As Editions progress, are homebrews...

[EATherrian]

I was just wondering... as editions progress, are you finding it more difficult to create your own settings and forge your own path, or have the new editions been making it easier to come up with your own content?

The truth is this has made me look at my home-brew and wonder if this is the time for a change. My world is nearing 20 years old, and there is a lot of stuff there that I'm not sure are going to work with the new edition. The simplest ones is that gnomes are not PCs for awhile, that's fine because I'll still have the NPCs. Some of the more complex ones are how alignment is going to work or if it will exist. Cosmic evil plays a large part in my world, and the division between good and evil is sharp. This is not a gray world, mostly because I enjoy heroic fantasy more than gritty for the world I run. I was surprised to find that I can place both the Tieflings and Dragonborn if they are indeed included without much work. In fact I've already come up with some really good backstories for those races. All in all, I can keep my world going with some work, but it might be a good opportunity to change.

 

[The Little Raven]

The truth is this has made me look at my home-brew and wonder if this is the time for a change. My world is nearing 20 years old, and there is a lot of stuff there that I'm not sure are going to work with the new edition.

I'm in the same boat, except I look at some things I wrote 5-8 years ago and now think "What was I smoking to think that was cool?"

The simplest ones is that gnomes are not PCs for awhile, that's fine because I'll still have the NPCs.

Do you not expect to buy the Monster Manual? It has been clearly stated that gnomes will be in the MM as both a monster and a race.

 

[EATherrian]

I'm in the same boat, except I look at some things I wrote 5-8 years ago and now think "What was I smoking to think that was cool?"

Trust me, we've all done this. I'm not allowed to work on my world less than 2 months after reading a new book for that very reason. Dragon Knights *shudder*

Do you not expect to buy the Monster Manual? It has been clearly stated that gnomes will be in the MM as both a monster and a race.

I'm still not clear on whether the races will have leveled abilities and whether the ones in the Monster Manual will also have this. Mostly I'm saying I'm glad I can use them, if I can use them like the other races I'll be ecstatic, but I haven't heard enough to know if that will be the case yet. Not really a negative point, more of a I-don't-know-yet point.

 

[Keldryn]

I very much agree with BryonD.

As I see it, there are two kinds of core fluff:

1) The kind that needs non-intrusive editing. This includes things like the Greyhawk gods in 3e, the Bigby spells, etc. Renaming them or dropping them has serious ramifications for dealing with my players. If they know what "Bigby's Crushing Hand" is, they'll know what "Crushing Hand" is. All of these fixed by either not using the thing, completely replacing it, or a trivial renaming.

Is this because of the nature of the changes, or is it more because we're all used to making those changes for all non-Greyhawk campaigns that we've been playing for 25+ years? There are plenty of spells or magic items that have names that are based on creatures or concepts which may not exist in a given world.

I don't think it would take that long to write up a short table of feat that the PHB calls "Golden Wyvern Adept" and that in my campaign would be called "Shape Spell" and so forth. The Spell Compendium has such a list of spells that were renamed before inclusion in that tome.

 

[The Little Raven]

I'm still not clear on whether the races will have leveled abilities and whether the ones in the Monster Manual will also have this. Mostly I'm saying I'm glad I can use them, if I can use them like the other races I'll be ecstatic, but I haven't heard enough to know if that will be the case yet. Not really a negative point, more of a I-don't-know-yet point.

Well, they've stated that there will be a "Monsters as Races" appendix with a number of the more-favored monsters having full racial writeups, and they've said that the gnome is on that list. So, hopefully that's a comfort to you.

 

[EATherrian]

Well, they've stated that there will be a "Monsters as Races" appendix with a number of the more-favored monsters having full racial writeups, and they've said that the gnome is on that list. So, hopefully that's a comfort to you.

I had seen that, I just wasn't sure it would be as complete as the races in the PHB would be. I hope your reading is indeed the correct one.

 

[Xethreau]

What if, in 3e, I want to play a home-brew game with magic based on the Fire Emblem magic system? If I do that, then perhaps clerics might be ok, but I would have to completely rebuild wizards if I wanted to use them. "Just have them all be Evokers?" Why, when arcane magic relies almost completely on Fire, Wind, Ice, and Lightning, should all 'mage' types be 'specialists', when there is nothing special about them? Use a Wu-Jin? Ewww, don't even say that! The flavor of a wizard is near enough, but the reworking of flavor and some class features of a Wu Jin might just be a great deal more work.

As hypothetical as that situation is, it is still relevant, because that is shows that YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE TO REFLAVOR WHEN YOU MAKE A HOME BREW SETTING. Isn't that the point of homebrew? What edition you make it in matters very little.

 

[Kesh]

I've been rewriting my homebrew for a few years now, to get it where I want it. 4e will make me throw out a few things, tweak some others, and add a bunch of other stuff. In the end, I think it'll be a better fit for what I was trying to achieve than 3e was.

Like others, I'm seriously considering going full "Points of Light" for my campaign, rather than sketching out the whole continent. My homebrew was always focused on one city-state anyway, so this is as good an excuse as any to just focus on that and leave the rest of the world unexplored… until the PCs want to wander, anyway.

 

[Mercule]

I'm pretty anti-Christmas tree and always have been. Regardless of default assumptions, I found the flavor I wanted easier to maintain in 1E and the early years of 2E (I switched to Hero and WoD about '93, so the Players' Options, etc. books were outside my experience) than I do in 3.x.

In 3.x, the rules are much more intricately intertwined and I quickly found myself having to comply with the recommended treasure listings or encounters were a pain in the butt to gauge.

 

[Nikosandros]

I had seen that, I just wasn't sure it would be as complete as the races in the PHB would be. I hope your reading is indeed the correct one.

That's what I was wondering as well. Will the playable races presented in the MM have the same amount of info as the ones in the PHB? Namely, will they have a set of race specific feats?