Roleplaying Games

Musings of a Dungeon Master #2: Why Home Brew is Killing Your Games

And why it’s okay to do things by the book.

Let me begin with a quick lesson in herbal medicine. Digitalis (also known as the Foxglove) is a plant most well known for being extremely poisonous. But in small doses it can help a failing heart beat stronger.

Home brew content is very similar to Digitalis. Small doses can help a game hit its stride and fill in the weak spots of a system or setting. However, administer too much and you will end up with a bloated and clunky mess of a game.

Now before you come at me, waving your pitchforks, screaming that your home brew setting is fantastic and that I am a fool, I ask you for a moment of patience.

The first time I ran a game in D&D 5e I used my own home brew setting, changed the races and added class features, and for the most part it worked quite well. However one of the main reasons it worked was because I kept within the limitations of the 5e system.

A friend approached me several years ago asking for my thoughts on his attempt to fit the Mistborn setting into the 5e system; I wanted to find something positive to say as I scanned the pages of content he had made, and in all honesty I didn’t have much to say. It was clunky, impossible to remember and wildly imbalanced. The proof was indeed in the pudding when a level 2 character in that game was able to hit 30+AC, making them functionally impossible to hit in combat.

I have fallen to the hubris that many Dungeon Masters suffer. Whilst planning my Eberron campaign I spent countless hours trying to rework the inspiration system, changing resurrection, and even wrote a list of banned spells that was mostly based on the fact that I was sick of seeing them (Shield and Polymorph come to mind). In the end one of the players had a gentle word in my ear that I was adding so much crunch to the system that all I was really doing was limiting the fun the players could have. I deleted the entire document and had a rethink, and after several mugs of strong coffee I came to the realisation that if I wanted the characters to perform acts of heroism, I just had to give them the tools in the form of how I set up scenes.

Many examples of overusing home brew rules come from using the wrong system in the first place. D&D 5e is a very good system for exploring dungeons and the wilderness around them. It has great rules for combat and very limiting advice on how to handle social interactions. Shadowrun is a great system for running short bursts of action with role play in between, but wouldn’t be the best system for a stone age game where rival tribes compete for hunting grounds. Understanding what system to use can save hours of trying to brute force a setting into the wrong rule book and is a fantastic antidote for the poison of home brew.

Many of the people reading this will be familiar with the Powered by the Apocalypse system and its endless flexibility. The main reason the system is so flexible is because there isn’t much of a system there in the first place. 5 skills cover most of what you need to do within any average game, so it’s great for improv style games with a focus on the role play. There are also options like Fate or GURPS that allow you to build a system from the ground up, but that should probably be recommended for people familiar with building systems and settings in order to get the most out of those books.

My advice to all the aspiring Dungeon Masters out there is to keep your changes light, but always feel free to have little house rules that help your table’s issues. If you sit down and try to work out how to force in deadly combat as an option I suggest you just find a different system. Dark Heresy or Zweihander are famed for their deadly combat and they are no lighter in social interactions than 5e. If you do insist on adding things to your D&D game, especially regarding classes and races, my recommendation is that you look to older editions and make them compatible. Dhampir being unavailable as an official 5e race breaks my heart every day, but in the right game ripping the stats from Pathfinder 1e is probably a very manageable task.

I hope this musing can help out those of you that can’t work out why your game isn’t that fun despite all the shiny bells and whistles you have glued on (and if you are playing in one of those games just leave this on your Dungeon Master’s desk in secret). Please let me know in the comments about your own experiences, especially if you think I am a buffoon.