At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, any mechanic designed around providing characters magic items at their discretion in a system not balanced around magic items seems broken by default.
It’s unfortunate that they seem to want to make the cantrips less unique rather than more. All the interesting little wrinkles like Chill Touch’s interaction with undead, Poison Spray’s Con save, or Shocking Grasp’s interaction with metal armour were reasons to use these spells over just using the highest damage dice cantrips all the time.
The Bastion seems a really fun addition, both as a way to introduce magic items in the game in a way that’s not entirely dependent on the DM, and to spend all those GP that the party is bound to amass simply by playing as intended, and that the game currently offers very little to spend on.
I’m a bit worried about the balance, though, especially as it aims on giving the players more autonomy in gaining magic items and other bonuses, yet it seem to be heavily reliant on the DM to work as intended. The document recommends at least “six to eight Bastion turns per level” and warns about players “amassing more Bastion Points than they can use”. This is a very weak recommendation, akin to the “two short rests per long rest” rule the entire game seems to be balanced around, but which very few tables actually enforce.
The difference being that, while short/long rest balance relies on the DM to plan the session accordingly, following the recommended pacing for Bastion turns requires the DM to accurately plan the entire campaign around this new addition. With Bastion Turns occurring once every seven days, do designers now expect each character level to last at least six to eight sessions, each covering seven in-game days?
If that’s the case, my actual game experience couldn’t be further from the designers’ expectations, as I’ve never had a character level last more than a few sessions at most. It would probably be fine for other games, but DnD is severely lacking in player options and customization, and I don’t look forward to doing the same attack action for months just to wait for my Bastion to do its thing, until enough time has passed that the designers have arbitrarily deemed enough for me to level up.
I’m also not sure about Bastion Facilities generating 1dx Bastion Points instead of a fixed amount. I usually recommend standard array in place of rolled stats because the latter is entirely dependent on luck and heavily screws the balance between party members; the same can be said about the Bastion Points being generated at random, possibly leading to one player being able to acquire magic items and gather more benefits from their Facilities than other players in the same party.
Despite the doubts I have over these specific details, I very much like the Bastion system and I hope to see it fleshed out for release, hopefully with some fixes to the problematic bits I’ve highlighted and more additions. BUT, I also hope it won’t be released in the current form, as I fear it would require extensive amounts of homebrewing and DM-fiat, which would in turn defy the entire purpose behind the Bastion system in the first place.
As for the reworked cantrips, it’s fine. Mostly comprising of buffs to underpowered/underused options, which actually empowers cantrip-based classes such as Warlock and gish classes more than pure casters, as the latter don’t rely on cantrips as much as the formers. Nothing too ground breaking as far as I can see, but it’s nice to have,
Overall, it’s a good UA. I wonder if the Bastion system will appear in the PHB or the DMG, though. Some things, such as the Bastion Events, seem more fit for the latter.
each covering seven in-game days
I saw this and went “I thought it said once a week”. But you are correct, it’s every seven days. Which is ridiculous as the Forgotten Realms (the setting of most modules) uses a 10 day week. This means that any further modules are going to need to modify that timeline.
Either way, it means that tracking the date for your adventure becomes mandatory, rather than optional. My first time DMing (Lost Mines/Icespire merge) I didn’t bother with the date, because it wasn’t necessary, but I tracked days on a calendar for Dragon Heist.
It’s this extra work that makes me hesitant about the bastions. Keeping track of the date, the rooms, the number of hirelings, running the random encounters. The random encounters mostly seem like distractions, especially when the party is away from their bastion.
Player: “who is attacking me?” DM: “this group” Player: “well I’m going to leave Avernus and hunt them down next session”
And each player is supposed to have their own bastion! Sure, the standard group is 4, but we often hear of larger groups. And the combined bastions are combined in story only, they run as two separate locations for everything apart from the encounters.
Whatever happened to “don’t split the party”?
I’m glad you like the idea of the system, and please don’t think any of my negativity is directed towards yourself.
And each player is supposed to have their own bastion! Sure, the standard group is 4, but we often hear of larger groups. And the combined bastions are combined in story only, they run as two separate locations for everything apart from the encounters.
Whatever happened to “don’t split the party”?
Agreed. Instead of different bastions for different characters, the party should have one bastion, with each character providing a unique starting room/facility or a passive bonus related to their class.
I’ve just done some number crunching to see how much sense the bastion turns per level values make.
- The oft-quoted 6-8 medium/hard adventures per day gives us an expected amount of XP that the players should be getting per day
- I’ll estimate on the lower side of things to give a bit of benefit of the doubt for how much people actually stick to that (i.e. not at all)
- 4 PCs
- 6 encounters per day
- the lowest amount of XP that qualifies as a medium encounter shared between the PCs
- You stop adventuring for the day when you reach a level up so I don’t have do deal with fractions of days
- This means that at each level you need the following number of days adventuring at each level:
- 1
- 1
- 2
- 3 (2.53)
- 3 (2.5)
- 3 (2.5)
- 3 (2.44)
- 3 (2.59)
- 3 (2.42)
- 3 (2.92)
- 2 (1.56)
- 2 (1.67)
- 2 (1.52)
- 2 (1.67)
- 2 (1.79)
- 2 (1.56)
- 2 (1.71)
- 2 (1.59)
- 2 (1.70)
So unless my maths I is way off it seems they expect you to level up every two or three days, which doesn’t at all fit with the amount of bastion turns they’re asking you to take.
Sounds like they’re trying to get into the area that a lot of third parties have taken with Bastions, like the Strongholds & Followers book that MCDM already published or Walrock’s stronghold’s homebrew on DM’s guild. Probably a good idea for people who don’t use third-party material but seems too late and unnecessary for me now lol.
It might be a good combination, though, since it does look a little similar to me like a combination of those two systems. This makes sense since I think Matt Colville said he adopted systems and stuff that had been in past D&D versions, so it makes sense an official variant would have some similarities. I’ll probably just use this as more options with Strongholds and Followers, which has been working for me so far.
As for the cantrip changes, nothing much to say except I love them all.
I would speculate that the vast majority of players don’t use published third-party material, so putting something in the official rules will make it way more mainstream
I like the idea of the bastion system.
But when I think about my game. It’s time that could be spent playing rp&combat together. And if we spend gametime on bastions it should be a group activity, not x solo turns.
