and make the mistake of building broad? Then you will effectively never be able to afford walls.
Example 2: Other than magical items, there is only one other use for BP. Coming back from the dead! It costs you 100 BP to do that though. So, when will that happen?
Well, If you spend 8 weeks at your Bastion, getting 8 turns, you can create 40 bastion points. Meaning that, it will be until level SEVEN to get enough points to survive dying... once. At level 7. Do you know what else you have access to by 7th level? Death Ward. Which prevents you from dying. And by 9th level, you have Raise Dead. By 9th level a Bastion is going to be generating ~96 BP a level... still not enough to come back from the dead, and this is assuming you spend every single week at your bastion.
By the time you can reliably have the benefit of this once per level... the fear of death is practically gone from the game!
Example 3: Let us say that you are a 5th level wizard. You decide you want to build a Bastion. You look at the list and two things jump out at you, an Arcane Study and a Library. Perfect, right?
So you build your facilities. And what do you get?
The Arcane Facility has three benefits. 1) After sleeping in it you can cast Identify without spending a spell slot or using material components. That... is utterly worthless! Unless they have severely ripped Identify apart, it is a ritual spell (so it never uses slots anyways) and the material component isn't consumed. 2) You could create an arcane focus! Which you already have? But you can sell it for 10 gp... after a week's work... 3) You can create a blank book with nothing in it, which can sell for 25 gold... after a week's work...
You decide to look at the PHB, page 159, and see that you can sell your spellcasting services for 10 to 50 gp... PER SPELL. Of which you have far more than 3 per day, meaning that you can trivially make so much more money than this.
The Library? You can learn three facts you didn't know about something famous. For a week's worth of work.
And that's it. That is your entire benefit from you Bastion Actions, except rolling some dice and hoping to build up enough to get a magical item.
And this is fairly common. The highest gold per action at 5th level is the Garden (50 gp per action) with the second being the Storehouse (50 gp profit per two actions, as long as you invested 500 gp the first time), Everything else either costs you money, or gives no monetary benefit.
Example 4: Hey, wanna take a guess how easy it is to lose your Bastion Actions? Or even your whole Bastion?
1) At level 5 you can only be away for 5 weeks. I'm in a game right now that has us needing to travel from Neverwinter to Baldur's Gate. Wanna guess at how long that takes? About three weeks by foot. Meaning, if we had a Bastion in Neverwinter where we started, and we had to travel to Baldur's Gate, if we arrived, spent less than a day on the adventure, and immediately turned around, my Bastion would be destroyed and looted for being abandoned.
2) That's not all! Let's assume you are lucky enough to be gone only 4 weeks. There are four rolls on the d20 that can lose you hirelings from the Maintenance action. That is a 20% chance. That is about a 59% chance of hitting at least one of them over four weeks. With the Library and the Arcane Study, I have only two hirelings, and zero defenders. Meaning that if I get a single 10 (18.6% chance) or happen to get two of these events, I've lost all my bastion actions for the week.
And this is the sole purpose of the Barracks, Armory, and Menagerie. You have to get these facilities, out of your limit of 6 facilities, to prevent the attacks, and the other three events are simply going to wreck most facilities, as you generally only have one or two hirelings in the majority of them.
So, we have minor benefits, and defending those minor benefits come with MASSIVE costs completely out of line with the benefits you get. Now, sure, some of the high level facilities can give some big boosts. You Empower a Demiplane and you can start each long rest with five times your level temp hp. That's INSANE, but others are super niche/Useless (You can use an adventurers guild to put things in your trophy room for no benefit, or gain a new creature in your menagerie). The most money you can get is with the Storehouse, which at 17th level allows you to make 5,000 gp with two weeks of work. And other than the storehouse, most things get you a max of 500gp of value (except the stone masons, because they can make your stupidly expensive walls for free)
So, over all... there is a decent idea here. But none of the execution seems worth the hassle.
