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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mattcolville" data-source="post: 5050360" data-attributes="member: 1300">I just introduced my own Stronghold house rule in my game. My goal was to encourage players to want a Stronghold. In other words, read the Stronghold rules, and think "that's awesome, I want one of those."Now, my players could always just spend some money and build a tower and just...have a tower, but in the absence of any tangible benefit, they don't do this. Certainly other players in other games might, in which case my house rules would be superfluous.But being a Lord and dealing with local problems beyond "there are goblins in a dungeon" is a style of play I like to encourage. So I like to reward my players for engaging in that kind of play.I started with the premise that gaining a Stronghold granted some kind of mechanical benefit and whatever it was, it needed to be substantive enough for players to be attracted by it. In other words, it had to be juicy. I considered granting Lords (A PC with a Stronghold) some benefit to their Action Points. But the more I thought about this, the more I wanted to stay away from it. Paragon Paths affect how your Action Points work and I didn't want to overlord Action Points with even more design. Furthermore, Action Points are rare. I wanted something closer to a Feat. Something that granted a permanent benefit.But I had something else in mind for Feats. So I decided that Strongholds would enhance your Role. In other words, having a Stronghold would make you a better Controller, Defender, Striker, or Leader.That was a little tricky since not all Controllers, for instance, control the same way, but I decided that was ok. If a Wizard's Tower granted a certain bonus to certain kinds of powers and not others, that's ok. Few players take all one kind of power anyway.So I went with the following rules, which we're testing right now.Strongholds enhance your Attack Powers. Specifically your Encounter and Daily attack powers. At each of 7th, 10th, 13th, 16th, and 19th levels, the player gets a new Power Enhancement and may apply it to a new power. In other words, at 7th level, your Stronghold allows you to enhance one Encounter Attack Power or Daily Attack power. At 9th level, you can pick another power.And at each of these levels, your Enhancements improve.For controllers, at 7th level any affected by your Enhanced power is knocked prone, in addition to the normal power effects.At 9th level, they're Dazed instead. Eventually at 19th level, they're Stunned. Defender Strongholds apply penalties to enemies Marked.Strikers gain extra damage and enhanced critical range.Leaders can grant Temporary HP, restore used Encounter powers, grant extra action points, etc....The main problem with these rules as I see them is that the Character Builder doesn't support them and so the players, who (like me) have become super reliant on the builder, will tend not to use them, because it means more bookkeeping. We'll see.I also want money to be more important to the game and so Strongholds become one of those things that cost money to keep up, but that's not critical to these rules.</blockquote>

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