D&D 5E Aversion to Creativity?

[Minigiant]

Like I said before 50% of official and 75% of homebrew non-fluff material is poor quality..

 

[Bupp]

To be upfront, coming to this thread late I read the first several and last several pages, and skipped the middle...

I have a collection of Google Docs of all kinds of different stuff that I found that I like that I might want to use. Races. Class archetypes. Spells. Monsters. Alchemists. Psionics. Not to mention all the links to stuff that I haven't copied over to my Docs yet.

Where did I get all of these? Yes, some I converted from older editions. But the vast majority were found online. Enworld here has a great homebrew subforum that is full of great stuff. There are tons of blogs out there pumping out stuff. Google+ is full of different gaming groups where people share their creations. Is all of it gold? No, but there is a pile of quality stuff out there. Just start looking for it, and it's easy to find.

 

[Henry]

I feel sorry for you then. The fact that you will turn a blind eye to the work of a 3rd party publisher and just by rote call it "real" because they are so-called "professionals"... but can't do the same to your own work is a shame. Too many of us are blinded by authority to our detriment.

As I said, my main reason is time - but I still heavily disagree with your statement, even though the sentiment is well-meaning. People like Owen Stephens, Bill Webb, Ari Marmell, Wolfgang Baur, Rich Baker -- these people can, and do, write gaming adventures and supplementary material phenomenally better than 75% of gamers I know, myself included, and it's because they have experience at it, experience I don't have and am off doing VERY different things than they are. I would trust one of them to write better than me, for the same reason I'd trust my family member who's an artist to draw something on my behalf. I'd pay her to create something for me, just like I'd pay Owen Stephens if he had a dozen 5e feats to sell me in a 2 page PDF. She has the passion, the skill, and she put in the hours of prior experience.

Same thing with 3rd party products under an OGL or other license - I acknowledge their gaming material as better than mine because it IS BETTER! I further don't make any distinction between WotC and non-WotC - half those 3rd party people have produced material FOR D&D at WotC. It's great sentiment that "our homebrew is as good as their 3rd party stuff" but it just doesn't hold water.

And I submit if your homebrew is personally AS good as any D&D or 3rd party out there, I wanna see it! I'm in the market for material to read, buy, and play, chances willing. i'm already backing Russ' Patreon, I'm pre-ordering Elemental Evil, and I just bought a DM screen, Heaven Help me, because I wanted to support my FLGS, and because of wishful thinking that I can find a 5e campaign near me, because a handful of people are playing it - my local store that ran Dragon Queen AL last year isn't even running Elemental Evil AL this time, I'm guessing no interest - they'd rather use the space for Magic The Gathering.