Homebrew Heuristics: The End of the World as We Know It.

I’ve made a bit of a thing out of making custom rules for D&D, so I figure I might share my own rules of thumb and my own guidelines for modding my 4e games in hopes to help you easily build your own.  My hope is to inspire and empower those feeling a little constricted by the rules to make the system their own.

This is a five-part series on solutions to problems you might have in your game.  You might want to represent something in 4e and have no idea how to do it. You want to make a 4e world that strays from typical models, and have gotten to the limits of what re-skinning can do for you.

Welcome to the lands of homebrew!

Stop Trying out for the WotC design team

You’d think I’d take my own advice, right?

But listen, when I put something on the site I’m trying to share it with you. The more idiosyncratic I make my stuff the harder it is for you to use. That’s no fun.

What I use for my personal games might be way out of spec.  If I’m particularly hopped up on drugs at the moment, I might make something hilariously out of spec.

When you make something for your game, you’ve got to think about the your game, and what it needs. Nothing else matters, especially not standardized 4e.

Trying to make something that feels and looks like something ripped right out of a D&D book is going to kill you as you build your standard 4e game.  Depending on what you change, there’s a pretty tight ecosystem of rules whose balance you can upset, causing you to make more corrective changes and then even more, until the whole affair resembles a lady swallowing a spider to catch a fly and the hilarity that then ensues.

Even if you do this well, is it worth the effort?  Are you getting rules that work for your story?  I’ll tell you, if you want to make dear old Stormbringer for your 4e game, trying to design it to official WotC standards…is going to hurt.  Same for the One Ring, or Excalibur.  Same for, well, a lot of things in fantasy literature and movies.  There’s a ton of stuff 4e can model well, but we’re focusing on the gaps because that’s what homebrew rules are all about.

So, here’s a secret: that really out there stuff you really want to see in your game?   WotC isn’t going to make it! They don’t put out crazy stuff because they have to build things for all their players — WotC needs to design the standards the game is built on.

But you and I aren’t WotC!  It’s ok that I build something in my game like:

You know why I can do that?  It’s my game that I run.  WotC doesn’t have a rules ninja that it sends out to assassinate wayward GMs, so you’re greenlighted to build what is important for your story.  It doesn’t have to look like something out of the PHB unless you want it to.

Before we go any further, I need you to internalize that.  If you don’t, you’ll sprevent yourself from making the best stuff for your games.

Four principles for 4e.

What do these mean?  I don’t know, you’ll have to keep reading! In the meantime, tell me what you want to know about!

What problems are you having building items or rules for your 4e game?  Use the contact page or leave a comment and let’s chat.

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•      Trouble Getting Started? The Answer is a Question