I got to read Dungeons and Dragons brand-new 2024 DM’s Guide early, and I spotted one glaring omission from the ultimate Dungeon Master’s compendium. No, it wasn’t a key piece of advice on running D&D campaigns. No, it wasn’t the recommended 6-8 combat encounters per day (though that is gone too). Wizards of the Coast has removed a single feature from its Bastions chapter – bathrooms.
DnD Bastions did have washrooms in their earlier playtest rules. Granted, these were ‘basic facilities’ that offered no mechanical benefit, but they were as important as kitchens and bedrooms for facilitating immersive roleplay. Somewhere between then and the final draft, bathrooms were axed from Bastions. Considering all other basic facilities made the cut, I’m not sure what bathrooms did to anger the DnD gods.
This continues a long-running grudge that Dungeons and Dragons seems to have against rooms that feature toilets. Case in point: many minor buildings in DnD campaigns feature washrooms, but the tabletop RPG’s most famous buildings often omit them.
Curse of Strahd is one of the most egregious offenders, despite the fact it has the most mentions of bathrooms of any Dungeons and Dragons campaign. If you need to pee, you’re well equipped to do so anywhere between Death House and Vallaki.
But when it comes to Castle Ravenloft, the setting’s largest and most elaborate map, you’re sh** out of luck. Not a single toilet in sight. Everybody poops, but apparently Strahd von Zarovich doesn’t.
Tasha the Witch Queen never seems to need the little girl’s room, either. The recent adventure anthology Quests from the Infinite Staircase gave us a detailed look at Igwilv’s cavernous lair, and toilets are once again absent. While it’s much harder to install plumbing in an underground cave than in a man-made castle, we’d still expect Tasha to have somewhere to perform her demonic ablutions.
Things get a little better for Tasha in Vecna: Eve of Ruin, where she stays in the sanctum of Alustriel Silverhand. The map doesn’t specifically mention any bathrooms, but we can see some tiny illustrations of sinks in Alustriel’s guest bedrooms. Presumably, Tasha pops by whenever she’s starting to stink.
This map is likely the key to solving D&D’s bathroom-based mystery. It’s plausible that Wizards of the Coast has (correctly) assumed that most adventuring isn’t done while your characters are on the toilet. (Unless you’re in my adventuring party, of course, where last session our Artificer painstakingly researched ways to turn piss into gunpowder.)
Any bathroom included in a hex-based map is there for flavor rather than any real purpose. It stands to reason, then, that they don’t need mentioning too often – if a bathroom is needed, players can assume that one is available.
Perhaps a chamber pot is conveniently stashed under a nearby bed, or a convenient demiplane can be summoned to fulfil the same purpose. Heck, if you can afford to craft a rare DnD magic item, you could turn the Portable Hole into your own personal port-a-potty. Do with that mental image what you will.
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Source: Wargamer
