As-written, I find the entire chapter on Bastions to be an interesting concept that is executed in the most rules-heavy, mind-numbing way possible.

My players are definitely interested in the idea of having a "home base" - when we ran Waterdeep Dragon Heist, they loved roleplaying running the Trollskull tavern, holding events there, using it as a hub for downtime events and stashing their treasure, etc. 

However, the Bastion chapter in the 2024 DMG seems very focused on mechanical benefits and lacks ideas on how to integrate the acquiring and upgrading the bastion into a campaign story (you magically have two more rooms in your bastion now, surprise!). I can also say with certainty things like "take a Bastion action every 7 days" and "roll to see what nonsense happens when you're away from it for a week" or "manage these 20 hirelings" would be seen as boring and fiddly by my player group. They *definitely* would want to just have a single bastion structure that they collectively live in and manage rather than a bastion per-character.

How have others successfully used Bastions in their campaigns?  I'm tempted to mostly toss out the rules as written and focus more on the roleplaying opportunities, but I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater if there's useful stuff in there that is worth leveraging.

As a more specific question, I'm planning on running the Planescape "Turn of Fortune's Wheel" campaign soon, so I'd love advice on what an appropriate bastion location in Sigil (or elsewhere in the Outlands) might be.

I also really dislike Bastions. I feel like a player base should be more of a narrative than mechanical thing. "Oh look, we're level 5, so the DM needs to give us a Bastion or he's being mean!" is not the right way to handle them. It would be best to just make it be a convenient, free place to rest and then everything else is roleplaying and narrative stuff.

It's reminiscent of some of the more annoying aspects of 2nd Edition, and it seems extremely out of place in 5e. Also strange being in the DMG instead of the PH, and that it integrates with essentially nothing else in the book. Like one guy at WotC just really really wanted bastions so they let him write the chapter and then told him to go away.

I agree, the Bastion section is an incredible waste of space and mindnumbing mechanical rules. In various games I've played in, most of the time we just use a bastion as a place to send NPCs we want to protect, and/or as a way to express our character's personality by decorating it to suit them. IMO the Bastion section should have simply been a table of costs for renovating rooms, a table of defensive features and their costs to build, costs for paying different types of hirelings, and a table of events that could happened to / in a Bastion. 

E.g. I'd do something like this:

Room Renovation:
Basic room: 10 gp per 5ft square  - this makes a derelict room, safe, livable, and comfortable regardless of the weather outside, 
Crafting room: +10 gp per 5ft square - this upgrades a Basic room into a room specialized for crafting using a specific tool set that you choose when renovating the room, e.g. a alchemy workshop with floors and furniture that won't be destroyed if acid is accidentally dropped on them.
Extradimensional room: 50 gp per 5ft square - this converts any room into a fully customizable space with the same total floor area as the original room that can change design / purpose on command, located in a separate private dimension thus safe from many types of magic. (requires a mage capable of casting Demiplane to create).

Defensive features: - these can be added to the whole bastion and aid in protecting it from various forms of attack.
Perimeter Wall : 2000 gp
Ballista Tower : 1000 gp
Moat : 3000 gp (+2000 gp for monsters living within it)
Guard Barracks : 500 gp
Magical Warding : 5000 gp
Stable : 500 gp

Hirelings: - these can be hired to staff your bastion if you have the required rooms.
General staff (cooks, cleaners, gardeners) : 1-2 sp per day.
Skilled Crafters (requires a Crafting room) : 1 gp per day.
Soldiers / Guards (requires a Barracks) : 2 gp per day.
Mage (requires an extradimensional room): 4 gp per day.

Bastion Events:

Natural Disaster - the bastion itself or the nearby area is struck by a natural disaster - a famine, flood, storm, or fire - a crowd of refugees arrive at the Bastion and demand to be let in for safety, and/or one or more rooms might be destroyed and made derelict by the disaster.

Infiltration - a criminal organization or antagonist of the campaign sends someone requesting sanctuary / employment in the Bastion in order to spy on the party.

Someone in Need - a nearby resident comes to the bastion asking for help.

Attack - monster(s) attack the bastion by: burrowing into it, flying into it, swimming in through the sewers, or by being awoken from their lair within unexplored areas / secret areas of the bastion.

Siege - an large bandit group or platoon of soldiers attempt to take control of the bastion by lying seige or a frontal attack against it.

Tax collector - the ruler of the area sends a tax collector to exact a fee / taxes from the bastion owners.

Infestation - large numbers of a small monstrous creature infest the bastion, also includes haunting by a ghost(s)

Gift - someone leaves a gift at the front door of the bastion, this may be honestly helpful in thanks for something the party did, it might be an attempt at sabotage (e.g. contains a trap / monster / curse that will cause problems for the bastions & bastion owners), it might be something mysterious that acts as a hook for a new quest / plot - e.g. a strange magical artifact, documents tipping the party off to a conspiracy, an orphan baby, a stolen object, a request to meet from a stranger etc...

Theft - thieves break in and steal something of value from the bastion

Assassination - assassins get in and attack one or more party members.

Angry Mob - someone stokes resentment among the local people and they show up as an angry mob demanding food / money / the party to leave.

Secret room - someone discovers a secret room with a hidden entrance somewhere on the bastion property, within might be lore, monsters, puzzles, traps and/or treasure/loot.

I’m in a campaign with a bastion now. Our one change is we don’t each get a facility, the party gets one as a whole. So we decide as a group which to use. We just hit level 13, and it’s been working great.
For one, the above poster saying it’s mean if the DM doesn’t give you one is just silly. That’s why it’s in the DMG, instead of the PHB, so it can be optional.
Also, it’s a session 0 conversation. Decide at the beginning if you are going to have one, as it really set the tone for the campaign. You can’t have one of those constantly traveling around the world kind of campaigns if you have a bastion; you’re likely to be tied to one spot, until you can teleport, at least. Though I’ve heard of people using boats as a bastion, like a little flotilla with different boats being different facilities.
As for getting new facilities, you just say you’ve been working on building them and now they come online at a certain point. You use the same model for the bastion overall when you hit level 5. As it was a session 0 conversation and everyone knows you’re getting one, you start building it early, and construction completes when you hit level 5. It’s not very different from a wizard suddenly knowing a few new spells, or any character suddenly getting the benefits of a feat — they’ve been working at it, and now they can do it.

As to the OP’s questions, you can’t always have a base without it being a bastion. Just a safe house without any mechanical benefit. The idea behind them, according to some of the promo videos they released, is to give the players a bit of a chance at some world building. They can decide what it looks like, what their NPCs personalities are like, what specific facilities are in there. It’s a little corner for the players to run. But just giving them a safe house can work, too.

As far as where, that will depend a lot on the party. I’d see if they end up maybe aligning with one of the factions, or at least act in a way that will make one of the factions willing to have the party in their territory. 

To be honest, they really should have left out the entire idea of bastions. All the DMG really needed on this was some base costs for structures, in case the characters ever decided to build, rent, or buy someplace and let the DM do the rest.

First edition had it where each character class upon reaching a certain level had a chance to attract some sort of follower and perhaps get a stronghold or tower - but let's face it, most games didn't use them because it didn't fit into all campaigns. There's nothing stopping a character of ANY level from renting a place and calling it home (or building something). All that was needed was some basic cost info to help inexperienced DMs to figure out how much such a thing would cost.

To go back to my original post - what bothers me is there's so much ink about the mechanics of it and almost *nothing* that's actual DM advice on how to integrate bastions organically into a campaign. It's basically one paragraph. Furthermore, in my opinion the mechanics are largely uninteresting fiddly stuff that neither I nor my players would be interested in tracking closely.

As I said previously we had great success using the tavern in Trollskull Alley in Waterdeep Dragon Heist, primarily as a role playing hub. Having a bit more structure around how to do that effectively without the campaign being explicitly written around having one (which Dragon Heist is), would have been neat! Instead it's pages of meh mechanical benefits and addition cognitive load for everyone.

Anyway I honestly didn't intend to turn this into a grumpy complaints thread. I'm mostly curious if and how others have had success with the new system as DMs. What worked, what didn't, specific examples, etc. I want to give all the 2024 stuff a chance before I dismiss it out of hand, and we're using the Planescape campaign as a way of trying this all out (Mainly with glitch mechanics of that campaign giving every player a chance to try out multiple classes under the new ruleset.)

Quote from DreadLordNerd >>

It's reminiscent of some of the more annoying aspects of 2nd Edition, and it seems extremely out of place in 5e. Also strange being in the DMG instead of the PH, and that it integrates with essentially nothing else in the book. Like one guy at WotC just really really wanted bastions so they let him write the chapter and then told him to go away.

To be fair it is in the DMG so that it can easily remain "optional" If it was part of the phb players would assume they would always get a bastion, and given how many people don't like it that would have been annoying. Besides I think the phb could have used a lot of stuff besides bastions and half the other things in the book.

My biggest complaint is that Bastions weren't included in the new OGL because I agree that what we've got is both very bare bones in terms of how to manage them and far too rules heavy, both problems that tend to get dealt with much better by third party publishers than by WotC themselves

The problem with bastions is that there are a couple of reasons people want their own home base... and bastions aren't designed to answer the interests of any of them.

1. For a lot of campaigns, it's useful to have a home base, but it's mostly "here's where we store our stuff and where people seeking help can come find us". To the degree this needs rules at all, it's advice for the DM for how to work it into the campaign, and possibly some discussion of what PCs can do to secure it against NPC adventures who figure that the PCs home seems like a lootable dungeon to them.
2. Some players just want a trophy. That means it should either be an adventure reward or a thing you buy, not an automatic grant, and its primary attribute is cosmetic -- say, put it on the same scale as magic item and describe the appearance and amenities of a common, uncommon, rare, very rare, or legendary home.
3. Some players want it as a social location -- they want to throw parties, host events, etc. This has mostly the same demands as (2), but could also get into the topic of coming up with high society.
4. Some players want to play empire builder. That's a really complicated topic worthy of its own supplement, and is honestly not something D&D is particularly designed to handle, but would still have to come with prices and the like.

Quote from Pantagruel666 >>

The problem with bastions is that there are a couple of reasons people want their own home base... and bastions aren't designed to answer the interests of any of them.

1. For a lot of campaigns, it's useful to have a home base, but it's mostly "here's where we store our stuff and where people seeking help can come find us". To the degree this needs rules at all, it's advice for the DM for how to work it into the campaign, and possibly some discussion of what PCs can do to secure it against NPC adventures who figure that the PCs home seems like a lootable dungeon to them.
2. Some players just want a trophy. That means it should either be an adventure reward or a thing you buy, not an automatic grant, and its primary attribute is cosmetic -- say, put it on the same scale as magic item and describe the appearance and amenities of a common, uncommon, rare, very rare, or legendary home.
3. Some players want it as a social location -- they want to throw parties, host events, etc. This has mostly the same demands as (2), but could also get into the topic of coming up with high society.
4. Some players want to play empire builder. That's a really complicated topic worthy of its own supplement, and is honestly not something D&D is particularly designed to handle, but would still have to come with prices and the like.

 But, it does do those things. 
Want to secure your place? Take the barracks special facility.

Want it to be a reward? Well, you discussed at session 0 that you’d be using a bastion, and conveniently there’s a bandit stronghold you take over at level 3 or 4 and start building up so it’s ready at 5.

Want it for society functions? The local mayor gives the party a run down mansion/farmstead/whatever, and they partycan fix up how they like.

Empire builder? The camp you establish on the edge of civilization starts growing when people hear about your push into untamed lands.

If you’re homebrewing, you just put it in how you like and how fits your campaign. As there are countless campaign premises out there, I don’t know how they could give more meaningful advice than they do. At some point, they just need to trust and allow DMs to be creative. Start giving more rules, and people will just complain about all the stuff they have to ignore/take out to make it work the way they want.

Personally, I think the issue comes with trying to fit it into a published campaign where it could possibly derail the story.

Quote from DreadLordNerd >>

To go back to my original post - what bothers me is there's so much ink about the mechanics of it and almost *nothing* that's actual DM advice on how to integrate bastions organically into a campaign.  

 Just to provide a counter-opinion, this is the least of my issues with the system. How your party comes to have a menagerie or run a theater are going to be so super-specific to your players and campaign that any kind of general advice would be useless IMO. I mean what would they even say? "Have the party stumble across NPCs in need of a home, roll a d10 to determine how they lost their previous home"?

I don't know if I'm in the majority or just lucky to fit the audience they're writing for, but all I want is mechanics. I will figure out how to mesh that system into my world on my own. I say that as a DM though - as a player I can see how it would be nice if the alternative is your DM just dropping it in the world and not ever making an effort to make it part of the world.

All that being said, I'm not wild about the mechanics either. In the current game I'm playing the bastion turns have become pretty tedious and by the time my bard-ish character got a theater I didn't really care about it anymore. I found MCDM's Strongholds system to be more compelling, flavorful, and interesting although I have never tried it in a game.