D&D 5E Will your campaign be purely adventuring?

[AntiStateQuixote]

After 86 game sessions over 2+ years, 3 DMs sharing the duties for a couple of dozen characters we have a handful of "name level" characters (three 11th level, four 10th level) and the closest thing to "assuming responsibility" is that the PCs jointly own and operate an adventurers guild.

No one has shown any interest in stronghold building, taking over the thieves' guild or building a wizard's tower. I don't think anyone ever will. None of the DMs has offered the option, but to me this is something that really has to come from the players.

 

[Blue]

I expect them to continue to be adventurers, regardless if they seek out adventure or if they build strongholds and adventure comes to them.

I've played in plenty of campaigns where we built strongholds and claimed land - but that would mean we'd have to deal with issues on the land, work out treaties with neighbors, and still occasionally left for other adventures. The adventuring didn't stop simply because we had a home base that came with responsibilities.

 

[ExploderWizard]

One way of making it easier to stick with group play if the characters are each ruling their own domains, is to have the players make additional characters who are employees/servants of the other PCs. Then a segment of the campaign can focus on one main PC and his henchmen (played by the other players).

Alternately, we could just get some updated Birthright-style rules for domain management and campaign integration.

In my 5E Karameikos campaign the PCs have recently been granted a hex of land each to establish domains as a reward for service to Duke Stefan. The players had fun choosing their domain locations and are looking forward to clearing their hexes and establishing strongholds.

One of the players chose the old haunted keep for his domain. He intends to clear the area, and rebuild the keep. Since the PCs are busy saving the Duchy (I am running Death's Ride set in the Black Eagle Barony), he has hired a band of up and coming adventurers to scout, explore, and clean out the site of his future stronghold. The players are all creating 2nd level adventurers and we will play out the cleaning out of the haunted keep. We will alternate sessions between the high level group attempting to free the barony from the effects of the death cloud and the hired help attempting to dislodge the goblin & hobgoblin raiders led by Captain Flailface from the haunted keep.

 

[Ath-kethin]

The Primeval Thule Narratives include some organization and stronghold building features, and I love it.

One of the ways 2e balanced characters was in their high level capabilities. Wizards could level a town with a word, but emphasis was always on the trustworthiness of fighters - they got an army. Thieves got a guild, clerics got a church/congregation, everybody got something.

I like interweaving the characters in.my campaign with larger events, and I like involving them in organizations. The Thule Narratives combined with info from back in 2e makes it much easier to do.

 

[Charles Rampant]

I found the poll a bit difficult to answer. Here's why. In my campaign, we do adventuring; virtually everything is revolving around them fighting, travelling to fights, or discussing fights with people. It's fairly combat heavy. However, I also wanted to integrate these demi-god level individuals into the setting, rather than having the oddity of them being so powerful but also having no place in society. So the cleric was given a specific place within the religion as a figurehead pope. He later started a religious order with the party's Monk and Paladin. The Sorceress is an Earl, and was from the start of the game, so regularly spoke to her King in that role, not as an adventurer. The party's Arcane Trickster got knighted and started his own international society of mages to have people to chat to. I facilitated all of this by instituting BIG downtime breaks in the campaign after levels 7 and 14 roughly, where five and ten years passed respectively. That meant that the high level and ultra-dangerous Dwarven Monk is now known widely as the feared but respected Master of the Order of the Holy Fist, and when he goes to speak to the Dwarven High King the court can respond to him in that light.

None of this has a lot of rules attached: we use the DMG guidelines for stronghold building and expenses to sort of eyeball how much it costs to run a 100 monk monastery for a decade, for example, but I don't go about using random event tables or the like. We have had a session each time for sorting out how downtime goes, but otherwise things move as a normal game.

As an explanation for why I was so keen to do this, I refer you to Skyrim. In that, I did the whole main quest, won the civil war, killed a dozen dragons, whatever. And then I decided to do the companions quest, and when I walked in the room one of them said, "I don't know who you are" really dismissively. It drove me mad; there is no way that sentence makes sense in the story that the game has told thus far. I didn't want to have this happen in my campaign, where the King can say, "Wait, who are you guys again?" to the party who could kill everyone in the room in six seconds if they wanted.