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]

Re: Zone of Truth

Questioner: "Failure to answer a question will be interpreted in a manner highly unfavourable to you."

Sure, but that's no better than them refusing to be subjected to magic in the first place. It doesn't tell you anything, you are just guessing.

2 and 3 overlap with the name piece: if someone gave me the answer "You can call me Timothy (etc.)" I'd ask the question again: "What is your name?". Continued obfuscation would end the interview real fast.

"What is your name?"
"You can call me Timothy."
"What is your name?"
"I said it was Timothy, why are you still asking?"
"What is your name?"

Now, you might interpret the second line as not being the Truth. but you get the point. And again, just because you have lived in paranoia for the last few decades and are currently reading a list of things that can be done to circumvent the spell (meaning you are thinking about them in terms of circumventing the spell) does not mean that your average player is going to catch this. Which inevitably leads to "But we put them under a zone of truth and they were still lying to us?!" which leads to even more extreme measures, which also still have a chance of failure and it is just an arms race.

Indeed, but they do exist.

Yeah, they do, which brings us back to the arms race. Eventually you are going to end up having ever NPC strip-searched and subjected to magical interrogation... to sweep the floors of your house. Now, if you are playing a strictly medieval culture in your game, where peasants are little more than human-trash to the ruling powers, you might be able to get away with that. Play in anyway that vaguely resembles treating them like people, and you won't have a staff.

"Well you never asked" situations are usually the fault of the questioner, who should have asked unless it's really obscure (and a demon hiding in someone's shadow would to me qualify as obscure).

And do you think that somehow prevents it from happening, or from making the players even more paranoid? Especially with the stated goal of Gotcha DMing and turning everything into a potential life or death challenge?

And realistic. Not every third Sunday, though: I'm trying to defend against it happening once, because once is all it takes if the assassin is successful.

No, it isn't realistic.

That, and the definition of "good deeds" very often depends on whose side you're on. The character of mine I'm referring to here has been in parties that have done covert ops in an enemy nation that have resulted in some serious messes being made - all "good deeds" to us and our home nations but not at all good deeds as seen by the place we were messing up.

And we-as-PCs already know that nation knows who we are (or thinks they know, their info is a bit inaccurate) - at one point we stole a copy of a supposedly top-secret intelligence brief that had half our names in it along with some half-decent sketches of some of us, though the matching of names and sketches was largely out to lunch.

And we also know this nation has the means of reaching out halfway around the world to screw with us.

So yeah, a bit of good old-fashioned paranoia ain't always a bad thing.

Expect it when you least expect it.

Sure, if you are playing in a political intrigue campaign where you are literally engaging in spycraft, then that is one thing. IF you are playing in a game where you are local lords who sally forth to slay the troll that started terrorizing a village and to recover the bones of a great hero stolen by a reclusive necromancer... less likely that they are sending assassins against you or even have an intelligence agency at all.

And most games of DnD are not political spycraft games. I've only run one game like that, ever, and it was a "here former war heroes, go investigate why zombies are spilling out of our enemy nation, that seems bad." So no real spycraft going on

 

[Chaosmancer]

@Chaosmancer ,please correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel that you're not interested in a game where the PCs are not trying to be objectively (more or less) heroic individuals, by which I mean they almost always take good guy-coded actions (by modern standards. Is that correct? If so, I can see how that opinion would color the character of your rhetoric quite strongly. The posters against whom you are arguing largely do not share this point of view; ie, there is no assumption that the players will or should portray their PCs as modern-styled heroes.

I am aware that not everyone plays heroes. That really doesn't affect my answers very much.

 

[hopeless]

That movie WAS a flop, to be fair.

Hasbro's OGL fiasco played a big part in that.
After it was released there was some word of mouth, but the lack of promotion also hurt it.
For example back in 3.5 wasn't there a feat allowing a druid to wild shape more times?
Chris Pine's character would have worked better as a rogue rather than a bard given I didn't see the druid or the bard employing healing magic which both possessed.
But thats just me being familiar enough to try and work out what they would be playing in game something that really should have bene addressed.
Did they actually play a game of d&d together and if so was that an extra I missed?

 

[Chaosmancer]

Toxic players are easy to deal with - they get the boot instantly.

Yeah, I find it really strange that people keep pulling this card. Like, somehow a player going around and slaughtering women and children for giggles is perfectly fine, as long as the DM can have the local militia punish and kill the character for it. But if the character can't be killed, because they refuse to leave their fortress, then the DM is utterly incapable of dealing with this behavior.

Non-narrative problems don't need narrative solutions. Because the player who decides to do that can just keep making psychopath characters and have the entire campaign revolve around them being executed again and again. The bastion rules don't make the problem suddenly appear.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

If the rules were "broken" this should can be fixed easily with house rules.

My opinion is if a player enjoys too much adding details about the bastion, for example creating a background for each hireling or grog, this is not happy if his cute Flora the halfling gardener to be killed by gnolls because dices told there was a raid. Then player and DM should talk and agree Flora wasn't killed but KO for a long time and instead creating a new character as hireling Flora returns to the bastion.

Maybe in a later sourcebook there are rules about "sidekicks" as PCs' companions. Then the hirelings created by the players for the bastion could become "sidekicks". These would be like classes with a simpler leveling up, style survivor classes from Van Ritchen's Guide 5e.

DM should allow to start to create a bastion but the reward or bonus should be lower, for example a level 1 magic item would need more time to be crafted.

If the players worry too much about to keep the bastion, this shouldn't be damaged easily by fault of a bad roll of dices. The DMs should try to respect those secondary characters created by the players, for example the potential love interest or the family of the PC.

 

[Umbran]

I dread how delusional the answer I will probably get,

Mod Note:
You have personally been warned twice in this thread, and still you persist in being insulting. That's more than enough.

You are done in this discussion.

 

[Umbran]

No i think it's pretty succeeding since the one that gets the most riled up about how bad it is is the one that's getting repeated mod warnings. So it must be doing something good on making someone like that so angry.

Mod Note:
If you want mod warnings yourself, you can continue to make discussions personal.

That someone gets warnings does not mean you get free shots at them.

 

[M_Natas]

Zooming in on this. What counts?

I recently was discussing things with a DM. One of their players was a bit brusque with a shopkeep who was pressing them about a personal issue. The Shopkeep was trying to be nice, but the PC took it as a complete stranger trying to dig into their personal life, and responded a bit harshly. So the DM had the Shopkeep burst into angry tears and throw them out of the shop. If that had been a hireling, would that be enough to break their loyalty?

What if the PCs decide to defy the Evil Overlord and his Evil Plans. Clearly such a figure would retaliate against them correct? And surely since they invited such attention, they have put their home in imminent danger, right?

And that is the problem. You may have a clear idea in your mind of about what constitutes these things. What behavior would cause a loss of loyality, what makes for putting their home in danger. But the players might not agree with your assessment, They in fact have no clue what you might decide counts. Oops, turns out that creepy statue they found is actually a cursed artifact, so now their Bastion is cursed with undeath and all their servants died. Too bad they had just grabbed it and didn't bother to research it, right?

And this is why I feel like it is fine to be a player's decision what goes on in their home turf. Because it prevents miscommunication and mismatched expectations.

That's like ... I don't even know we're to start.
If you play with the same group for longer than ... like 6 month or so, you know what goes and what not.
Like at my table that I DM we never had a problem with any of that kind.

But I also never had a player demanding that there are things in the game that can't be affected by anything.

The closest maybe is ... a PC had a brother, that they now met and after speaking with the players about hownI can use him the rule was not to kill him, everything else was fine.
Another PC had several half-siblings running around he didn't know about, the player of that PC first had the Idea to give me the (already created) siblings (it was a preexisting character) but then decided against that and let me create new ones, because the player thought that it would be very hard to do them correct (and they were part of the Plot).

Like ... when we put it in the game world it can be affected by the game world. I always played and DMed like that and never met a player (at my tables) who wanted it otherwise.
And there never was a problem in that regards at my table because my players trust me. And when I'm unsure about something I ask them and when I see them doing something that could have consequences they as players are maybe not aware of, I usually warn them.
Like last session they looted the pirate base they just conquered and found a lot of magic items the pirates weren't using to fight them (hint 1). Of course the wizard does, what a wizard does and spams identify and as a DM I reminded the players, that Identify doesn't tell you, if an Item is cursed or not (hint 2).

So, now, if they just put on the Items anyway, it is on them if they get cursed.

So, now, if we had an Off-Limits Rule for a Bastion I would usually warn the players in similar fashion, that the action they are taking could make the Bastion vulnerable.

But in general in session zero I would tell the players that I don't play with Offlimit Rules if WotC put some in.

 

[pemerton]

I have players who believe the game begins and stops at a session and resent being given "a homework assigment". The are great players but this "fun minigame" would probably made them leave the table.

Then don't use the bastion rules?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Yeah, I find it really strange that people keep pulling this card. Like, somehow a player going around and slaughtering women and children for giggles is perfectly fine, as long as the DM can have the local militia punish and kill the character for it. But if the character can't be killed, because they refuse to leave their fortress, then the DM is utterly incapable of dealing with this behavior.

The character isn't the problem, the player is. Easy to get rid of them.