In the early writings about running Dungeons & Dragons, Gary Gygax and others suggested you create a base for the characters (the town) and a nearby dungeon (the dungeon) wherein the monsters guarded the treasure.
Over the years, I have done a lot of play based on that idea. And it is rare I detail the town to any great extent.
This the thing about a lot of DMing advice: it depends greatly on the individual group as to whether it works!
One ideal is to have a well-developed home base to engage the players when they are not on adventures – and to provide the players with quests for further adventures.
Often my campaigns are very quest-centric and don’t spend a lot of time at the home town. But I do, from time to time, use aspects of the base.
A Place to Shop
I have heard tales of players and DMs spending hours role-playing the conversations between adventurers and shopkeepers, haggling over the price of iron rations.
I cannot say that happens in my games. However, I do try to make some distinction about what items are available; not everything is available in one store, or even one town. This level of distinction most often applies to magic items.
Xanathar’s Guide to Everything has a set of guidelines on what items characters can get. If I have one suggestion – never allow a player to choose which permanent items are available. It is very, very easy to break the game if the players have free choice. Yes, you might think that giving the one human in the party goggles of night is fair, but in fact it is taking away the advantages of the other characters. How much should permanent magic items cost? More than the players can easily afford! Give them a reason to adventure.
When you are just starting a campaign, potions of healing are safe. They are even in the Player’s Handbook! And it is rare that you will break a campaign with consumables – especially potions. Spell scrolls are valuable to wizards and I would rarely make them obtainable in a shop – but allowing this every so often gives moments of joy and discovery.
You can highlight regional distinctions by limiting the types of weapons and armour available, though this is a bit tricky to implement. If you’ve got a travelling campaign, this may be desirable. In your regular campaign? Not so much.
I do like the idea of something like plate armour being imported and expensive, but if you go to where it is made, it is a lot cheaper. Find the Milan of your campaign world!
A Place to Hire
Who might the players want to hire in town? The standard answer is “mercenaries”, and in the early days of D&D, they were absolutely necessary. Especially for low-level groups, who advanced through the dungeon in formation. It was a very military-style game. If you have only got 3 hit points, you would prefer someone in good armour to stand in front of you!
The low-level men-at-arms became the “secondary characters” of henchmen later one. In 5E, they have become sidekicks, although we do not use them anywhere as much. Why not? Well, it is mostly because characters are a lot more complicated. You can easily run a fighter who can only make a single attack roll each turn. It is not so easy when they have combat manoeuvres and the like. (This is why DMs tend not to build NPCs using the PC generation rules – too much to keep track of!)
So, even while the sidekick is simpler than a PC, the main character still takes up most of a player’s attention. But for smaller parties, consider a man-at-arms or two to accompany you.
Who else could you hire? People to do services for you – alchemists, sages, builders, carters, artisans, priests, or lawyers.
Some of these are obvious and in response to actions in the adventure. If you find a monster or puzzle you cannot overcome, then it’s off to the sage for an answer (costing gold, of course!) Likewise, a poison or curse may need an alchemist or priest to overcome. Others are used when the players want to involve their characters in more of the fantasy world – purchasing buildings, engaging in trade, dealing with legal disputes, and so forth. Not that this occurs in most of my games, with the exception of the first, and that rarely.
But there are campaigns when the urban life and intrigues begin to dominate more.
A Place to be Hired
However, there’s an aspect of town life that predominates in my Dungeons & Dragons play: it is as a place where people come to the adventurers seeking their services.
While a few of these instance come from the iconic “You are in a tavern, and someone approaches you”, others come to characters… oh, I really don’t know where. People can find them. They develop a reputation. And so invitations to adventure come.
When I am firing on all cylinders, those invitations come from NPCs the party has already interacted with. Okay, yes, you will have the random farmer’s wife needs a pig rescued (never a plotline I have done!), but in those games where the urban campaign takes on a life of its own, the players get familiar patrons, or events the characters have set in motion dictate that the next quest comes from this NPC. Oh, they may not take it – but the offer is there.
And, of course, there are self-generated quests that are inspired by the characters and locations of the home base.
A lot of this doesn’t come easily to me. To properly support this, I should be taking more notes and doing more preparation than I am. But when everything works, the town outside the dungeon takes on a life of its own!