Or, instead of twisting 5e into a different TTRPG, just play a different one better suited to your goals for the game
It’s more that this game doesn’t have enough content and variety. But it’s popular, it’s the zeitgeist, so it’s what you can get your players to play.
Most homebrew isn’t changing core rules. Just adding more variety. As long as the dragon race template runs in 5e rules, no problem. Balance will be harder be it’s not like core 5e is balanced anyways.
Precisely. 5e’s greatest strength is its’ simplicity. A player who’s never touched a TTRPG before will have a much easier time picking up 5e than a more niche system (although PF2e is definitely not bad on that front, 5e is just super simple and even has resources for absolute beginners)
But that simplicity is also 5e’s greatest weakness. Once you’re beyond the starting phase and understand how to play, then you realize how much stuff 5e is missing, you start noticing how some of the rules are oversimplified and unclear, and you REALLY notice how the game starts to get dysfunctional at levels 13 and above due to Quadratic Wizard and the fact that AC doesn’t keep up with hitrate.
But 5e at its’ core is a simple, robust system that’s dead easy to homebrew for. So covering that weakness (and being able to keep finding players for your games) is entirely within the realm of possibility. And hey, unlike trying to mod an actual game, if you decide that at all costs you want to play an Actual Dragon? Fuck it, we Homebrew.
5e’s greatest strength is its’ simplicity. A player who’s never touched a TTRPG before will have a much easier time picking up 5e than a more niche system (although PF2e is definitely not bad on that front, 5e is just super simple and even has resources for absolute beginners)
I don’t know what other games you’ve been playing, but while 5e is simple compared to other D&D editions and other big long-running systems, it’s significantly more complex and harder to pick up and start playing than the vast majority of indie TTRPGs, many of which have rulebooks with under 30 pages.
My experience with 5E hasn’t been that it’s all that simple, though. Bounded accuracy and advantage/disadvantage are great intro mechanics, of course, since they cut down on math at the table, but the number of poorly integrated subsystems, and rules with unaddressed edge cases just leaves things confusing, unpredictable, and unsatisfying far too frequently.
Lack of text to read isn’t the same thing as simplicity.
Exactly. The one major issue with homebrew for me are magic items. The game doesn’t define their power level much and it’s very difficult to understand how to create them at a balanced rate.
5e’s greatest strength is its’ simplicity.
Lol no. That is the last thing 5e has going for it.
D&D has traumatized a whole generation of table top players into thinking it’s easier to stay with it than change to any other system that takes a session to pick up to a level that d&d takes months to. It’s an abusive relationship.
That’s a good alternative, but sometimes the issue with picking a different game that is suited for that one thing is that you want your game to do more than one thing.
Every other time I pull a PbtA game I end up banging against the walls of the genre and walking into the barren uncodified void of “I dunno, I guess you just do it”.
So fuck it, we Homebrew!
For more complex games like what you’re describing, I’m a big fan of generic systems like Savage Worlds, where it’s intentionally made to potentially handle anything
I’m in the GURPS pipeline now. Dead simple or brain meltingly complex, or anything in between.
You can’t say that and not show your work to the class.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit?usp=sharing
Here you go. It’s still a work in progress, I’m trying to make something fairly tightly balanced and I want all the classes to be equally powerful (Linear Fighter Quadratic Wizard can suck it as a philosophy for a team game), but as you can imagine fully testing something of this size will take me quite some time.
its’
That has to be a new one.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit?usp=sharing
Most people don’t care, so I try not to force the matter. You asked, here you go. Still playtesting it and doing some rebalancing, but it should be reasonably good to play.
There are probably going to be a couple of overpowered things in there and it operates by throwing a couple of 5e design principles out of the window (For example the whole template is intentionally designed to be very Multi Stat Dependent, so it has a whopping +8 Racial ASI compared to the normal +3.)
