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.

 

[Chaosmancer]

You can reward the player for good things in setting, of course. People bring up the bad stuff because that's you're more likely to see a conflict, in this case between a DM who wants to see what they perceive as in-setting justice at least be attempted in what they see as a logical way, and a player who understandably may not want negative consequences to fall on their PC for their actions, whether deserved via setting logic or not. In such cases, it's nice to not have a rule that says the player can always hide in their DM-immune bastion when the fuzz gets close.

Obviously a functional group is unlikely to have this kind of issue often. But then why the hard rule that flies in the face of a long-standing dynamic? Wouldn't it be better to have this be a conversation in the books? And if that is the case (since we haven't seen the book yet and don't actually know), why make a big deal about the "hands-off" thing in the marketing materials?

There is no rule in the book that says the player can hide in their bastion and never shall the DM be able to touch them. Heck, let's say that IS a rule, have you actually thought through how that would go at the table? Character enters their "No DMs Allowed" fort and... then never leaves, can never participate in a single adventure again, and has effectively retired their character. Because if they leave, they are no longer in the "you can't do anything" fort.

But more concretely, what I'm trying to draw your attention to is that the focus of most of the anti-bastion crowd in this thread displays the reason why this isn't actually an issue. Because every single one of you has pointed out how you now can't punish the players. You can't punish characters for acting badly. You can't punish players for not vetting tertiary NPCs thoroughly enough. You can't punish characters for following the plot. Even your insistence on "realism" is all about the realism of bad things happening to people.

And the designers... don't think like that. They don't imagine the players are going to go on a murder-spree then thumb their nose at their DM by hiding in their super-safe super secret "you can't enter" Fort. That isn't even a spark of an idea in their head... because who would want to play that way? Instead, they have a rule, not a hard rule for certain, that clearly indicates their intent.

The Bastion is a DM gateway drug, a way to give players a taste of what it means to be a DM and how it works. To let them stretch their creativity and make NPCs and events. Maybe even bad events! Literally nothing stops them from telling you that one of their staff is a spy, because they think that would be a fun side-plot. But, for that to work as a concept, to make it possible for the player to have that creative control... it has to be the player's to control.

And if you don't have players who are going to actively be hostile jerks to you, which is a problem regardless of what rules exist... then none of this is a problem. But so few of you who are against Bastions seem to trust players with ANYTHING. There is this almost palpable fear that the moment you loosen your grip, the table will go up in flames and everyone will be screaming. And I think that is the bigger problem, not the player's getting a taste of what being a DM is like.

 

[pemerton]

I believe the point being made is that by the Bastion rules as written (or interpreted) the PCs can do whatever they want to whatever ridiculous extreme and because the Bastion is off-limits to the DM consequences of those ridiculous actions cannot follow them* into their Bastion.

So, I don't believe my house is insured against laser attacks from Mars. Do you know why this doesn't keep me awake at night, worried about losing my house and being unable to replace it? Because there are no lasers on Mars, and hence my house is not going to be attacked by lasers from Mars.

Why are you worried about PCs doing things to ridiculous extremes? Why do you need to worry about bringing home consequences of ridiculous actions?

(That's before we get to the question of *why would the bastion have to be a place where those consequences are visited.)

I'll open a can of worms with this, most likely, but to me that sort of thing is just a different form of railroad.

The poor players, railroading themselves into having their little bastion minigame, or enjoying the colour of having a family, because the GM can't bring home consequences to those bits of the shared fiction . . .

I mean, when the GM has NPCs do ridiculous things, the players don't get to decide what consequences follow those NPCs into their hideouts, and among their families, and so on. Yet the game goes on!

 

[pemerton]

Very well then, we retcon two last sessions, you didn't left the pub, we will now do the staff hiring process and then we will travel again, and I will roll for random weather and random encounters, we will waste total of 12 hours to make sure all in-universe fiction changes accordingly to the player whims.

This is what you are asking for right now.

No I'm not. I'm not the person who raised the prospect of a two-day adjustment and who suggested it would actually matter.

You know what I would say to you if I was at your table and you told me the king is killed a day after we talked to him and it effectively doesn't matter if we arrived at 23rd or 25th, this event would only trigger after we arrived? "Choo choo, all aboard the railroad!"

In this scenario that is of your creation (not mine), you have decided to adjust all the dates, to incorporate two days of personnel hiring. It's established in the fiction that your PC spoke to the King N days after leaving town. If the date of leaving town is adjusted by two days, than N days later is also going to be adjusted by two days.

If you insist that the date on which the King is killed is not going to be adjusted by two days, then you're stuck with contradiction - the King was dead when the PCs spoke to him! So either we can all pretend that didn't happen, or the GM can come up with some idea that the PCs really spoke to the King's ghost, or everyone can agree that the date of the King's death is the day after he spoke to the PCs, just as everyone agreed it was before-hand. I mean, it's not as if the calendar date is much more than somewhat arbitrary colour.

The month after Auril is Eolna, and by the time the player tries for the retcon play has progressed to the in-game date of Eolna 32. All the stuff in the example above - the meeting with the King, the King's subsequent death*, various fallout from both those events, etc. - has already happened in play and been roleplayed through.

The requested retcon that adds two days means the meeting with the King could not have taken place, even though it was played out at the time as having happened. Any resulting fallout from that meeting could also not have happened, meaning a whole lot of play already done at the table just got invalidated.

Does that make my concerns clearer?

* - this death could have been any of
a) a scripted and locked-in plot point, or
b) a known deadline the party had to beat (e.g. the King had been cursed to die at the next full moon), or
c) somehow caused by a different played party (in a multi-party game) which locks in the timing for everyone

I threw in the date change idea as an example of a seemingly-trivial retcon that turns out to be anything but, in order to explain why I wouldn't let it happen.

Why would you adjust dates for some events, and not others, in a way that makes everything confused and incoherent? I don't get it. So no, it's not really any clearer to me what is supposed to be going on here. I mean, is this a thing that has actually happened in your play? The second of the above quotes implies that it hasn't.

In any event, I don't understand why this imaginary fiasco, that comes about because of some weird decision to adjust half the dates in the campaign without adjusting the others, has anything to do with my post that it was ostensibly a response to:

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.

I didn't say anything about adjusting timelines, either in whole or in part. I certainly didn't say anything about ret-cons. I talked about adding new bits of fiction - something that happens routinely in RPGing that is anything less than a total railroad.

I don't understand why you think your example of weird mis-play - which has never actually happened? - has any bearing on the issue I was posting about, which is talking about the relative simplicity of doing a thing that GMs do all the time: introduce new NPCs, introduce new elements of setting and situation backstory, etc.

 

[pemerton]

Your implication here is that the players' desires, even to the extent of changing campaign history, are more important than setting fidelity. "The issue here" is that not everyone agrees with you.

The only person who has advocated this date change is @Lanefan. Who then appears to disagree with himself!

So I don't understand what the date change example is supposed to show.

 

[pemerton]

There is no rule in the book that says the player can hide in their bastion and never shall the DM be able to touch them. Heck, let's say that IS a rule, have you actually thought through how that would go at the table? Character enters their "No DMs Allowed" fort and... then never leaves, can never participate in a single adventure again, and has effectively retired their character. Because if they leave, they are no longer in the "you can't do anything" fort.

But more concretely, what I'm trying to draw your attention to is that the focus of most of the anti-bastion crowd in this thread displays the reason why this isn't actually an issue. Because every single one of you has pointed out how you now can't punish the players. You can't punish characters for acting badly. You can't punish players for not vetting tertiary NPCs thoroughly enough. You can't punish characters for following the plot. Even your insistence on "realism" is all about the realism of bad things happening to people.

And the designers... don't think like that. They don't imagine the players are going to go on a murder-spree then thumb their nose at their DM by hiding in their super-safe super secret "you can't enter" Fort. That isn't even a spark of an idea in their head... because who would want to play that way?

<snip>

But so few of you who are against Bastions seem to trust players with ANYTHING. There is this almost palpable fear that the moment you loosen your grip, the table will go up in flames and everyone will be screaming.

I have had the same thought as you - that "perma-hiding" in the bastion = retirement of the PC.

And likewise that the whole critique of bastions appears to be grounded in a desire on the part of the GM to utterly control the shared fiction, down to the finest minutiae of whether or not a PC's friends and family members betray them. Coupled with an idea that, without that control, play will collapse in some fashion.

It's so far removed from my RPGing experiences of the last nearly 40 years as to be bizarre. The reason I say "nearly 40" and not "40+" years is that, when I was a younger teenager, I did have some experiences of players "acting out" transgressive behaviour in ways that didn't conduce to good play. We worked it out over a year or two, as we grew up a bit.

 

[pemerton]

what do you want from the game instead of plot hooks and quests?

Play that is less GM-driven and more player-driven.

You have too antagonistic view of the GM, where the only way GM could ever want to interact with a Bastion is to do something bad to it, when by these rules I cannot interact with it AT ALL. Traders cannot show to set a trade in the bastion, refugees from war cannot seek asylum, people cannot hold festival there - DM is not allowed to interact with the Bastion. It's not part of the world

Why can't the GM make suggestions, and see whether the player is interested in taking them up?

GM working with the player to establish something should go both ways, that's what cooperation is. You are defending Bastion as a thing where player is all take and no give - they get new fancy thing that DM has to give up control over, and DM gets nothing in return.

<snip>

Except you don't want to work together, both previous paragraphs seem to be "just let the player do it", whenever it means giving them unlimited freedom or offloading to them the work. Why ever DM if you don't want to put in the work?

I don't accept that the GM needs anything in return. Nor do I see this in terms of "not putting in the work" as GM - I don't really know what that is supposed to mean. I don't see establishing the setting through the lens of zero-sum trade-offs. In terms of ideas and authorship, I prefer cooperation, mutual contributions, and collaboration. And in terms of how elements, once introduced, change over the course of play, I think in terms of what the player "owns" and what the GM "owns". Stuff that the player owns, and that is not put at stake by the player, is not really for the GM to change.

The most memorable "bastion" for me, in my game play, was the townhouse of a high-level sorcerer in a Rolemaster game. The player detailed the PC's townhouse, the servants, the secret areas for doing sorcerous things, etc. That PC lived there, and from time-to-time other PCs would stay there. The player "owned" it as an element of the fiction. I was able to put plenty of pressure on that player, and on their PC, without any need to muck about with their house or servants.

 

[Yaarel]

So in @GMforPowergamers' game, the rules of the game stipulate that the PC's grandmother is to be one of those lucky people, and the GM's narration of the war must conform to that rule.

As far as the dynamics of play are concerned, the grandmother under threat in the warzone is therefore pure colour. Her survival is not part of the stakes of play. This doesn't make the fiction unrealistic.

"Plot protection" is a normal part of fiction.

 

[Micah Sweet]

"Plot protection" is a normal part of fiction.

It's a normal part of story. Fiction is just something that isn't real.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't accept that the GM needs anything in return. Nor do I see this in terms of "not putting in the work" as GM - I don't really know what that is supposed to mean. I don't see establishing the setting through the lens of zero-sum trade-offs. In terms of ideas and authorship, I prefer cooperation, mutual contributions, and collaboration. And in terms of how elements, once introduced, change over the course of play, I think in terms of what the player "owns" and what the GM "owns". Stuff that the player owns, and that is not put at stake by the player, is not really for the GM to change.

One could argue that both the player and GM put everything at stake.

The GM makes the world then puts it at stake in terms of what the players (as their characters) proceed to do to it; while the players make their characters and associated elements (including bastions) then put them at stake in terms of what the GM (as the game world and opposition) do to them.

The most memorable "bastion" for me, in my game play, was the townhouse of a high-level sorcerer in a Rolemaster game. The player detailed the PC's townhouse, the servants, the secret areas for doing sorcerous things, etc. That PC lived there, and from time-to-time other PCs would stay there. The player "owned" it as an element of the fiction. I was able to put plenty of pressure on that player, and on their PC, without any need to muck about with their house or servants.

The nearest thing to a bastion in my game at the moment is a PC and an NPC jointly own what was an abandoned manor house on the edge of civilization that they took over, repaired, augmented, and are in process of building defenses around - a curtain wall, a gatehouse, etc.

They have...well, had...one live-in servant and a bunch of hired labourers working on the defenses. Both the owners are away adventuring, meanwhile the entire region incuding the manor house has been evacuated of civilians as it's about to become (or so the local nobles think) a major war zone. When last any PCs were there on a fly-by visit, a troop of local soldiers had taken over the grounds in order to put the partly-built defensive walls and redoubt to use (odds are they'll augment those walls while they're at it) as the surrounding country is mostly open moor for at least a few miles in all directions.

Once some PCs get back to that area (which likely won't be long from now in real time) we'll play out the war in general as it pertains to that region, probably through just a few dice rolls unless anyone wants to get more involved*, and figure out any specific downstream effects thus far on the PCs and-or the house in much more detail.

EDIT to add: the war is not a surprise to anyone at the table; the coming invasion attempt - think Romans invading Britain from the southwest - was a low-grade backdrop to a year or more's adventuring in that area then became a front-and-centre element when some PCs started de-facto working for/with the local military, which they did until more important things came along.

* - I really hope they do, as I've got some homebrew mass-battle rules I've been wanting to bust out for about 25 years. I'm not holding my breath, however, as my players aren't really into that mass-battle stuff.

 

[Yenrak]

One thing I’d like is better rules for a “party bastion.” My group of players has been playing together for years, mostly with the same characters, and if they are going to set up a bastion, they’d likely do it together and not build their own individually.

In fact, they already have one, having come into ownership of Trollskull Tavern.