D&D General What do you do for housing?

[Shades of Eternity]

Kind of a silly question. Replaying Oblivion got me thinking.

What do you guys look for in housing in your fantasy world?

Do you go standard house, wizards tower, castle, or even stranger (looks at Merlin's houses in the old Grail Quest series)?

 

[Lanefan]

As a player, for me it depends on the character. One might go for a castle or stronghold, another for a fancy villa in a big city, another for a simple cottage somewhere quiet, another for a communal base shared with some (or even many) other adventurers, and so on.

That said, most of the time during their adventuring careers the PCs live out of inns, hostels, or sleep rough.

 

[Hriston]

My party is first level and has just emerged from an eight hour dungeon crawl. Their choices are to seek shelter in the nearby abandoned castle where a family of wild boars awaits in the courtyard, camp in the wilderness and risk a random encounter with ogres, or head to a village a short distance away that's currently experiencing an anhkheg problem.

 

[Brendan Byrd]

The baseline for my characters when selecting shelter, in order of priority: secure, sanitary, and spacious.

I prefer my characters to have a stable place to call home, even at low levels. Improved residence(s) as the character accumulates levels/wealth, if the circumstances of the game can accommodate it.
I’ve never been happy about the “murderhobo” thing.

Availability of “Gimmicks and Gadgets” for improved quality of life in the home. (Non-adventuring spells, items, and tech.) This worldbuilding/social stuff isn’t always available in a game, though.
Having a “Dutch Oven” that can be commanded to fill itself up at the creek and then go sit in the fire… is successful adventurer bragging rights in a way that gp or that string of pearls isn’t.

 

[Shades of Eternity]

Man, it's funny how many homes I haven't done ...too busy murderhoboing.

I get a serious kick out of post-apocalyptic housing because it's fun to turn something that was never a house into a house, but with fantasy, I rarely do.

I once built a motte-and-bailey farm on the edge of town. It is kind of fun building a "reverse dungeon" and forcing the gm to get past your defenses. I had a gm who used to curse the word 'geese'.

I can see a house being way more useful if it were in a world like Ultima, where you had moongates to travel long distances within the world. These could be treated as customs.

 

[aco175]

When not adventuring and sleeping in barns and inns, the PCs have been gifted a house to live a few times. Eventually they move onto an abandoned keep and fix it up. Sometimes the keep is little more than an estate and other times it is a military keep on the borderlands so to speak.

 

[Tonguez]

For humans I like Roman and Persian style Villas with the internal atriums and impluviums (water basin features), peristyle internal gardens, colonnaded walkways, mosaic floor textures and private spaces off the central courtyard.

Peasants might live in wattle and daub cottages, or in caves, urban dwellers in tenements or apartments above shops.

Of course other races will vary eg gnomes live in burrows, dwarves in cavernous mines with private spaces branching off from central Halls. Elves live in sculptured tree villages, Orcs in yurts within thorn bomas

 

[Li Shenron]

What do you guys look for in housing in your fantasy world?

I suppose you mean for our own player characters. Usually I keep it undefined and just go adventuring and live on the road. I probably also never go back to my original region.

If I am playing a long enough campaign and the DM requires us to have a base or residence where to spend downtime, it will appropriate to the character's nature and economic possibilities, so it can vary a lot.