Homebrew Missteps

[MrStabby]

I am a big fan of homebrew. I think it adds a lot of flavor, helps characters feel unique and can tie PCs to the setting in a cool way. Its also risky. Whilst I like to think I am a pretty decent judge of balance there ae always some risks of missteps. I thought it might be fun for people to throw in som of their own examples/stories.

My latest one was a PC in D&D 5e wanting to play a cleric of Waukeen. I brewed up something. I think the cleric domain was broadly fine (the cleric domains are so tightly structured you have to be quite reckless to go to far wrong.

The problem was the spells. Or specifically one spell, and a spell I had thought totally safe.



Waukeen's Credit

Level 2 conjuraton spell

You hold some coins in your hand as you cast the spell. You name a recipient whose name you know and if hey are on the same plane those coins apear on their posession with a note saying who sent them.



I thought giving clerics of Waukeen a spell to enable long range commerce would be cool. The ability to make payments seemed in keeping and I felt it was a nice addition to the world.

PCs can't have nice things anymore.


Of course in retrospect some of his was obvious. No more sending spells with their word limit (there was still a role for a return message). Any message you could carve on a coin could be sent any distance for a level 2 spell slot. Locate object is awesome when you can find people with it by planting a known coin on them. If you want people to teleport to you you can aid them by sending an object from the destination... as I discovered. Or stick a magic mouth spell on a coin and teleport it onto an enemy and they cannot sneak up on you. Then the PCs decided to launch an ambush. Cast darkness and magic mouth on a coin, add a dab of sovereign glue (OK, my fault for leting them get this) and then sticking it to a person. Coin started shouting as they crossed the bridge, they reached in to their bag to find the source of the noise. Darkness spilled out but they still grabbed the coin... which was now stuck to both their saddlebags and their gauntlet. Whist they were still thoroughy distracted surrounded by darkness and with only one free hand the party attacked and made short work of them.

It was fun, and honestly I would have minded more if it wasn't everyone paricipating - but it kind of derailed a bunch of sessions and ended a campaign a bit early.

Always spcify a willing creature if it maes sense to. 5E designers mostly got that right - missing it was a bit foolish of me.

[NichG]

This was a funny one... I made rules for inventing and constructing vehicles. I also made rules for crashes and the splash damage caused by crashes at different speeds. Vehicles became far more useful as hypersonic missiles than as vehicles.

[King of Nowhere]

I think there are two major rules for homebrewing:

1) don't be afraid to try things.
some people may want to wait until they are more experienced. but you are never enough experienced. the people who did design the game have a whole job career as game designers, with decades of experience, and look at the imbalanced mess they made.

2) don't be afraid to fix mistakes.
of course, you'll always do something wrong when homebrewing. when that happens, recognize you did something too overpowered, and tone it down.

I may also add another
3) don't trust internet forums.
your homebrew must work at YOUR table. every table has some unique balances, and what works at one won't work at another. a lot of people on the internet start on common assumptions that got ingrained in internet forums, but that don't describe many real tables.
my biggest mistake in homebrewing came from following internet wisdom, namely that two weapon fighting is underpowered if you don't have some source of precision damage. I allowed a character with 4 arms with the caveat that he would not take precision damage, thinking that a twf fighter sucks, but with 4 weapons it would be balanced. i didn't consider that a bunch of unique conditions relative to my campaign - like the fact that money was super plentyful, so it was easy to get 4 +5 wounding collision scimitars and fully compensate the low damage - already made twf a very good option for fighters in the first place. it ended up with the player, in a level 20 d&d 3.5 campaign, dealing 900 damage in a single round to a creature with AC 56 - without even considering the wounding effect.
which is another reason why rule 1 is so important. trying to learn from others, to get advice, it does not work. you get the wrong advice. the only way to learn what works for your games is to homebrew for your games.

[Quertus]

MY biggest missteps were usually "trying to explain it to other people". Like, they just couldn't get the idea that a 5/10 casting prestige class was bad, or that creating a 5/10 casting prestige class that technically *almost* kept up with taking straight <caster> levels by, say, giving them <lost highest end spell level> (ie, if you were 2 full spell levels behind, casting 5ths instead of 7ths, that would be "2") free levels of metamagic to a very narrow range of spells (like, say, single-target ice spells) wasn't horribly broken OP. Sigh.

[glass]

I am a big fan of homebrew. I think it adds a lot of flavor, helps characters feel unique and can tie PCs to the setting in a cool way. Its also risky. Whilst I like to think I am a pretty decent judge of balance there ae always some risks of missteps. I thought it might be fun for people to throw in som of their own examples/stories.

One recent example springs to mind, but I'll get to that at the end of the post. In the meantime I wanted to comment on a couple of things in other people's first (starting with the OP's)....

Waukeen's Credit

Are you interested in finding ways to fix it (assuming you haven't already)? Because it occurs to me that if coins in the same denominations/materials/value appeared in the target's hand but not the exact same coins, that would preserve the intended use-case while eliminating most (all?) of the abuses. The coins could go to/from Waukeen's treasury.

MY biggest missteps were usually "trying to explain it to other people". Like, they just couldn't get the idea that a 5/10 casting prestige class was bad, or that creating a 5/10 casting prestige class that technically *almost* kept up with taking straight <caster> levels by, say, giving them <lost highest end spell level> (ie, if you were 2 full spell levels behind, casting 5ths instead of 7ths, that would be "2") free levels of metamagic to a very narrow range of spells (like, say, single-target ice spells) wasn't horribly broken OP. Sigh.

Way to humblebrag!

More seriously, it might have been edging towards broken if there was some way to make up those missing levels of casting but still keep the free metamagic, but that is a pretty niche concern.

---

Anyway, recently I designed a class for PF1 called the Dreadnought which was basically a heavily-arnoured fighter type, but much simpler than the PF1 fighter to build (fixed features with very limited choice). It also strongly encouraged single-attacks over full-attacking, both because it saves table time and because movement in combat can be interesting without being complicated. It's an idea I've had for a while, but the impetus for finally writing it up was a new campaign starting where it would be just what one of the other (more casual) players was looking for (it was a gestalt game so he had another class to keep track of too - both needed to be as simple as possible.

Because it lacked choices, the optimisation floor and ceiling should in theory be pretty close together (and fairly high). The first draft somehow managed to fail that in both directions! When I rechecked the numbers, the single attack did not at all keep up on damage as levels increased.

But conversely, while the specific build of that character would have been fine, when paired with other classes it got way out there. Part of how it worked was free class-based ability score boosts, which means a Dreadnought//Barbarian could ignore the big single attack (unless they wanted to move anyway) and do even more damage with their raging full attack than normal. Even worse, my character could have swapped out one of his classes for it and it would have made him a stronger caster even if he never touched a weapon and ignored the armour-related abilities altogether. Worse still would be paired with a full caster who does care about weapons and/or armour, like a cleric or druid.

The second draft was hopefully a lot better!

[Mastikator]

3) don't trust internet forums.

*rolls insight check* .... 3

I can't decide if I should trust you or not. Oh no... the paradox is killing me.. aaagh

[GloatingSwine]

This was a funny one... I made rules for inventing and constructing vehicles. I also made rules for crashes and the splash damage caused by crashes at different speeds. Vehicles became far more useful as hypersonic missiles than as vehicles.

Always someone is learning the Kzinti Lesson.

[Quertus]

I just noticed that this was posted in the general "Roleplaying" forum, rather than the 3e forum. Which means I have a lot more kinds of homebrew issues than just perception problems.

Let's see... what might I be able to make sense of, especially if I put it in more 3e parlance? Oh, I know:

I made a homebrew Magic the Gathering class that was intended to play exactly like the card game. In a system that didn't follow that tempo. This led to 3 distinct playstyles:

1. Fill your deck with 1-drops; spam them as quickly as possible, winning action economy.
2. Fill your deck with (land and) late-game bombs. When combat starts, get the entire party to run away; build up mana (land drops) while you run.
3. Forget about combat (rely on things outside your class to win a "participation ribbon"), stock up on out-of-combat spells to use when there (usually) isn't a time crunch.
4. Spanish Inquisition Special: Build a deck that can "go infinite", then add whatever tech you want after that (scrye and fry, teleport through time, animate dead, angel summoning, anything).

Also, does "the GM and I worked together to homebrew a 'Sentient Potted Plant' (in a system where that amounted to rules almost as simple as [Inhuman], [Can't Move], [Can't Act])" count for this thread?

[Lord Torath]

Waukeen's Credit<snip>

Always spcify a willing creature if it maes sense to. 5E designers mostly got that right - missing it was a bit foolish of me.

Or require standard, non-magical, non-modified coins. Dented and scraped from normal use? Fine. Message carved on it? Nope! Spell won't work. Carefully dented in a particular pattern by precision-dropping daggers on it? Nice try. Magic Mouth (or any other spell) on the coin? Yeah. "No." The intent is to use it for commerce. If your goal is not commerce, Waukeen won't permit you to abuse her spell.

I don't think I've had any homebrew come back to bite me in the butt, but that's probably because my game simply didn't last long enough.

[Jay R]

Waukeen's Credit

This spell is fine if it *only* sends credit. It's not a teleport spell; it's a creation spell. The coins in your hand are a material component, and are gone forever. Meanwhile, equivalent coins are created elsewhere. That created coin has no magic or message.

Of course, you could still create a code, and send a coded message -- if you knew in advance what messages you might want to send. Send the castle 17 copper pieces to tell them that the invading army will arrive in 17 days. Then send 3 coppers, 4 silver, and one gold piece to tell them that it's 300 goblins, 400 hobgoblins, and 100 bugbears. But this requires having the code worked out in advance.

---

The alternative is to figure out what people do to defend against the current spell. I'd have an agreement with a merchant across the ocean to trade coins each day, using the same spell. Now the locate object spell points to another continent. I would also automatically use detect magic on all coins sent to me. Or those coins get spent first. If that spell exists, people will learn to defend against it, just like they learned to block sword shots as soon as somebody invented swords.

[Kane0]

Over my time my biggest mistakes were usually copying too closely to existing stuff, honing too finely on a single thing and/or excluding flavor to focus purely on the mechanics.

[King of Nowhere]

*rolls insight check* .... 3

I can't decide if I should trust you or not. Oh no... the paradox is killing me.. aaagh

on the other hand, if you do trust me, you must not trust internet forums. if you do not trust me, then you clearly are not trusting internet forums. so, paradox solved either way

[Vahnavoi]

Most old-school D&D-like games have a rule that limits XP gained, and thus levels gained, from a single expedition. I once removed such a rule to speed up character advancement in the early game. This was fine, in isolation.

I also had elaborate homebrewed treasure charts. Some of these could generate tens of thousands of gold coins as part of treasure, leading to tens of thousands of experience points. This was fine, in isolation.

So, once, I switched editions of a game in the middle of a campaign. This involved the game system moving from gold to silver standard, experience point rules included. This meant the next treasure of gold coins ended up 50 times more valuable than previously, which, in combination with the first change, caused the player characters who found it to shoot past several levels. Oopsie.

In the same campaign, rules for animating dead monsters were vague on which kind of special abilities undead could have. The rule was something like, for every caster level in excess of the hit dice of the re-animated monster, the resulting undead creature can have one special ability. Since there was no accompanying complete list, I allowed purchasing of spell effects to this end. Cue herds of zombie cows radiating mass invisibility and mass silence. My players were very good at milking this for all its worth.

[Duff]

cows

milking

I see what you did there.

But more seriously, the key is for the whole table to be willing to try stuff and see if it works, and to adapt as needed. Dial it back if needed, boost it a bit of as in OP, remember all coins are equal

[Kurald Galain]

Not so much a misstep but an intentional design...

I once homebrewed a spell system where summoning a lesser demon was a second-level spell... but the warding circle that you should summon the demon into was a third-level spell. If an inexperienced spellcaster summons a demon that he didn't ward himself against... well, that's entirely what the demons want, isn't it?

on the other hand, if you do trust me, you must not trust internet forums. if you do not trust me, then you clearly are not trusting internet forums. so, paradox solved either way

Yeah, but what if I don't trust you enough to believe that you lied?