Worldbuilding More Interesting Deities in 5e

The gods in DM Quest (watch episodes here!) play a big part in the narrative of our campaign. Jasper is a divine soul of the Treefather, Dakren found solace from his demonic pact in the goddess Tonna, Shaz is a war champion of Tual'dir, and Hargus the bard has a... complicated past with Bancotha, the goddess of death. We use the rules for piety as found in Mythic Odysseys of Theros, and the extra abilities we've gotten from our relationships with the gods have created some of the most memorable roleplaying experiences in all of my time playing D&D.

However, there have been some moments I thought detracted from our gameplay experience—mostly involving non-cleric players saying a prayer to a god and getting amazing boons for very little work, or multiplying the number of days of downtime by the number of times the character could cast commune to basically divine the answer to absolutely any puzzle in the game.

Just as Superman is the least interesting superhero because he has all the powers and only one easily-avoidable weakness, gods who know everything and are always waiting on their followers' every need to give them whatever they ask are boring. Interesting stories come from interesting choices and from creatively dealing with constraints and challenges, and it doesn't make sense that a being with as high of an existence as a god would play such an intimate part in mortals' quests and questions.

Instead of making gods all-encompassing in their influence over mortal affairs, consider juggling the following godly attributes for each deity: omnipotent (all-powerful), omniscient (all-knowing), and omnibenevolent (all-caring). Only picking one of them will make for a much more interesting god for your religious player characters to interact with.

Better 5e Bastion Facility Boons

As discussed in my last post, the new Bastion system is inspiring, but its reward system (and a few fundamental systems) lacks a clear motivation for players to utilize it: Harvesting ten floral bouquets worth 5 gp each? Recruiting guild members to make fifty barrels of ale worth 10 gp each? Crafting some sovereign glue for 100,000 gp?!

I'm confident that the roleplaying and story-focused aspects of Bastions will be taken care of automatically by the players themselves. What players and DMs need in an established system are facilities that provide useful, mechanical rewards they can award players with. Each benefit should be be temporary, consumable, or incremental, and should have a cost of some kind. I put a special emphasis on spending gold. Players get treasure all the time and never have anything to spend it on but magic items! Why not buildings that give them lasting benefits on their future adventures?