D&D (2024) Dungeon Master's Guide Bastion System Lets You Build A Stronghold

The Dungeon Master's Guide's brand new Bastion System has been previewed in a new video from Wizards of the Coast.

Characters can acquire a bastion at 5th-level. Each week, the bastion takes a turn, with actions including crafting, recruiting, research, trade, and more.

A bastion also contains a number of special facilties, starting with two at 5th-level up to 6 at 17th-level. These facilities include things like armories, workshops, laboratories, stables, menageries, and more. In total there are nearly thirty such facilities to choose from.

 

[pemerton]

I guess what's missing is the reason why followers are so loyal. What did the PC do to earn such fanatical devotion?

AD&D PHB p 20:

When a cleric achieves 8th level (Patriarch or Matriarch) he or she automatically attracts followers if the cleric establishes a place of worship -a building of not less than 2,000 square feet in floor area with an altar, shrine, chapel, etc. These followers are fanatically loyal and serve without pay so long as the cleric does not change deities and/or alignment.​

AD&D PHB p 32:

When a monk player character attains the 8th level of experience, he or she will gain a number of monks as followers upon defeating the monk which held the 8th level position that the player character has now gotten. . . . Note that monk followers require no support, upkeep, or pay of any sort.​

I assume that a ranger's followers, a fighter's mercenaries, and a thief or assassin's gang/guild members, have loyalty calculated in the normal fashion, but the rules don't really specify. (The text for fighter's was already quoted upthread, I think (PHB p 22): "These men will serve as mercenaries so long as the fighter maintains his or her freehold and pays the men-at-arms".)

As to why these various NPCs turn up to serve the PC, the DMG addresses that:

AD&D DMG p 16:

Your players know that upon reaching certain levels and doing certain things (such as building a stronghold) they will be entitled to attract a body of followers. These followers might be fanatically loyal servants of the same deity (or deities) in the case of clerics, stalwart admirers of fighters, or whatever.​

I know that it is common for posters to assert that the D&D GM is not subject to any rules, and that the GM can make up whatever fiction they like that they think makes sense as coming downstream of some PC action; but the text just quoted is yet another counter-example to that contention: once the PC reaches the requisite level and the player has them do the relevant thing, then the GM is obliged to create fiction which includes the appropriate followers turning up to serve the PC in the appropriate fashion.

 

[pemerton]

No, just that forced impossibility of betrayal is unrealistic.

As per my post just upthread, it is the GM who is being forced - by a rule of the game. There is no "forcing" in the fiction.

 

[pemerton]

The problem I have with that is that when this month's bastion event tells us that the third guard on the right was in fact an agent working against the party all along and has now left the bastion, I (or I and the player) now have to ret-con whatever underhanded deeds this agent did (if any) while at the bastion and-or how much info was passed along to the character's enemies.

Ret-cons of any kind are a complete non-starter for me, as there's no way of knowing what knock-on effects those ret-conned events might have caused had they been allowed to occur in proper sequence. As in, "Oh, look - it turns out Celesta wouldn't have come on that last adventure because she was busy sorting out a murder at her stronghold" thus invalidating the entire adventure you all just played through. No thanks.

These are problems entirely of your own making. If Celesta was on the last adventure, it follows that she was not at her stronghold, which in turn entails that if any murder occurred there, she didn't know about it. Which is hardly an unrealistic possibility!

Writers of serial fiction (TV shoes, comics, etc) deal with these issues all the time, in a context of commercial production/publication that is being scrutinised and enjoyed by millions of people. I think the GM of a RPG can handle establishing a few bits of new fiction, and fitting them into the established past facts of the game, easily enough.

 

[Chaosmancer]

My issue here is that you are presenting this as a binary, where the DM must be kept out of the bastion because otherwise they're seemingly guaranteed to abuse the NPCs because...they enjoy messing with players? I just don't see the need to force a separation in this one area.

And you and others who don't like the system say that the DM must have absolute authority over the Bastion, or the player's will act like psychopaths with no regard for morality or decency and hide behind the rules mocking the DM as they cry tears of powerlessness in the face of "but the rules say"

 

[Chaosmancer]

Reality allows such horrible things to happen. I want a setting that mimics reality as much as is practical, and I don't want a game where players control characters outside their PCs (sue me) so I don't want rules that force a situation, however unlikely, that doesn't make logical sense.

If my player started going on about how they beat and demean their butler for giggles, I'm not addressing that as a rules problem. Just like I wouldn't address it as a rules problem if they decided to do that to anyone else.

Yeah, reality allows for monsters. That doesn't mean I am going to accept those monsters are my table and spend 4 hours a week playing nice with them.

 

[Chaosmancer]

We disagree there; to me those two things are part and parcel of one thing.

We absolutely disagree. Those two things are very different.

Zone of Truth is still a thing, is it not?

Failing that, there's real-world options such as references, getting to know the person, etc.

Zone of Truth is trivially easy to compromise with even a modicum of effort. And yeah, do you know how long it would take to RP needing to get references (Which you can't trust) and getting to know them before you hire them (which you can't trust) would take? All of that time and effort in the game devoted to merely reducing the chances of something terrible happening... no one is going to bother with that for more than a single NPC per campaign. It's exhausting.

That's the reality. Which means that's what I'm going to put in my games: that there could always be that one bad apple.

Games are not reality. You are not honorbound to make every PC who wants to have a supporting cast act as a paranoid hiring manager, in real time, at the table, just because people lie in real life. You even said in your aside about your history it was 2 out of 60, that is 3%. That is a margin of error in most statistics, so... why not round it to 0% the majority of the time? Because reality? That's a pretty poor reason to make a game less fun and more hostile.

Same as traps - not every door in a dungeon is trapped but some of them might be.

Ah yes, traps. Classically never a thing that has ever caused any problems, debates, or dozens upon dozens of articles about how they are poorly used, poorly thought out, and are likely harming the game from misuse. As long as it is like traps, then there should never be any discussion about whether or not it is the right thing to do.

Which, also, just wanting to point out. This isn't an "all NPCS" thing. This is literally a sub-set of NPCs. Just like you hopefully don't trap the doors to an inn, why would we need to have our personal maids vetted to make sure they aren't traitors?

Or you just see how it goes. The servant my character has at her house in the game I play in has shown me more loyalty than any other person I've ever met...and taking him on was a pure leap of faith on my part; he's a Goblin (they're monsters, in our games) who was servant to some bad guys we knocked off. We didn't know what to do with him so my character took him in and hired him, not quite knowing what to expect; and it turned out to be one of the best moves that character has ever made.

But it took me a while to realize just how loyal and trustworthy he was. Until then I took precautions, not knowing if he was going to slit my throat while I slept, but soon realized I could relax on that.

Why should every single NPC in your entire house have the potential to slit your throat while you slept? Why can't that just... not be a thing, because it would make for a terrible game experience to actually have that happen?

Oh, and lets say they did slit your character's throat. How long would it be before you decided to take a leap of faith on trusting a goblin again? After all, you were proven that you were wrong to trust them, so why trust them in the future?

50% would be overkill, I agree.

But 5%? That's more like reality, IME.

And at that point, as I said, you can exclude every single Bastion NPC, and still have 5% of all NPCs in the game be potential traitors. You don't need to also include Bastions.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Or, at most in these situations, have a bit of fun with it, with the player's consent.

When I ran SKT, one of the characters was a noble and we determined she had a mansion in Waterdeep, which the group would periodically go back to for R&R when possible. But, she was a wild magic sorcerer (with a large, custom wild surge table), and eventually they hired a gnome steward who liked to tinker... so, sometimes weird things happened. The mansion got filled with lavender paint. It went temporarily invisible. It was taken apart, piece by piece, and reassembled in an empty lot a few blocks away. The gnome tinkered a bit too much, and the whole mansion became self-mobile, so they had to catch it and stop it from moving on its own. But at no point was it threatened with any real harm.

And I think that is fine, and I don't think the rules are designed to prevent this. I also think if the player (who wouldn't be playing a wild magic sorcerer at that point) came to you said "I don't want all this random stuff happening to my character's house, it is exhausting and I just want it to be a calm place she goes to relax" then it should be perfectly fine to respect that and let it be that. Because it doesn't harm anyone to let the player have the majority say in that.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

So, suppose that a player chose to have their PC be an orphan. Then you as GM wouldn't get to make kidnapping their family members a part of the fiction.

Or, suppose a player chooses not to have their PC build a bastion. Then you as GM wouldn't have any bastion NPCs to make up stories about.

Presumably in such circumstances you would nevertheless be able to find enjoyable stuff to do as GM.

So why can't you do whatever that would be, even if the PC is not an orphan, or even if the PC has a bastion?

I'm going to tackle this part first because it is the only one with an actual substance, instead of insults. If something is not added by the player to the setting, it just doesn't exist. If player adds something but then proclaims it is their thing and I am not allowed to touch it in any way, hen it a) will not be integrated into the setting properly and break suspension of disbelief b) it communicates to me that the player doesn't trust me as a Dungeon Master and therefore that I need to pull them out and have a conversation with them and be prepared they want to leave the campaign.

If the stuff mentioned in the second quote is a serious part of your RPGing, then I think you are failing in the aspiration stated in the first quote.

I called out one person for making stupid assumptions about my personal game and trying to reduce my argument to personal experience to then dismiss it and then you come along doing the exact same thing, with extra dose of acussing me of being a bad dm. I have explained in another post, that you conveniently ignored, it is a hypothetical scenario. Do you need me to refer you back to it?

It sounds to me that you as GM are shaping (=authoring) the world, treating the decisions and actions that the players declare for their PCs as factors to take into account.

So because I don't run the game exactly the way you personally want, you have decided I'm a bad DM, the "failed author" who "should just write a book" and my players are just hopeless victims trapped on a railroad, and you also done it in a craven way to have plausible deniability or under asusmption I'm too stupid to get a roundabound insult. All of this just based on few very specific questions, and without ever sitting down at my table and playing with me. This is apaprently what passes for an argument in your opinion.

Maybe I should make assumptions about you too then? Because you come off as a player who wants the complete control over the game, to detriment of the GM and the players, and who treats the GM as an enemy to defeat and wrestle control of the game from. You come to me as someone who doesn't understand, nor respect the idea of social contract and player buy-in, someone who is told the GM wants to run a nautical campaign and shows up with heavy-armored Dwarf with flaw "cannot swim" and a sacred oath to never set foot on a boat and first thing you do is sell party's ship and forcefully enlist them into an army marching to liberate your ancestral homeland in the mountains. Who then screams about having your creativity limtied when GM tells you you cannot do that and doesn't understand why other players didn't left once you've been kicked out. Is it so nice when people make assumptions about you?

Next person who takes anything I say and make any assumptions about me, my players or my game, gets added to ignore list. Wanna judge me as a DM or a player? Play a game with me first.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Agreed. The Bastion events table is like a wandering monster table that randomizes encounters for verisimilitude.

you mean that thing nobody uses anymore?

 

[Chaosmancer]

I guess what's missing is the reason why followers are so loyal. What did the PC do to earn such fanatical devotion?

If you care about the narrative of the game, this is something that needs to be established, and it's hard to imagine the average murderhobo acquiring followers of such integrity.

Perhaps if you are the Chosen One, highly placed in an organization or faith, have godlike Charisma, or personally saved the lives of every one of your followers (and/or their loved ones) you could justify it, but that's not something "Bob the Fighter" should be able to expect.

There are people willing to run into machine gun fire, grab someone and drag them back, all for the simple reason that they ended up going through some rough training together and were put on the same team.

I don't think it really needs to be on the level of being a chosen one or a godlike hero to have someone willing to lay down their life for yours.