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Bastions: And How to Make Them Pay – Maximizing Profits for Bastions in the 5e 2024 DMG

Thursday, October 31st, 2024

The late 19th century was all about ducks, but in the early 21st century we know better

The late 19th century was all about ducks, but in the enlightened age of Generic Fantasy Times we know better

ANOTHER RORY GUEST POST!

With the release of the 5e 2025 Dungeon Masters Guide, Bastions are official and can be easily acquired at 5th level for any DM who sees fit to include them! Are they a little half baked? Perhaps! Is it mostly useless to recruit defenders and build walls for your Bastion? Yeah, pretty much! Are some of the facilities you can build almost entirely useless? YES (I’m looking at you Armory)!

On the other hand… Can Bastions actually make you quite a bit of easy money? Most Certainly! Are there actually quite a few facilities available that provide a host of useful buffs and abilities? Yes… but let’s go back to the easy money thing. Imagine if you will an adventurer motivated by the desire to make fat stacks of gold and platinum. Perhaps this adventurer has a kind heart and wishes to support the local orphanage. Or perhaps they simply want to buy a lot of sweet magic items and throw their money around like it was water, bribing their way to success, wearing the finest clothes, and throwing lavish parties. Either way, money is pretty useful in D&D and it’s no surprise players would want to acquire more of it, especially with the new rules for buying and crafting magic items. I’ve looked through all the special facilities in the new DMG, and below are the most profitable special facilities for each level range:

TLDR: Start with a Gaming Hall and Garden, pick up a Storehouse and Stable at level 9, and then grab a Guild Hall at level 17 for most impactful gains. Much longer explanation below!

Levels 5-8: At level 5 you can choose 2 specialized facilities at no cost. Every week that you spend with some kind of access to your bastion (generally being able to stop by in person at the beginning of the week is enough), you can give special commands to these facilities to make you that sweet sweet lucre. The most profitable at this level are:

Gaming Hall (73.5 gold/week): The payout is random each week, but if you do the math, this facility makes you 73.5 gold a week on average, which isn’t bad!

Garden (50 gold/week): You can make a lot of stuff with a garden, but from a pure profit standpoint selecting Poison is your best bet. You can create two vials of Antitoxin or one vial of Basic Potion a week. If you actually need those items, awesome, you’ve just netted 100 gold of value. If not, the standard rules let you sell those items for half price and net a pretty decent 50 gold.

Should you enlarge your garden? For a mere (lol) 2,000 gold you can expand the size of your garden to Vast size and effectively maintain two gardens instead of one, which would double your weekly profit to 100 gold. Probably this isn’t worth it unless you expect to stay in the 5-8 level range for quite some time, as it would take literally 40 weeks to recoup you expenses and turn this into a profitable endeavor. Probably don’t bother.

Total Profit per Week: 123.5 Gold!

Levels 9-12: At level 9, you unlock 2 more special facilities, increasing your total to 4! More importantly, you unlock some nice options for making substantially more money. Here are the top 4 most profitable facilities at this level:

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Posted in 5e D&D, advice/tools, RPG Hub | 1 Comment »

Do the 2024 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide XP Tables Work?

Tuesday, October 29th, 2024

Rory Guest Post!

Arguably one of the most impactful changes in the 2024 5e Dungeon Master’s Guide is the new XP Budget table for Combat Encounters. It has three notable changes from the original 5e DMG:

The old table had 4 categories of difficulty for encounters (Easy, Medium, Hard, and Deadly). The new table drops the old Easy encounters and has only 3 categories (Low, Moderate, High). So effectively, the old Medium is the new Low, the old Hard is the new Moderate, and the old Deadly is the new High. Considering how laughably trivial Easy encounters were, this is a pretty reasonable change.
The notorious Encounter Multipliers table for multiple enemies has been removed. This table was designed under the premise that multiple weaker enemies are more difficult than a single high level enemy. While single enemies are uniquely vulnerable to spells like Hold Person and Polymorph, it was a fundamentally flawed premise considering the prevalence of AE spells and abilities such as Thunderwave and Fireball, and it’s removal ensures less burdensome encounter calculations and more realistic difficulties overall.
The XP budgets start out the same (once you shift from 4 categories to the new 3), but increase at higher levels. Considering how powerful PCs become at higher levels, this is probably a good thing. For the hardest difficulties, the XP budget increases relative to the original DMG starting at level 9 and is almost double at level 20 (12,700 vs the new 22,000).

All things considered, I would say it’s pretty obvious these are all good changes. My question though, is does it go far enough?! With that in mind, let’s explore some scenarios at various tiers of play using the High difficulty, which is meant to provide a meaningful chance of death for one of more characters. We’ll have to work with the old Monster Manual, so perhaps we can revisit these numbers when the new MM is out:

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Posted in 5e D&D, advice/tools, RPG Hub | 2 Comments »

5e Dungeon Masters Guide: The Paradoxical Economy of D&D

Wednesday, December 17th, 2014

The D&D Dungeon Masters Guide is out now, and it’s a very cool resource filled with lots of new rules for treasure, magic items, world building, new downtime activities, and optional rules! Also, my name is in the play-tester credits, so that’s pretty fun :).

Anyway, instead of doing something ridiculous, like review an entire book, I’d like to focus on one specific element I found interesting, the rules for running a business during your downtime!

The idea of running a business and making extra money during downtime is pretty appealing. It’s a great way to engage with the campaign world, a fun “simulationist” way to make money, and it opens up some cool adventure hooks for the DM. For example, maybe some mysterious cloaked figures show up at your Inn, clearly wounded and seeking shelter for the night, OR maybe a group of bumbling first level adventures meet up for the first time, planning a raid on a dragon lair that will surely result in their deaths!

However, running a business is a tricky mechanic to get right. You probably don’t want it to be TOO profitable, or else your PCs will be scratching their heads, wondering why they ever go on adventures. Conversely, if it doesn’t really make you any money, why even bother? Sure, running an Inn sounds cool, but if it’s not profitable, maybe you’re better off spending your character’s time elsewhere.

The folks at Wizards of the Coast gave running a business a decent shot that may work for casual play, but unfortunately it suffers from a few serious flaws when you dig into it:

Running a big business is less profitable than running a small business: If you look at the table for running a business, you’ll see that lower results penalize you by forcing you to pay some percentage of your upkeep every day you spent running a business. Your upkeep can range from 5SP a day for a farm to 10GP a day for a trading post. That makes sense. If your business does poorly, you still have to pay your workers and keep your property in shape. What is pretty counter-intuitive, however, is that if you roll higher on the table, you roll a set amount of dice to determine your profit. This profit is in the same range no matter the size of your business. So a small farm makes the same profit as a large inn, but since the large inn has an upkeep that is 20 times larger, you’ll end up making a lot less money overall since it will hurt a lot more when you roll poorly and need to pay that upkeep. (more…)

Posted in 5e D&D, advice/tools, game design, RPG Hub | 23 Comments »

Light Crossbow: Still the Weapon of Choice for Low Level Wizards in 5e

Monday, July 7th, 2014

One of the nice things about D&D 4e was that wizards and other spellcasters got to step back from the old routine from previous editions of relying on the crossbow during easy fights or after they expended their paltry assortment of spells at low levels. They had at least 2 powers they could use over and over again to do solid damage equivalent to a basic melee strike (often with very cool added bonuses).

Alas, in 5e the crossbow comes to the forefront again. A layperson may be forgiven for assuming that a low level wizard doesn’t really need a crossbow; after all, they have plenty of cantrips they can fall back on to do a wide variety of elemental damage. My response is that unless they are fighting monsters with vulnerability to fire, cold, or electricity, the crossbow is almost always a better bet until level 5.

My reasoning is simple:

Damage: A wizard using point buy is often going to have a 14 or 16 Dexterity, depending on their race. With a 16 Dexterity, a wizard does 1d8+3 damage with a crossbow, blowing the 1d10 firebolt out of the water. That’s an average of 2 extra damage, which may not sound like much until you consider that it’s a 36% increase in damage that has less variance, making it much more likely to make the difference between an injury and a kill. Obviously, the effect is less potent for a 14 Dexterity Wizard, but 1 damage is still significant when the damage values are so low.
Spell Effects: Fire Bolt, Ray of Frost, and Shocking Grasp have relatively minor spell effects. In short, the effects of these spells are very situational. Fire Bolt is good for environmental effects, like setting an oil slick on fire or lighting a torch, but has no direct effect when used against a target. Ray of Frost has some use in the first round of combat or when an enemy if fleeing, interfering with their ability to approach and escape effectively, but its utility is limited during the bulk of combat when significant movement across the battlefield tends to become less important. Shocking Grasp is arguably the most useful, but it’s melee only; it’s really best as a way to do some damage and still withdraw (presumably to pull out your trusty crossbow). And of course, both Ray of Frost and Shocking Grasp only do 1d8 damage, which puts them even further behind the crossbow in the damage department.
Crossbow is better than ever!: The light crossbow has the loading quality, which is no surprise. What is surprising is that all the loading quality does is restrict you to one attack per action, bonus action, or reaction. Since wizards almost never get more than one attack per action, this tag is no real impediment. In contrast, in 3.5, a light crossbow required a move action to load, which could be a real pain.

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Posted in advice/tools, RPG Hub | 12 Comments »

Lifestyle and Downtime in 5e Basic

Sunday, July 6th, 2014

D&D 5e Basic was released a few days ago, and it is packed with 110 pages of great information, including full line ups of the common races and classes. What I am most excited about, however, are the rules for lifestyle and downtime! Some version of these types of rules probably existed in earlier editions, but as someone who primarily played 3.5 and 4e, I really missed not having them. I love subsystems that give a little structure to life outside of adventures and give rewards and consequences to taking time off to pursue other goals (or just wait for the next adventure to roll around). Also, for a certain style of campaign it is very fun to put financial pressure on the PCs so they are always wondering how they are going to scratch together enough money to pay their rent and feed themselves (or suffer the consequences of the new rules for starving!).

Let’s explore our options to see what we have to work with:

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Posted in advice/tools, RPG Hub | 4 Comments »

witches are hobbyists

Monday, June 24th, 2013

My random forest monster chart includes witches, which don’t usually get a stat block. The Hag isn’t the same thing. The important thing about witches is that each has her own cottage industry.

Despite the fact that witches gather in covens, and despite the misguided Hansel and Gretel movie where witch mooks are mowed down with machine gun fire, D&D witches are most interesting as lone monsters. Each witch should have a unique and cruel form of magic.

Hansel and Gretel’s witch makes gingerbread. Circe has a pig farm. The witches in the seminal work on witchcraft, Nick Cage’s Wicker Man, keep bees. The Macbeth witches are political wonks, and probably have a Nate Silver-style blog. Each witch has a horrific twist on their own hobby*, but they’re all hobbyists nonetheless, following the dictates of their own peculiar imaginations, and therefore spiritual sisters to D&D players. Some witch probably plays a twisted variant of OD&D where the players suffer the fate of their characters. “Bad luck, your character stumbled into a trap! Roll on the random trap chart! ROLL ON IT!”

When your players randomly encounter a witch, you should take a few seconds to come up with some unique pastime. Or roll on this chart (when you roll an entry, cross it off and write in something new):
1: baker (we used a witch baker recently in the Mearls sidebar)
2: shoemaker (collects feet for study so that the shoes will fit better)
3: mason (turns the victims of her trickery into stones; has a pretty big castle by this point)
4: playwright (captures friend/family groups and compels them to enact horrific Shakespearean tragedies)
5: cooking contest judge (mystery ingredient: pieces of yourself!)
6: randomly choose from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_hobbies – so many good ones to choose from! B-boying, RC car racing, and parkour witches are all great possibilities.

Witches and gender

Because medieval Europeans were weirdos, traditional witches are female. We don’t need to reject this powerful archetype, but we don’t have to be bound to it either. As far as I’m concerned, a witch is a person who seems civilized, but who uses guile and magic to destroy travelers in terrifying ways. Bluebeard is a nice example of a male character with witch-like characteristics (his particular hobby is serial monogamy). Inside the game world, he might not be called a witch, but I’d use witch stats for him.

*I didn’t see the movie, so I can’t say for sure that the Wicker Man witches had a particularly horrific style of beekeeping. I can only hope that they did, and that it involved Nick Cage getting stung, a lot.

Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 8 Comments »

randomly generate aeons of warring empires

Monday, March 18th, 2013

In this post, I use Mediterranean history to create charts that randomly generate plausible history. If you want to skip the numbercrunching, here are the charts:

1: Each century, for each already-existing empire, roll 1d4:
1-3: It continues to be important.
4: It dissolves or becomes unimportant.

2: How many new empires arose this century? Roll 1d6.
1-2: 0
3: 1
4: 2
5-6: 1d4

What does a plausible fantasy history look like? In order to feel familiar, it should avoid the monolithic extremes of 30,000 years of barbarism of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and the 1000 generations of peace of Star Wars’ Old Republic. Better to stick to something more like Earth history: constantly changing borders as competing empires rise and fall. Not only does this feel more realistic, it lends itself better to D&D play. A big pool of fallen-empires-of-the-week provides diverse dungeons and treasure.

I decided that, to better determine what imperial histories look like, I’d count up a representative sample of Earth empires: How many exist side-by-side, and how often do they arise? From there, I could extrapolate random charts to generate my own game worlds. I limited myself to the Mediterranean from 500 BC to 1500 AD (after iron and before the New World). This is a manageable piece of the world. The Mediterranean is fairly easy to travel, so co-existing empires can interact. Furthermore, it provides the history many of us are familiar with.

Empires of the Mediterranean, 500 BC to 1500 AC

(A lot of data is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_empires. Specific dates are arguable, but I’m just trying to get a rough count here.)

How long do empires last?

It looks like empires have a half-life of a little more than 200 years: of the 27 Mediterranean empires, half (14) are dead after 200 years, 8 more after another 200, and 4 more after another 200. Only the Byzantine empire defies the odds for 1200 years. You’d be pretty close to accurate if you said that each empire has a 3 in 4 chance of surviving each century.

How often do empires start?

In the 21 century-marks I examine, 7 see the birth of 0 empires, 6 see 1, 5 see 2, 2 see 3, and one exciting century (1200) sees 4 empires arise. Here’s a d6 chart that models that pretty closely.
1-2: 0 new empires
3: 1
4: 2
5-6: 1d4

How big is each empire?

That’s extremely variable, even over the course of a single empire’s lifetime. Most empires reach their height around the middle. The Macedonian empire started small, conquered all of the Mediterranean overnight, and then shrunk again. The Bulgarian empire, on the other hand, is donut-shaped: it started at a decent size, disappeared briefly when it was conquered by the Byzantines, and then re-established itself. Therefore, I won’t make any dice charts for this one. Look at your campaign map and see what fits where. Generally, if an empire shares the world with many rivals, it’s probably smaller, and if it’s alone, it probably spans the known world.

The final empire-building model:

For every 100 years of ancient history, roll on the following tables.

1: Each century, for each already-existing empire, roll 1d4:
1-3: It continues to be important.
4: It dissolves or becomes unimportant.

2: How many new empires arose this century? Roll 1d6.
1-2: 0
3: 1
4: 2
5-6: 1d4

Differences between the Mediterranean and your campaign world: Monsters and magic!

Your campaign world is probably wilder than ancient and medieval Mediterranean, which should reduce the rise of empires. On the other hand, magic increases each country’s logistic and military might. People must compete for land with monsters, which reduces their imperial resources – but on the other hand, monsters can start their own empires. Let’s say that these opposing factors cancel out. Just make sure that a few of your empires are ruled by demi-humans, humanoids, or monsters. In my campaign world, I’d expect humans to be the major empire-builders. Obviously I have no real-world numbercrunching to do here, so I will just make up an extra, top-of-my-head d6 chart:

Who rules each new empire? Roll 1d6 for each new empire.
1-4: human
5: humanoid or demihuman (orc, elf, etc)
6: monster (vampire, lich, etc)

OR you can just play a game of Small World.

Edit: Gallowglas wrote a sweet random empire generator using these rules. I tried it a few times, and it works great, and I saw some interesting history unfold! Thanks!

Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 16 Comments »

A year between levels

Monday, February 4th, 2013

Last week I suggested that in-game time match real time. If your D&D campaign lasts a real year, your characters grow one year older. You could also try the opposite approach: Leveling up always takes a year.

This is good for the type of game where earning a level is a real achievement. As part of the leveling-up process, the players describe how they spent their year. Have them describe exactly how they got their level-up perks: where did they learn their feats and spells? Did the PCs travel the world, or work as guards? The Pendragon RPG incorporates this idea into its “winter phase”, and you could certainly use some Pendragon-inspired charts to find out what happened to your family, friends and lands over the course of the year. This would also be a good time to roll on the investments and business charts from Lamentations of the Flame Princess or the ACKS domain charts. In general, the intersession can be a celebration of the role of logistics in D&D.

The DM can advance the gameworld’s story between levels. At this pace, this type of campaign is much more likely to experience wars, royal succession, and other big events. Furthermore, characters can build castles, found guilds, start families, and otherwise impose their wills upon the world. In a high-speed game, where you go from level 1 to 20 in a month, you don’t have time for such things.

In such a game, your character actually ages significantly. Over the course of 20 levels, a 20-year old youth becomes a 40-year-old veteran. Racial age categories are not meaningless fluff. If you decide to start the game as an aged human wizard, magical aging and elixirs of youth might actually be relevant for once.

Tags:uncanned
Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, RPG Hub | 5 Comments »

Last minute Christmas gift: the Random Dungeons kickstarter book!

Tuesday, December 11th, 2012

If you’d like the real-book version of every printable reward from my Random Dungeon kickstarter, you can get Random Dungeons, a 180-page book containing every reward made for every backing level, for $19.95. Until December 14, you can use the coupon code FELICITAS to get 20% off the price (for a price of around $16) and it should arrive before Christmas if you order, like, today.

It contains

the art from the Random Dungeon and Random Monster posters

the sticker art by Rich Burlew and other artists

the final Dungeon Robber rules

Paul’s DM Notebook, a 64-page book on its own

the All-Star DM notebook, containing new adventures and game tools by Mike Mornard, Mike Shea, Tavis Allison, James Maliszewski, Jared von Hindman, and myself.

My adventure is none other than the dungeon crawl that we’re doing in the Mearls sidebar. Watch out for spoilers!

Buy it here!

Posted in advice/tools, fluff/inspiration, legacy D&D, news, RPG Hub | No Comments »

kickstarter posters shipping this week! In the meantime, run a barony!

Monday, May 7th, 2012

GameSalute has been busy. They’re doing shipping and fulfillment for my project as well as the Dwimmermount, Sunrise City and Empires of the Void kickstarters, as well as some others. Still, Dan at GameSalute says he’ll begin shipping the posters this week. Thank you all for your patience!

Around the time that posters are shipped, everyone will get a URL where you can download PDFs of the posters and, eventually, the other rewards as they become available. Most of the other PDFs (all-star adventure book, board game, etc) aren’t ready yet, but one reward that WILL be ready for $22+ backers (and $15 backers) is a PDF version of Paul’s DM Notebook!

I’ve been working on the DM notebook for a lot of hours over the past month, and it’s just about done: I just need to do one or two more illustrations. It weighs in at 64 pages. This will be a beta version of the book. I’d love it if you guys each tested something from the notebook in your next game and sent me some feedback. Next month or so, I’ll update the notebook and make the final version available as a PDF and on lulu.

In the meantime, here’s a big chunk of Chapter 7, which includes prices for big-ticket items like castles and armies, and gives rules for running a barony of your own.