Do you really think that d&d players are going to be spending significant sums of gold on "basic facilities"to the point where it becomes a gold sink? Can you elaborate on that?
D&D (2024) Playtest 8 Survey
First of all, can we not use the term "gold sink"? I equate that with all the various ways games conspire to simply remove money from players for no real benefit, akin to encounters with thieves, tax collectors, or constantly having to pay repair costs for your gear in World of Warcraft.
Wealth has to have meaning, or no one would want to acquire it. I mentioned that I wouldn't use the Bastion system as is without adjustments. One of these reasons is that there are things you can spend money on that have no merit.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that you can't waste money in the real world on things you don't need, such as luxury items. People do, and that's a personal choice on their part. A fool and his money, as it were.
If a player wants to have a place to store their art objects, I'm not going to tell them no; that's an option they should have. I might consider giving them a small bonus if they can spend some time appreciating or showing off those things, but if they want it, it's usefulness to them is self-evident.
Naturally, what I expect players to do is put their money to work for them. So no, I don't expect them to spend money on basic facilities. You don't buy a solid gold commode for any other reason than to flex on others, lol.
It's just like how I saw people in AD&D not bother acquiring a keep, because they felt the disadvantages outweighed the advantages- it takes a lot of work to build/take over a keep. This can be a very pricey endeavor. You need workmen, raw materials, guards, there's maintenance fees, possible taxes if you have a liege lord you are beholden too, you have to feed all these people- it's fairly endless. Even if you get to the point that your holdings make you money, it's a pittance compared to what you can get from going on a classic dungeon crawl.
And the upshot? You get soldiers (that you still have to quarter, feed, and pay, mind you) who, again, are mostly 0 or 1st-level, not sufficient to really take over anything more than a town, and are primarily required to protect your holdings from things while you're gone. There is the high-level cohort, of course, which may or may not be useful. And all of this is predicated on the idea that you'll be able to return to your base frequently enough to use it as a base, instead of gallivanting halfway across the world or to other planes (typical of higher level play).
When players in 5e acquire massive amounts of gold, it's natural to want to use this gold to do something useful for them. The DM can create factions the players can join and finance, come up with rules for business ventures, allow you players to recruit NPC's who can create things for them, etc. etc.. Some DM's don't really know how to do this.
The Bastion system is an example- here you can use your money to gain things useful to your character. Whether that's acquire a magic sword or invest in something to make you more money down the road, or just a place to hang your hat. Whatever the player feels happy with.
The end goal here is to make treasure actually a reward instead of pretending to be one. My highest level character has something like 12 thousand gold laying around. He has all the basic equipment he needs, several dozen potions of healing, and even once bought a mammoth to ride around on because he could (obviously, not useful in all adventures). He regularly donates coins to casters who need expensive material components for things like Heroes' Feast, Revivify, or Greater Restoration. I even bought him a house that he never visits, lol, because the campaign has moved far from where he bought it.
As for the rest? I could give it to the poor, the Church, or just build a big money bin and swim in it like Scrooge McDuck. I could have it all robbed by thieves tomorrow and I really wouldn't care.
So now I ask you, what would you want from a Bastion system? If not a way for players to acquire things that they want, were you expecting rules for building unassailable fortresses and recruiting armies for mass combats?
Because D&D has been down that road before, and it's generally been rejected by the players. Battlesystem, Chainmail, D&D Miniatures, Birthright- I've seen many attempts to shift the game out of the dungeon and turn the players into nobles and commanders, and none of them stick. It would be nice to have these for those of us who want to make use of them, but I think it's a fairly safe bet to say that's not what most of WotC's customers want.
If you are talking about bastions as a way for players to spend money it is a gold sink.. Unless we admit that the expenditures are inconsequential and likely pointless, but that counters the heart of your point about a way for players to engage in spending. Barring additional revelations from wotc 2024 is still targeting extreme stormwind levels of deliberately negative CharOp with no magic items as the baseline PC capability expectation yet the bastions inject quite a number of no consumable ones in an extremely skewed manner. Worse still is that the injections are ones where the players simply bypass the gm to add the item they want.
The ad&d comparison is not valid because it effectively lacked a skill system and doing things like gaining a keep/chapel/etc allowed a player to leverage it as justification for why they should be able to do x & y thing. That's part of the mistargeted problem with these bastions though, they are presenting on the surface as a way of filling a particular role while mechanically filling an entirely different one in too many ways to hold up the facade absent "you're the gm, you make it work".
On the subject of how 2e players used things like a keep/chapel/etc to bolster their ability 5e can't benefit there as long as it's skill system is trying to mimic both 3.x and 4e skill systems while simplification and streamlining clobbers what made each work
I was initially excited about bastions when they were described as a way to buy things between adventures and such, but these aren't targeting that goal. Instead we have a player focused solution aimed at allowing players to gear up while bypassing the gm and a wildly scattered level of rewards that will cause problems for the freshly disempowered gm. Those problems go so deep thand repeats so many times through this version of bastions that I don't even know what goal they are trying to fill as a tool for the gm.
You know, that's exactly how I feel about the living expenses in D&D. There's absolutely no mechanical reason for you to pick anything and spend your gold on any luxuries. But its printed that you have to spend the gold you earn to live luxuriously. Spending gold on things that have no merit is kinda a thing in 5e. Wizard spells and mundane armor upgrades is the only thing that really matters.
Gold sink feels very much appropriate, especially with your associations here.
These is basically just some rules for housing. Sometimes, players love housing. I'm a wizard, i want a wizard tower. Here's some rules for making a wizard tower. I'm a rogue assassin that's part of an assassin guild. Here's a way of designing the actual guild.
While I don't think every game would benefit from this - certainly, most published adventures wouldn't - I think its nice to have this kind of world building. Even if its just to help flesh out a Faction that a PC might be part of.
Well as I said, I don't think they are for the GM. The GM puts money into the player's hands. The Bastion system presents an option for what to do with said money.
If the GM doesn't like it (and I reiterate, I wouldn't use these rules as written either), they don't use them and create their own. Or keep their players poor, I don't know.
Mephista, you're correct about Lifestyle Expenses- I had to go double check the PHB because I thought they were optional! Certainly, no DM ever asked me to pay them (though in the case of my high level Fighter, I did anyways because why not?). Unfortunately, those rules are very lackluster, as you don't have to engage in them, and while it says things like "you're a hobo living in a box", there's a sidebar on "self-sufficiency" in the very next section, goods and services, which allows you to directly pay for food and lodging as needed; ideal for someone who doesn't have a set place to live and is always on the move (ie, an adventurer).
All we're told is how people might react to your character based on your lifestyle, which is entirely up to the DM to interpret. In my current game, I arranged a deal with the innkeeper to buy our rooms at the local inn days in advance and not engaged with the lifestyle rules at all; I'll have to ask my DM what he thinks about them, but seeing as how our party is currently rolling in gold due to exploring a megadungeon, we could easily afford it (we have lots of treasure we can't even sell in the hub town, and will have to travel to a major city to actually sell, but when an NPC asked us for 10,000 gp to acquire +1 swords for our Ranger, I, as the party treasurer, didn't even bat an eye when I said we could afford it. Outside of filling my spellbook or buying potions as they become available, we haven't had a major player purchase since we got the Cleric's full plate back when we were level 3).
D&D only has ever had the thinnest veneer of an economy, which breaks down very quickly with the rewards for adventuring. DM's have conspired for decades to keep players poor or to get wealth out of their hands, from simply reducing money amounts, to taxes, to wildly overcharging them at inns. I often joke that the antics of PC's will inevitably lead to the economic collapse of any population center they visit, because most of the goods and services that they require are generally not needed by the rest of the communities.
The Bastion system is not a solution to this. Nor is it any kind of tool for a GM in it's current state, outside of the very basic "well, now you have something to care about I could threaten to motivate your PC", lol.
Bastion's value as actual bases is entirely dubious as most adventurers, again, travel far and wide, always on the move.
That WotC is actually taking a stab at making guidelines for acquiring magic items in the game is a good thing, IMO, even if individual DM's don't care for it. Because of the almost zero guidelines we have now, lots of games don't have magic items which really ought to. Removing magic items from the game in 5e had a lot of effects on the game that WotC never really addressed.
But at the end of the day, it's something that a DM can say "we're using this" or completely ignore, like any other facet of the game, be it Feats, Multiclassing, Material Components for spells, the entire Tasha's book, new races, or, if my experience is anything to go on, lifestyle expenses.
Fundamentally, the real point of gold (or any currency really) in any RPG (be it TT or Vidya) is to be an xp track for your equipment. You can actually see this a bit with armor in the early levels.
Of course, that also ends up creating expectations on when and where +x bonuses come in, etc.
But by removing the ability to create or customize your gear, you do remove the purpose of currency in the game. Likewise, the purpose of crafting training.
By removing equipment and magic items from the hands of players, you remove the purpose of currency in the game.
Of course, that also ends up creating expectations on when and where +x bonuses come in, etc.
But by removing the ability to create or customize your gear, you do remove the purpose of currency in the game. Likewise, the purpose of crafting training.
By removing equipment and magic items from the hands of players, you remove the purpose of currency in the game.
That's the problem. The gm's needs in such a system are a distant secondary or even tertiary footnote of a half thought in them yet they are roughly 20 pages of content destined for the DMG.
I've used 5e's terrible rules for lifestyle expenses before & they are fail be design due to being written pretty exclusively for the lowest levels of play. These bastions don't even attempt to address the missing component that made 2e living expenses work while those of 5e fall uselessly flat... namely the fact that d&D's player economy is a farce that scales exponentially or maybe even logarithmically with PC levels for many good gameplay reasons. There are a lot of good reasons for that scaling and trying to make the "economy" work naturally creates more problems than it solves, but lifestyle expenses too need to scale with PC level as they did in the past for them to work.
Having a subsystem supplied to the DM in the DMG does not help with "we are using this" if the tool has been deliberately poisoned by not even considering the gm's needs in such a tool. It doesn't help because the DM needs to start by making a bunch of nerfs before they can even start adding in what they need
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