Improving Bastions in D&D 2024

I’ve talked before about what a mess I think the 2024 DMG’s Bastion rules are. With all respect to the designers, I think there are good LEGOs in the pile, but this arrangement of them doesn’t serve the needs of the game or the story.

The Issues

First, I’ll recapitulate the things I see as the issues, even if I don’t go deep on all of them in this post.

·         I think it’s fine for Bastion turns to happen whether the character is present or not, but everything about what happens (or doesn’t) while you’re not present is a problem.

o   Everything defaults to Maintain while you’re not there. You can’t leave an order queue, assign a seneschal who understands your goals, or communicate with missives. You can at least use a Sending spell to give orders, but... why even require that? This is a huge part of why we even have writing!

o   The Maintain action is the trigger for interesting things to happen. Which means that, by design, you’re never there to see them. The text addresses this, proposing troupe-style play where you start a second roster of PCs to engage that story, but I think it’s hard to find that satisfying. How is this not saying, “If you want the Bastion to matter in the story, play a different character”?

o   The things the Maintain action can trigger aren’t that interesting, though. Mostly they introduce problems that self-solve in a few more Bastion turns. This amounts to busywork.

o   The Empower action usually doesn’t last long enough to be helpful, unless you can be absolutely sure that every adventure takes place within seven days’ travel of your Bastion. Some of the Empower options, like temporarily gaining proficiency in a Simple or Martial weapon, are almost never going to be helpful, because classes and subclasses are designed to make sure you don’t need that. (It would be a design problem if you did.) As a result, the Weapon Expert trainer in the Training Area is essentially worthless for any character.

o   The Theater is an exception. It can last a long time! For exactly one die roll.

·         The section on floor plans would be fine, except that the system works so incredibly hard to make it never matter. Thanks for the permission to include closets, I guess! But everything about letting you spend time and money to add basic facilities… which don’t do anything except possibly be the backdrop for a scene, but also that’s the only part of the Bastion you can really improve with cash… that feels Bad.

·         Special Facilities, on the other hand, are level-gated in both the number you can have and which ones you can choose, but you get them for free, you can trade them out for free when you level, and everyone who works in them works for free.

o   If you care that little about the economy and gold pieces changing hands, why are we bothering with any of this? Don’t be embarrassed about asking people to keep track of gold pieces. Sure, that means it won’t be for everyone. Having made the system fully optional, it’s okay to make it not for everyone.

o   The level-gating on Special Facilities is deeply nonsensical and keeps you waiting until the late game to play core character fantasies, like owning a pub (level 13). I hasten to point out, that means this system conflicts directly with Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.

o   Here, I’ve got a quick solution. Level limits? Gone. Maybe you move the requirement for a War Room and a Sanctum to level 9, and Demiplane to level 15 (since Demiplane is a level 8 spell).

o   The other prereqs, like “Ability to use a Spellcasting Focus,” are also utterly illogical. The PC isn’t the one doing the work. The text centers this fact. There’s absolutely no reason the world’s most mundane fighter bro shouldn’t be allowed to hire a mage to run their Arcane Study or Observatory.

o   Hanging the War Room on “Fighting Style feature or Unarmored Defense feature” is all but hanging a lampshade on how goofy this is. You’re telling me I can play a Battle Smith Artificer with the Soldier background, but god help me if I ever aspire to an officer’s commission? This limitation serves no purpose at all.

o   For the most part, special facilities aren’t given the design space to do anything a PC can’t do more easily some other way. It’s hard to bring your Bastion’s special facilities into the story because you won’t often have problems that they can help with. The level 17 facilities have a little more space to affect the plot, but at that level of play you’re probably ready to handwave a lot of those situations.

In short, Bastions are window dressing rather than an interesting tool in your character’s toolbox, and I think it’s a vast sea of wasted opportunity. They fall short of even justifying the form-filling you do to have one.

I do think you need to understand the idea of a Bastion system as just as fundamental a change to a campaign as the ship crewing system of Ghosts of Saltmarsh. D&D historically struggles with this kind of subsystem, because the rest of an individual character or whole party represent such a consistent set of options. Remembering to go look at your additional action or subsystem’s ruleset takes concentrated learning effort for both the players and the DM. The solution isn’t to minimize engagement, though.

5e has had a problem with what to do with gold pieces since 2014. The 2014 DMG has a list of buildings you could reasonably want to construct, and in combination with XGTE, there’s reasonably good support for using money to acquire more magic items and buy information (mainly with the Carouse downtime activity). Bastion gameplay is a huge opening for turning gold pieces into problem-solving, or even into sweeping changes to the setting. (Looking at you, Demiplane and War Room.)

You can spend money on adding Basic Facilities. Of course, these intentionally do nothing and are, pretty literally, just a place to hang your hat between adventures. They’ve assigned GP values to the privilege of saying your room is this size rather than that. Have your vanity purchases, for sure, but don’t make that the only thing.

Core Mechanic Change

The UA for Bastions offered a whole Bastion Point system, where your Special Facilities earned Bastion Points that you could spend to make magic items, gain regional political influence (in the form of Advantage on Cha checks), or come back from the dead. The first two are cool ideas, while the last is completely unconnected from even the high fantasy of D&D.

The general flow of the Bastion Points was all wrong, though. The Maintain action – the default daily-routine kind of stuff – was significantly penalized for Special Facilities above level 5. Since Maintain is the only order you can give when you’re not home, it means a lot of staying home and assigning your special facilities actions that don’t really advance your goal, just so you can build up enough Bastion Points to get the thing you wanted in the first place.

Bastion Points aren’t a bad idea! The flow of them is just wrong. Maintain actions should pay more BP, because that’s when you’re resupplying and taking care of things we don’t care to spend time on at the table. If nothing else interesting can happen, give extra BP. The other Orders accomplish something tangible in the story or on your character sheet, so they should either cost BP or not grant BP. Giving each special facility an extra thing it can expend BP on seems like an obvious, fun area of decision-making to me.

On the downside, at least in terms of me ever finishing this blog post, it means rewriting every single special facility to give it another thing to do. But that’s not the only reason to rewrite every part of the chapter, so. I’d be surprised if more than a sentence or two of the Bastion Events section survived, because it hangs such a lampshade on how hard the chapter works to make sure you never need to care about any of this, and I think that’s about as wrongheaded as it gets.

Example

So I’m going with a few examples, as a proof of concept. Take it as read that you don’t need to be level 5 to get a Bastion in the first place.

Arcane Study

(No level req) Bastion Facility

Prerequisite: None
Space: Cramped
Hirelings: up to 1
Order: Maintain 1d6, Craft, Research

An Arcane Study is an area of quiet contemplation or thaumaturgic innovation.

Craft Options

Arcane Focus. You can expend 5 Bastion Points to craft an Arcane Focus.

Bindery. You can expend 10 Bastion Points or 10 GP to craft a blank book.

Publish or Perish. You can expend Bastion Points equal to 10 x your Proficiency Bonus (up to +5) to create a useful reference text on a topic you know well. It must apply to one of your proficient skills (Arcana, History, Investigation, Medicine, Nature, or Religion). You must be present in the Bastion for at least four Bastion Turns and assigning the Craft action to this facility, in addition to the BP cost.

Scroll of Identification. You can expend 25 Bastion Points to create a Scroll of Identification. This scroll casts the Identify spell but doesn’t require you to have that spell on your class spell list.

Research Options

Spell Preparation. If your Spellcasting feature can only change its prepared spells when you gain a level, you can expend 12 Bastion Points to remove one prepared spell and replace it with a level 1 spell from your class spell list, or you can expend 25 Bastion Points to remove one prepared spell and replace it with a level 2 spell from your class spell list. You must work in the Arcane Study for 7 days per level of the spell.

Spell Research. You can expend 25 Bastion Points to add a level 1 spell to your spellbook. You can expend 50 Bastion Points to add a level 2 spell to your spellbook. Adding a spell to your spellbook this way eliminates the GP cost of adding a spell to your spellbook. You must work in the Arcane Study for 7 days per level of the spell.

Upgrades

As part of a Roomy special facility, you can combine an Arcane Study with a Library or Scriptorium. The combined special facilities count as only one special facility for the number you can have in your Bastion.

As part of a Vast special facility, you can combine an Arcane Study with an Archive, or with both a Library and a Scriptorium. The combined special facilities count as only one special facility for the number you can have in your Bastion.

Expanding a Special Facility in this way costs the same amount of money as expanding a Basic Facility.

Armory

Bastion Facility

Prerequisite: None
Space: Roomy
Hirelings: 1-3
Order: Maintain 1d4, Trade

An Armory holds racks for weapons and shields, barrels for ammunition, armor stands for storing suits of armor, and whatever oils and barrels of sand are necessary to keep metal from rusting and leather or wood from drying out.

Trade: Stock Armory. You acquire and maintain the gear that your Bastion Defenders need for combat. This costs 50 GP + the basic armament of your Bastion Defenders. If your Bastion has a Smithy, a Tannery, or a Workshop, you can replace this cost with Bastion Points, at a rate of 1 BP per 5 GP.

The gear in the armory can improve your Bastion Defenders’ combat capabilities. An NPC defender equipped from this Armory gains a +1d4 bonus to attack rolls in a battle. Once they have used this bonus in battle, it is expended until they have gone 7 days without a battle. You can choose to overstock the Armory so that your Bastion Defenders have replacements for further battles in the same week.

Upgrades

As part of a Vast special facility, you can combine an Armory with a Barrack, a Smithy, or a Workshop. The combined special facilities count as only one special facility for the number you can have in your Bastion.

Library

Bastion Facility

Prerequisite: None
Space: Roomy
Hirelings: 1-4
Order: Maintain 1d6, Research

This Library contains shelves bowed with the burden of useful knowledge.

Research Options

Lore Inquiry. You expend 10 BP to commission the hirelings to research a topic, possibly with your participation. After 7 days of work, the hirelings make an Intelligence check with a relevant skill. Unless they are NPCs with their own capabilities, their bonus to this roll is +2. For every 5 additional BP you expend on this roll, you add +1 to their roll total. If you participate directly, you can use your Intelligence modifier and proficiency bonus in place of theirs. On a success against a DC set by the DM, you gain three new accurate pieces of information, or cryptic clues about where to search for more information. The DM determines what you learn.

Spell Research. If you also have an Arcane Study, the maximum level of spell you can prepare or research is 4. Level 3 spells cost 37 BP to prepare or 75 BP to research. Level 4 spells cost 50 BP to prepare or 100 BP to research.

If you have both an Arcane Study and an Archive, the maximum level of spell you can prepare or research is 6. Level 5 spells cost 62 BP to prepare or 125 BP to research. Level 6 spells cost 75 BP to prepare or 150 BP to research.

Design Notes

The math on the Maintain action, and how you improve that as you advance, isn’t firmed up in my mind yet. I kind of need to sit with this for a bit and test it out in use to figure out how it should work.

I’m also stopping here because one of the next things I’d have to handle is reworking the Bastion Defender system from the ground up. I’m not trying to get this to a full-on mass combat system, but the system described in the Attack Bastion Event makes it very nearly impossible for anything interesting to occur, so that’s got to go.

Anyway. I hope you enjoy what I’m trying to do here. My long-term goal would be to complete the overhaul and release it on the DM's Guild. I think giving a PC team a cool home base where interesting things can happen, and where there are memorable friendly NPCs to engage with, is a huge boon to a campaign. It needs to not tie the PCs down to that spot, but be one they’re excited to come back to. If you get to the reward part of an adventure and you’re excited that you can now afford to upgrade your base, that’s gaming magic.