Curiosity: Demarcation between Personalizing and Homebrew

[Yaarel]

Probably the difference between ‘personalizing’ and ‘homebrewing’ is mechanics.

Using the monk class to represent a player character who wants to play a bear, is ‘personalizing’.

Changing monk mechanics in any way is ‘homebrewing’.




For me, the real ambiguity comes in with regard to magic items. DMs have much latitude to make up their own, and even official adventures make up new magic items.

 

[Bacon Bits]

Hopefully you guys get what I'm saying, but just in case I've been unclear, I'll give a brief example. Namely, my own campaign.

The campaign I'm designing is based in the world of Greyhawk (drop dead Greenwood! ). BUT - and this is a big but - it's set 100 years after the end of the Greyhawk Wars. Further, the Greyhawk Wars didn't end in the canonical way. There was no Treaty of Greyhawk. Rather, the large scale war so depleted the nations that it just kind of stopped via attrition of resources and soldiery. So while large scale warfare ceased, brush wars have continued on throughout the nations. This has led to the rise of a number of mud baronies and self-designated city-states. As a result of this, the larger nations of the Greyhawk world are intact, but there is ample room for a plethora of smaller kingdoms/states. Further, in the 100 years since the canonical end of the Greyhawk Wars, much of the leadership has changed and the Circle of Eight has pretty much ceased to exist.

If I were advertising this, I would call the campaign setting an alternate timeline Greyhawk set 100 years in it's future. I wouldn't muck about trying to define if it's homebrew or personalized/customized. Nobody is really interested in the semantics at that level; they're just interested in understanding what to expect from the campaign and you can't get that from a single term. All you're doing is deciding if the sea is blue or green.

Simply put, there's too much overlap between "customized Greyhawk" and "homebrew based on Greyhawk" for the distinction to be particularly meaningful. Everybody is going to interpret that distinction slightly differently regardless of the opinions here or how deeply you examine the nuance. No matter what you do you're going to have people showing up who think the setting is something that it isn't until you just give them the backstory that you're using.

That said, about twenty years ago I ran a campaign set before the Twin Cataclysms. (The PCs witnessed the Invoked Devastation and were tasked with helping to assemble the artifacts used to create the Rain of Colorless Fire.) I just called it a Greyhawk campaign, but it wasn't even set in the Flanaess. It took place in the Suloise Empire and the Baklunish Empire during the Great Migrations! I wish I still had my notes from that campaign.

 

[Lanefan]

It is, I think, possible to have a setting be homebrew and stock at the same time.

My own example, which I ran for quite some time: start with FR (the 1e gray box version) as a base. Then take everything north of Waterdeep and west of the Anauroch desert and redesign it pretty much from scratch as a homebrew, keeping a few of the place names but playing very fast and loose with their locations (Neverwinter, for example, was moved several hundred miles inland - the name was a local joke as winters there usually lasted half the year!). Then run the campaign mostly in that redesigned bit but with occasional forays out into pretty-much-stock FR e.g. Baldur's Gate.

Homebrew? Partly. Stock? Partly.

 

[Lanefan]

Probably the difference between ‘personalizing’ and ‘homebrewing’ is mechanics.

Using the monk class to represent a player character who wants to play a bear, is ‘personalizing’.

Changing monk mechanics in any way is ‘homebrewing’.




For me, the real ambiguity comes in with regard to magic items. DMs have much latitude to make up their own, and even official adventures make up new magic items.

We're talking about setting homebrewing here; your examples are rules homebrewing, a different thing.

A setting - maps, geography, (most) lore, cosmology, etc. - in and of itself is mechanics-rules neutral and can be designed first, after which some mechanics and rules get overlaid onto the setting to give it a different feel and flavour from the other settings.

Example: if you took, say, the Eberron rules-races-mechanics-etc. and overlaid them onto the Greyhawk setting your base setting is still Greyhawk. Same thing if I used the Golarion setting for a 5e game or for a game using our own modified 1e rules.

 

[Satyrn]

So, for you personally, at what point do changes to a setting go from "mere" personalization to hombrewing? Your response can include examples from your own setting, ideas based solely on theory, or whatever else. We're just chatting here!

Spoiler alert: I'm gonna use your setting for my response!

For me, if the description of the setting starts with "It's set in Greyhawk . . ." then no matter how many changes are made to it, no matter how big, that to me is a personalized setting.

But if you were to say "Well, my setting was originally based on Greyhawk, but . . . " even if you'd made a few small changes, it would be homebrew.

To me, your setting is personalized.

 

[Blue]

I think for me, the cutoff is geographical IP. If it involves a different landmass as the main setting, not using any other owned IP landmasses, then from that point, it's officially homebrew.

In truth, in keeping with the Theseus paradox, I recognize that there's always a range and there is no definitive dividing line, but if I had to choose, I'd choose there, just because when people usually say "homebrew" they're usually talking about whether they're using an existing campaign setting landmass or not. If they say "Dragonlance" or "Eberron" for instance, 9 times out of 10 they actually mean Krynn, or Khorvaire, etc. Even Matt Mercer's two streamed campaigns seem to follow suit, as he seems to call them his "Tal'dorei" campaign and his "Wildemount" Campaign, after the continents on which he set them.

Take a bunch of player familiar with Eberron and Forgotten Realms. Transplant FR names, politics, etc onto a map of Khovaire. No dragonmarks, no dragonmarked houses, no Last War, no warforged, no lightning rail or other magitech, no Draconic Prophesy and all that comes with it. They meet Elminister, Drizzt and deal with clerics of Mask and Bane, the Red Wizard of Thay. Then ask them what setting they are in.

I really doubt you'll find the majority will say they are playing in Eberron.

Calling a campaign after the area it's in is an easy thing to do. I ran a completely homebrew setting call the Chronicles of Errantas, named after the kingdom the group started in. But with the same map but different things filling it up it would have been a wholly different campaign regardless of the name.

 

[Yaarel]

We're talking about setting homebrewing here; your examples are rules homebrewing, a different thing.

A setting - maps, geography, (most) lore, cosmology, etc. - in and of itself is mechanics-rules neutral and can be designed first, after which some mechanics and rules get overlaid onto the setting to give it a different feel and flavour from the other settings.

Example: if you took, say, the Eberron rules-races-mechanics-etc. and overlaid them onto the Greyhawk setting your base setting is still Greyhawk. Same thing if I used the Golarion setting for a 5e game or for a game using our own modified 1e rules.

The same difference in mechanics applies to settings. If someone uses Eberron mechanics in Greyhawk, then that is homebrew. But if the DM has somekind of magical railway linking two towns in Greyhawk while avoiding mechanical changes to the setting, then that is personalization.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

Ask yourself a question: "If I took all of 'my world', put it in book format and published it...would I get sued?". If the answer is No, then it's homebrew. If the answer is Yes, then it's personalized.

In the OP's first post, I'd say his Greyhawk is, well, pretty much a normal GH campaign...personalized. I don't think I've actually ever heard of more than one single DM claim they run their GH "by the books". Hell, even EGG himself said the Greyhawk that was published wasn't the GH he was still DM'ing in. That's one of the beauties of GH, imnsho; you can have 100 different Greyhawk DM's, each would have changed at least a little bit...up to a LOT...and all DM's will still be able to talk to each other about their games with no (or very little) of the "poo-poo'ing" effect I see with certain other popular settings.

Huh. Yeah, I guess most of us Greyhawkers are old n' grey dogs quite happy to keep on chewing that old hunk of rawhide. I'm cool with that.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[Morrus]

I would hope that everyone would personalize their settings. I mean, no two settings should be absolutely identical. That would be tragic! But at the same time, there has to be a line somewhere between a setting that has been personalized for a particular campaign and a setting that has deviated enough from the source material that it has essentially become a homebrew setting, with perhaps only the names or maps from the original source material remaining intact.

Honestly, I've never really thought about it. I don't really categorise my settings.

 

[Laurefindel]

crude, but visual