How do you guys feel about giving playsers strongholds at a certain level?

Thing is, theyre going tyo have advisors and regents while they're off doing important things.

>they don't play lineage/inheritance campaigns
Plebeians, all of you.

I've always wanted to have a stronghold/base/holding that I can flesh out and occupy my time with idle things in between sessions.

It would not be something to dedicate a whole amount of time to but something on tick-over to. At the end of each session, the GM could offer something like...

"Lord Isyix, the land from which your Stronghold draws its strength is experiencing a heavy drought."

"Wizard Thiligisligul, your Collegium has sprouted legs and is slowly walking back towards the mine it's bricks came from."

"Paladin Fig, your Order is under-strength after lending your swords as a go-between between two rival factions, you were scapegoated."

Before each session, a quick five minute briefing is given to those who want a stronghold, it is important that it does not impact the party and is kept apart from the game, something of a mini game for the player.

It also opens up possibilities for quests.

"After a short conversation with the messenger , you are told that sir delkor's keep is being qccosted by a small band of orcs, who dwell in the mountains near the settlement"

The only thing is with that is when one player gets priority and it's all about them. There is nothing worse than feeling like an NPC in a game.

That is why I suggest keeping it as background stuff.

Myself and some friends of mine recently mass-murdered some cultist fuckheads that killed another PC during a 5e campaign, so we inherited their keep. It's been fairly fun so far, as we're now sheltering refugees and I soon hope to make enough money to have a small retinue of soldiers to bully our enemies with.

Well thats why thered be a stronghold or prganization each class gets to earn, like a mage school for a wizard, or a thieve's guild for a rogue. Which would likely be housed in or near a warrior's keep.

Yes, but if the party then has to get involved in ridding the castle of orcs it becomes a one-man show. They should remain background or failing that, it can be a party owned so they all have some investment in what the party is doing.

>Not having them go through the minutia of managing a keep.
>Not having challengers show up to challenge them to duels for bragging rights.
>Not having rival nobles show up to perform political power moves.
>Not throwing curveballs like trading routes being shut down by bandits or roaming undead.

It's like you think owning a keep runs itself. I once had a campaign that was nothing but the party managing a village that they took over from a corrupt mayor, once you get a keep, the campaign should be more focused on how this group of murderhobos expect to manage a stronghold when all they know how to do is kill monsters.

Weol theredbe a que for every class.

Like with the hypothetical magc school, imagine one of the students got incredibky powerful increadibly fast, and wasforced to be expeled by the for doing unethical experiments

>Implying the mage wouldn't be able to scry to help organize troops from the outside.
>Implying the rogue wouldn't be able to lead in a strike team to destabilize key targets without being seen.
>Implying the cleric wouldn't be able to cast mass buffs to give the warrior and his cronies the push to turn the tides.

Seriously, it's only a one-man show if either your players are cowardly idiots or you're an uncreative GM.

>How do you guys feel about giving players strongholds at a certain level?

i have them run a quest (at any level) that has as its prize a stronghold/dungeon
i even have several that i have given out
- an old salt mine that was used as a library and keeps things in it preserved. that they had to help the previous owner move out to a better place
- a prison that held political prisoners that they had to free and has anti magic properties everywhere
- a small simple castle (several stories of how to get one)
- an empty and looted dungen (even the traps have been taken)
- a magic key to a very large dungen that the payers have cleared in a previous game
- (loved this one) players go to a dungeon that is unfinished... they find themselves in the center keep surrounded by undead that where working on building the dungeon with no way to escape and then have to hold off wave after wave of skeletons and zombies. they get the dungeon if they survive and all weapons armor the equipment that the undead had
>had it so that 12 of the undead skeletons had independent thought and can survive the death of the necromancer that made them and if the players did not destroy them they'd get 12 NPC undead guards/construction workers. sadly the players destroyed them without knowing.

>Terrible idea. In my experience players tend to nest and start only going out and looking for interesting things if you beat them over the head with it
--- not having hoards of NPC parties come to raid there dungen
--- you go to your treasure chest and find it empty and all your items stolen

Like, a literal stronghold, as in a fort, or a stronghold as in a boost up?

A castle, a magic school, a xhurch, whatever works.

I've had this experience

>the de facto "leader" of the party (the guy who comes up with ideas and cares about the world beyond their personal pile of loot) builds a fortified manor
>gets ultra invested in farming and managing his followers (like literally wants to play Harvest Moon and decide whether to plant turnips or cabbages)
>everybody else seems content to bum around the compound for a while

They got back to adventuring but that was an odd couple of sessions.

Other than that, It usually works out well. A captured stronghold has to be defended, a wizards tower gives you a safe place to summon demons (until the village next door rises up with torches and pitch forks, etc. It's a great impetus for adventure.

I've even run games where the characters start with a stronghold (ie, they all inherit an equal share through some contrivance) and have to deal with being petty nobles, paying tribute to their lord, etc. It's fun.

The idea was that 1e games were so brutal that if you lived long enough, you didn't want to risk your character anymore, so you were hoping to loot enough dough to retire the character, and a fief was a way of doing that.

Right. It wasn't that you could not do it earlier. It was that you could do it at level x and get elite retainer fighter types to follow you.

>Give

Niggas better be ready to pay the iron price

Frank is chaotic good

There's a bunch of ruins and even some still-standing watchtowers scattered across the countryside. All they really need is the funds to clean up and stock it.

I knew a GM who gave players a sort of stronghold to operate out of fairly early on. Gave them an incentive to recruit followers or resources, also caused a lot of prolonged descriptions of living quarters and downtime that we could have done without

ASSUMING YOU MEAN D&D

NO

DON'T

Yeah, it's neat, some sorta fortified base.

It use to be the thing to do

Well maybe not just giving it away

But it use to be, do enough stuff and get land and a title

Just remember to throw enough Nobel problems at them that they can't just run off whenever they want

If your players don't have a base of operations, I dont know how they're functioning. Unless you're playing with nothing dangerous attacking in the night, no encumberance rules, and instant level ups.

This place can be as simple as a room rented out in an inn, a fortified cave, a room they cleared in the sewers, whatever, but they need a place to store their gold and items and a safe place to rest and train.

So at higher levels, it only makes sense to have a fixed up keep, and aquired castle or running a village.

West Marches

Keeping in mind that (depending on edition) gold weighs between 1lb/10 to 50 coins, they shouldnt ever be carrying much around, unless they are off to make a large purchase or carrying it in carts back to home base.

3.5 say a 5th level character has 9,000 gold on average. Thats 180lbs, and unless they have a 15 Str or higher, they can't carry it all by themselves.

>Each session is presumed to be self-contained. Players venture into the wild, find or are found by adventure, and return home each session.

They have homes. My point is still valid

Someone doesn't know the Filthy Frank lore!

>I once had a campaign that was nothing but the party managing a village that they took over...

That's fine, if the whole party is on board but that's almost never how it works. RAW in 2e has the Fighter getting a Keep and an Army. The Cleric getting a Church and a Congregation, Druid (if you have one) gets a grove, then gets pulled away to literally be the Supreme leader of Druids and deal with politics for a while. The freaking thief takes over a thieves guild.
In character these are pretty drastically different ambitions and outcomes and they tend to separate the party, making it pretty much impossible to go on adventures, which makes it pretty difficult to advance in level or get swag, which sucks out the fun which ends the campaign.

>what are gems

>Yes excuse me I'd like to buy 100ft of rope a shovel and 3 torches.
That'll be 17 silver
>Okay let me just. . . I only have these gems, can you break a 350 gold gem?
No M'Lord, I'm afraid I dont have that kind of coin. Dont you have just a few silver?
>No, I only carry gems because the massive amounts of riches I have weigh me down too much if I use your petty commoner money.

True

Of course building a fortress or castle comes with bigger problems then where to keep your stuff

Not only is the cost a problem

Location, location, location is everything with forts and castles and anyplace else to hang your sword

if it's worth building there it worth owning there and someone probably does at least on the maps

You build or repair there and there is a good chance other people had their eye on the place

And you just went to the top of their and possibly a whole kingdom's shit list

So you know nothing too out of the normal for an adventurer

Why would it necessarily be the end of the campaign though?

When my party took over a village, all it did was shift the focus from going out and adventuring to managing this small village that they took over on a whim. Some days they met travelers looking for work, sometimes they had to deal with usurpers, something they had to deal with members of their past, sometimes they had to deal with mundane shit helping someone on a date or managing the town's economy.

But throughout it all, the party still had fun because every decision they made affected the town.

I mean, there isn't any rules that states that you can't have a keep, a church, a grove, and a thieve's guild in the same place. There's also nothing stating that you can't have followers be members of multiple groups, like a soldier who goes to church or a thief who is also a member of the army.

Even then, why not play legacy characters who work in service of the original PCs?

They still have to trade in all the gold, silver and copper they aquire for gems. That requires storage, or at the very least transport. And its not like you can spend them easily.

My DM made a campaign that started us in an ancient stronghold, powered by lost Magitek crystals. We were in the employ of a religious order, and the intent was that as we did missions for them and found crystals, we would get more defenses and more people would settle in the stronghold.

In the end, frictions between the party and the order led to us blowing up the machine they were using to exert control over our Warforged friend (setting various buildings on fire in the process) and fleeing into the countryside with their soldiers pursuing us.

But we also stole the one crystal we'd found, so now we're looking for another base to claim for our own use. All in all, it's been enjoyable so far.

>How do you guys feel about giving players strongholds at a certain level?

"Give a man a fish..." and all that. Before you "give" your players anything it's probably a good idea to make sure they are actually interested in it. They may not want the headache of dealing with managing a property and the staff that comes with it.

If they think they're interested then ease them into it. Do they track and manage the resources they already have well? Use the lifestyle expenses to make them do this if you don't already.
Then make it a bit more involved, have them draw up their campsite when they rest for the night, post sentries. Saddle them with a few followers that they need to look after and direct.
Have them RP a scenario where they have to actually perform conflict resolution between two parties over something asinine and thankless.

Most players will probably lose interest in the idea of their own personal keep/castle/whatever when confronted with the boring minutia that comes with it.

>Plebeians, all of you.

Death to the Catonian!

Can you elaborate?

I plan on giving them responsibilities. That much is obvious. But they will be free moat of the time due to advisors and 'second in command' type guys.

Real Frank is True Neutral, Kamikaze Failure Frank/Fake Frank is chaotic evil. Imposter Frank serves the dark lord Chinchin wholeheartedly, while real frank only does so out of fear, until he rebels. Fake Frank tortures animals, torments the disabled, and abuses sentient AI, Real Frank is just kind of a dick. Real Frank just cares about his friends and not much else, Fake Frank has no friends and will do any sort of evil in the name of Chinchin or for his own amusement.

I spent way more time on this stupid chart than I should have. Which is any time at all.

Any characters not featured are probably chaotic neutral that is to say retarded.

Gems, portable holes, and bags of holding.

Magic items can't be bought.

I get away with doing and saying that exact thing a lot more then I should in game.