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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CleverNickName" data-source="post: 8911916" data-attributes="member: 50987">Have you ever had your players decide that their characters wanted to take over a dungeon, a ruin, or any other piece of property in your game, and claim it as their own?  Like, they drove out the bad guys and looted all the rooms and then thought to themselves: "Hey, you know what?  This is in a great location!  It's right outside of town, close to schools, the neighbors are quiet...I think we should move in!"  And if so, how did you handle it?[SPOILER="Here's a bit of backstory."]At our last gaming session, the party of heroes were hot on the trail of a body-snatcher.  They followed the clues to an abandoned farm about an hour outside of town, and began to explore it, trying to find any clues that might lead them to their quarry.  And then one of the players went a little bit off the rails."Hey you know what, guys?  This place is abandoned...the DM said that it's sat abandoned for like twenty years.  Sure the farmhouse needs to be rebuilt, but there's a barn and carriage house still in pretty good condition, a mill, a well, and an overgrown apple orchard.  I bet that if we put in the effort to fix the place up and clear out that spider-infested orchard, we could have a pretty good home base for our characters.""That's not a bad idea," another player piped up.  "I wonder how we could go about doing that?  Start with the mayor, maybe?"  Everyone looked into their webcams, expectantly."Um.  That's probably a good place to start," I said, and then I went into Improv DM mode.  I spun a yarn about the farm's previous owners and the surrounding area.  A couple of History checks later, and I had invented a tale about how two of the characters in the party (who were born and raised in this town, according to their backstories) remembered something about an apple blight and bankruptcy, nobody wanted to buy the farm because of the blight, something something fell into ruin and monsters moved in and rumored to be haunted, et cetera.  One of the players recalled the name of the previous owners (that I totally invented on the spot), to give them a lead to chat with someone in town about it.  And then I brought the players' focus back around to the matter at hand:"As you were discussing this casually with your companions, you catch a bit of movement out of the corner of your eye.  You glance toward the orchard, but it's gone....you aren't sure if it was a trick of the light, or just your imagination, but you could have sworn you saw someone...""Oh yeah," one of the players chuckled.  "We're still on a quest.  Let's get this guy off of OUR farm!"[/SPOILER]So they've got a couple more gaming sessions before they wrap up this "body-snatcher quest," and then they're probably going to follow up on the lead I gave them....so I have a bit of time to prepare.And I'm not completely surprised...lots of popular video games have homesteads in them (Skyrim, Fallout 4, Stardew Valley...), it was only a matter of time until my players wanted to do the same in D&D.  I remember the earlier editions of D&D had a pretty important "Build Your Own Kingdom" element, and there were rules for construction costs, time, taxes, raising armies, building traps, and so forth.  So it's not exactly unprecedented.So I don't have a problem with any of this.  In fact, I'd like to encourage it!  But there isn't much info in the DMG (or elsewhere) for buying, improving, and managing properties.  Before I go out on a limb and start writing my own, I wanted to check to see if there are any 3PP sources out there already.Have any of my fellow gamers ever done this before in 5th Edition D&D?  If so, I have a few questions:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">How did you balance out the cost, time, and other factors involved in buying, repairing, improving, and owning property in your game world?  </li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Are there any resources you could recommend, for players that want to build a homestead and make apple cider in their downtime?</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">How did you make it FUN?  </li> </ul></blockquote>

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