On Strongholds and Bastions

With the release of not-OneD&D's (let's call it NOD&D) most recent playtest, Bastions and Cantrips, it seems that strongholds - or "Bastions", now (out of habit I'll probably just refer to them as strongholds in this post) - are the topic of the day among online D&D discussions. 

I don't plan to play NOD&D, mostly because my own sensibilities are often at odds with the design team's vision of an "updated" 5th edition (overall I feel like they are designing towards equivalent, "balanced" mediocrity versus unique identities which each feel powerful in their own way) and because Wizard of the Coast's recent offerings have all been disappointing, and I've made up my mind to never purchase any of their products again (not that I own many of them anyway 😉). But, I am keeping my eye on the playtest documents to see if there's anything worth incorporating into my own stitched-together version of 5e.

I mostly like the rules as laid out in the playtest document. There are some basic guidelines for creating a stronghold layout, what types of facilities a player can add to their stronghold and what hirelings and defenders come with those facilities, what those facilities might do, how big they are, and how much they cost in gold and time to build. I don't know that I like the abstraction that is Bastion Points or how exactly Bastion Turns work (you can't give specific orders to your hirelings unless you're physically there to do so), but it's a decent structure which I can probably use. It's at once more robust than what's presented in 5e, without veering into the very complicated morass of AD&D.

I quite like the rules that are presented in the 5e Dungeon Master's Guide. They're simple, but not useless. Each type of property has an associated amount of gold and time needed to build it. Then, there's a per-day upkeep cost which includes the salaries of skilled and untrained hirelings. 

This is a nice middle ground between the way strongholds were presented in OD&D and AD&D. As is usually the case, OD&D's rules are simple but quirky, and sometimes hard to parse or oddly specific. Much and more is left to the imagination of Dungeon Master and player - the rules only hint at the possibilities, rather than trying to cover them completely. AD&D, on the other hand, has exhaustive rules pertaining to strongholds, hirelings, henchmen, excavation, construction, patrols, peasant uprisings, employing assassins, sages, and spies, and many other bits of minutiae. The polar opposite of OD&D, AD&D tries to account for everything.

And honestly, I appreciate the "Encyclopedia of D&D" approach of the AD&D DMG. I appreciate that no matter what version of D&D (or really any fantasy roleplaying game) I'm playing at the time, if my players decide to recruit an assassin to kill one of their enemies, I can say "Let's see what AD&D says about this". Almost always there's some guidance that I can mangle into something I'm interested in using. It might be a lot to sift through, Gygaxian, verbose, and confounding, but it's something.

Unfortunately, in 5e there isn't much guidance as to what sorts of facilities each property contains or what purpose it serves besides what's implied by the name. The benefit of having a keep or castle is obvious, but there's no way to determine specifics - how tall and thick are the walls, what built-in defenses does it have, what's the layout, etc. What is the benefit to splurging on a large temple versus a small temple, aside from the number of hirelings and upkeep cost?

There also isn't any guidance as to what amounts to a skilled or untrained hireling in a given property, beyond garrisons for castles, keeps, inns, outposts, forts, palaces, and temples. Untrained hirelings are 0th-level non-player characters that attend to the property's mundane upkeep (they possess no "skills" so to speak), whereas skilled hirelings are any NPCs with a proficiency of any kind (so a mercenary, sage, spy, assassin, etc. are all "skilled hirelings" and would earn the same wage - a bit simplistic for my tastes). The DM could leave it to the player to determine exactly who each of their skilled hirelings is, but it would be nice to have a list of options to choose from.

The Power Fantasy of Property Ownership

I'll confess that I'm writing this post mainly because of the Dicebreaker article, "Dungeons & Dragons' latest playtest wants to sell you the dream of being a fantasy landlord". I dislike WotC, their corporate brand of D&D, and landlords as much as the next person who can't help but write about D&D online and who also laments the state of housing and wealth inequality in the real world, but this is clickbait (yes, I know I fell for it by reading and engaging with it and now linking to it here). 

An even cursory glance at the new playtest material will reveal that there is no mechanic for charging rent or taxing peasants to generate passive income. There are ways to generate income, but the player does so by building facilities which generate goods to sell to surrounding communities, inviting locals to gamble away their measly incomes (predatory, sure, but what would you expect a rogue to want to build a stronghold for?), or send underlings out to slay monsters that are no longer worth the character's time. Compare this to OD&D and AD&D, which present passive income via taxation as one of the main benefits of owning a stronghold (tempered by the looming threat of "The Angry Villager Rule"), and the difference is stark.

The article criticizes the simplicity of stronghold defense by pointing out that a player's stronghold defenders are nameless and without character, will lay down their lives freely to defend the player's property, and are without pay (at least not the sort that the player needs to worry about), and that the success of a stronghold defense amounts to nothing more than a die roll. 

The former points I agree with, to an extent. It would behoove the DM to at least detail key NPCs, like the garrison's master-at-arms, head librarian, smith, etc., but this can easily be done, at least using the 5e DMG - the DM generates an NPC whenever a character acquires a new facility and gives the player their information to keep track of (the DM should also track this information, along with extra, secret information like bonds and flaws). Presumably there will be similar NPC generation tables in the forthcoming update to the DMG (the error at the heart of critiquing playtest material like this before the core rulebooks are even available to review is that we don't know what else will be included in the final published books - it's difficult to accurately critique the parts without knowledge of the whole). 

Although morale has fallen by the wayside in 5e and presumably NOD&D, I use it in my games, and would employ morale checks for stronghold defenders in the event of an attack (recruiting a charismatic master-at-arms could improve the chances of a successful morale check in this event). Although the playtest packet states that the designers "want the gold [players] spend to make them happy (as opposed to feeling like mortgage payments", I would eschew this and have players keep track of the expenses they have to pay each "Bastion Turn", including wages for defenders and unique skilled hirelings like assassins, sages, and spies - it simply doesn't make sense to me that these things pay for themselves, although I understand why the team designed them that way.

A single die roll for stronghold defense is fine with me. My issue is that the strength of the attackers is always static, and it's assumed that they'll always be defeated (as with everything else in modern D&D, player success is a foregone conclusion). The player rolls 6d6, and each die that rolls a 1 indicates a defender has died in the defense. Though this isn't mentioned in the playtest document, the DM could easily increase or decrease the number of dice the player rolls to represent weaker or stronger forcese, but there's no indication of what sort of force that baseline of 6d6 represents. Is it assumed that the attackers are non-magical, ordinarily equipped human soldiers? (Presumably ones who are ill-prepared to lay siege to a stronghold, considering their defeat is always certain, even if the stronghold has no defenders.) How many dice would represent an attack from an army of ogres? What about a dragon?

The Dicebreaker article goes on to criticize the playtest for isolating the stronghold from the greater community and society, claiming that community members only appear to present burdens to the player character or enrich them "by either increasing their ability to enact violence or fattening their purse". But that's...the game. The players go on adventures, which often involve violence, usually with the goal of either solving a local problem, "fattening their purses", or acquiring items and experience levels which enhance their ability to do violence in their next adventure. Criticisms of the politics or worldview embedded in that gameplay loop are fair, but it's a fantasy adventure game, not Animal Crossing. D&D is never not going to be the game that these people criticize it for being.

Again, none of the rules in the playtest document preclude the DM from generating in-depth NPCs with any number of characterizations, problems, or relations to the player characters and the larger world. 

Similarly, although the playtest provides a procedure for resolving each Bastion Event (cops come to your stronghold to apprehend one of your hirelings - you can hand them over or bribe the cops; refugees show up outside your walls - they pay you gold for protection, but they're wiped out the next time your stronghold is attacked), no DM worth their salt would limit the players to these options. The player could just as well refuse to hand over the criminal hireling or pay a bribe, diffusing the situation with social tact or fanning the flames with violence, in turn creating tension with the local community. The next time the stronghold is attacked, the player might bring the refugees inside their walls to protect them. The refugees could establish a small village around the stronghold over time if permitted to remain there. It requires some extra work on the DM's part, but that's always been the case with building a world that feels real, where players are empowered to try to do anything. The designers simply can't account for the diverse tastes and playstyles of everyone who might engage with the game.

A further criticism is that the playtest material doesn't allow you to, for example, "pull the nearby village out of near poverty, or simply increase the wages of the butler that you named and wrote a backstory for last session". If a player wanted to pay their butler extra gold each turn in order to increase their loyalty score (another element from AD&D which I'd incorporate, alongside morale), then I would help to facilitate that. The matter of the local village is more troublesome, as it would be entirely DM discretion as to how much gold expenditure that would require, but I'm not exactly expecting the rules to cover such a specific situation - this is not AD&D, after all.

This is a problem you see all the time in modern D&D discussions. The introduction of skill checks (in 3e, and to a lesser extent in AD&D 2e with non-weapon proficiencies, and an even lesser extent in older editions with thief skills) has internalized the thought process in players "If it's not in the rules/on my character sheet, I can't do it." As a result, players clamor for more rules, so the designers oblige them by introducing/reintroducing new/old systems like Bastions/strongholds. Then, people complain that those rules don't cover the total gamut of things they could conceivably do in the game. 

Even before the WotC era of D&D, players would write in to the designers for "official rulings" on specific marginalities not covered by the rules. Gary Gygax eventually said in response to this "we are not loath to answer your questions, but why have us do any more of your imagining for you?"

The thing that D&D and TTRPGs in general have always had over video games is that the rules don't have to cover the gamut of gameplay options. Rules certainly help, and the Bastion system introduces a framework which might be useful in my games - much like how AD&D's DMG is a handy reference regardless of edition - but that framework isn't the totality of how I would use the system - much like how the rules of 5e aren't the totality of how I run 5e. 

With imaginative players and flexible DMs, the framework can become so much more. And while it's fair to criticize the rules that the designers put out to the extent that they reflect the kind of game they're designing, and the designers' implicit politics and worldview, the game they design isn't everything the game can be, and their politics and worldview needn't be your own. If the DM doesn't like the way something is presented or wish it presented more, the onus is on them to make that game element theirs.

Personally, I will probably use NOD&D's Bastion system to allow players to build more modular, customized strongholds which develop over time. The specific hirelings, their wages, and functions will be determined by AD&D's DMG in some combination with NOD&D's rules for facilities. Important NPCs will have writeups alongside other important NPCs in my setting, and they'll each have AD&D-style loyalty scores based on a variety of factors, including (especially) how they're treated by the PC. 

The stronghold will exist within a larger world and the two will mutually influence each other according to the events which transpire in the game's fiction. A player can do just about anything feasible with their stronghold and I will do my best to adjudicate the outcome as referee. I may use Bastion Events as they're presented in the playtest document, combine them with other complications found in Xanathar's Guide to Everything's downtime activities, or make my own tables. I'll have some rough outline of how all of this works, but it will grow and evolve and become simplified or more complex to taste as I playtest it in my games.

I understand that the Bastion, as presented in the playtest document, is meant to be in the background of the campaign, another bell or whistle to complement the 5e player character's purely beneficial wealth of existing bells and whistles, that Bastion Turns are meant to be a minigame resolved quickly, and Bastion Points a simple abstraction, and that most DMs would prefer it that way, but if the designers are going to dangle this kind of mechanic in front of me I am going to wonder how it could be more robust or lifelike, and how I can customize it to fit my game and my tastes. And the beauty of D&D is that my players and I can do pretty much whatever we want with our game.