D&D 5E Does your group allow homebrew or 3PP material?

[CapnZapp]

That's actually a very good point. I should have gone with something more ridiculous, like vampires and lycanthropes in the same setting! Can you imagine that?

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[Xethreau]

I've never been comfortable with the limits of the "core" game. I adore splatbooks and I am a voracious reader of homebrew boards. This works wonderfully, since I mostly DM.
When I have a casual player, I ask them what they want to play--and refluff what I can, and scour tomes/homebrew for the rest. For an advanced player, I ask if they are interested in playtesting a class!

 

[Ilbranteloth]

I've always had a lot of home-brew stuff. Some of it to address what I see as shortcomings or missing rules, with my goal focused on making the rules support the types of scenes that I want to model, rather than the potential scenes being a function of the rules. For example, in D&D as written, there really isn't anything as a plague or poisoning the king (both can be cured by any number of characters capable of 2nd level spells). The opening scene of several published adventures with an NPC "to injured to help or fix the problem themselves" which could also be corrected by a simple heal spell. "Nah, we're not interested, here, do it yourself."
Or "You're good, but I know something that you do not...I am not left-handed."

I also like the way magic is often depicted in the novels (such as Danilo Thann miscasting spells he's still learning), so my magic rules allow for the possibility of spells you're learning not working, in addition to other circumstances that might make a spell not function as planned.

Others are problems with things like Superiority Dice and Maneuvers for the fighter. "Oh, tripping that guy to send him into the ravine would be so awesome, but I've already used my maneuvers and can't remember how to do that until I can rest for an hour." I have no problem with something like a magical power being limited, as your well of magical power might be tapped, but for a maneuver that you just learn? Doesn't work for me.

The rest of them are to pull things together to fit my version of the Forgotten Realms. It's much closer to the AD&D Realms, although there's certainly my stamp on it, with a lot of leaning on Tolkien for feel.

One of the things that I really liked about 2e were that the rules were modified to fit specific campaign worlds. That started to change in 3/3.5e, and 4e drastically homogenized things. So my magic system is tweaked, healing, armor, etc.

I admit that like Morrus and others, part of the fun for me is tweaking things. And I also readily admit that most of my players probably don't really care about it as much as I do.

I will also borrow liberally from any source, WotC or 3PP. Probably not quite as much as I used to, since I don't have the gaming library or budget that I used to. But I will go through 3PP and online home-brew stuff when I have the opportunity to check for ideas. I don't usually use them as-is, but it often helps me figure out how to address something (or points out something else that I now want to tweak).

My current home-brew rules book is 87 pages long, although in some cases (like Combat) I've combined my home-brew into the original text of the PHB to make it work as a complete whole. Rules that only need an occasional look, like races or classes, are just the updates. This is much, much shorter than my 1e/2e book which was a compilation/rewrite of loads of material from Dragon magazine, 3PP and the ever expanding rules of the Complete series of supplements, etc.

 

[AnimeSniper]

[MENTION=6778044]Ilbranteloth[/MENTION] I agree that Homebrew and houserules often fills the gap that as a DM and player I feel makes the game better and easier to play... for example heralding back to D20 Modern there were no rules for belt-fed chain-linked machine guns like the say the M2HB so I came up with a few using a mix of dice that denoted the number of seconds for each trigger pull and another set for how many hit the target.

I also came up with some rules for the uber-future armors in D20 Future to denote how much HP per Inch the armor gave similar to earlier hardness and HP in earlier editions

Also rules for where a bullet would strike and the chances of a fatal wound or loss of limbs depending on the munitions caliber... anything above fifty caliber and you were a bloody paste

 

[Wrathamon]

game I am currently in doesn't allow anything but the PHB

 

[Henry]

You forgot a few... like Mystara and Ravenloft. I mean, I'm sure there are more, but that's getting into stuff that basically no one has ever heard of.

I suspect ever since House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula in the 1940s; once that Chocolate was dropped in that Peanut Butter there was no going back.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

Seriously though, do you disallow core classes or races? I originally had homebrew races back when I was playing B/X, but when I converted to 5e it got too complicated to disallow PHB races and classes. So for my new campaign, it was far easier to just make the PHB available for everyone to pick from, even if in my world there are literally only a handful of elves left, and they're mostly remembered as cruel, psychopathic overlords.

Yep, I do.

I started running a public game and basically allowed anything, but told the players that I was not a fan of things like Dragonborn or Tieflings (at least as they are written now). But I had decided that since I was running a public campaign I'd run a more open campaign even though it didn't entirely mesh with my ongoing home campaigns. So of course I not only had a dragonborn monk, but a warforged character as well, which just doesn't fit into my version of the Forgotten Realms that I've been running since '87.

So the new campaign is starting in a small village (Parnast, actually, but it's quite a bit different than the tiny group of buildings in HotDQ), and I require all players to roll up three characters, since it operates as a home-base type of thing so we can play with whichever players show up each week. In this case, one of the characters are required to be human (they make up 85% of the population in town), one can be human or halfling (10% of the population), and the remainder from moon elf, gold elf, half-elf, or shield dwarf, and can be from out-of-town. I might consider a sylvan (wood) elf as well. I'm also limiting the available classes, many of them rewritten.

Of course, the people choosing to join will know all of this up front. I have a booklet of house rules along with a booklet describing Parnast since the majority of the characters will have grown up there and know all of the local lore.

If I decided to run a different type of campaign, then I'd be happy to revisit other options. And some of the options may be available later. My "dragonborn" are half-dragons that are nearly indistinguishable from their human or elven parents (they are the only races that can be half-dragons in my campaign). I've added a lot of new things, though, like humans have a 30%+ chance of having some other bloodline in their heritage that might give them something like darkvision, or resistance to something like cold or poison.

I'm a big fan of things to be more tightly tied to the campaign world. So warforged make a lot of sense in Eberron, for example. In a great many of the cases the lore and history of the races differs from what's published, especially for a lot of the monsters (although I still lean heavily on the published Realms materials). I prefer the core books to have less lore and more descriptive text instead, and then leave the lore to the world-specific books, or at least something that separates out the different worlds like they've done in a few cases. But, I also play in the Realms, and with what they've published to date I can see how DMs that run campaigns in other worlds are in a tough spot with 5e. From what I see in Volo's Guide to Monsters, I'm not in agreement with a lot of the lore they've published for the Realms there either. I just don't like the direction the lore is taking. But that's OK, it looks like there's a lot of good stuff in there, and even the bits I don't like often have germs of ideas that I will use.

 

[Ilbranteloth]

You forgot a few... like Mystara and Ravenloft. I mean, I'm sure there are more, but that's getting into stuff that basically no one has ever heard of.

Council of Wyrms? Red Steel?

 

[Connorsrpg]

Like [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION], the ability to write your own stuff and customise the game to your setting is a VERY big part of our games and has been for many years.

I write and convert a LOT for any game I play. I love doing that as much as playing. We have never really fussed over 'balance'. In fact, have only really done so in a real studious manner since interacting on forums TBH.

Used to write stuff, try it and adapt it. Now you put something out there and the number crunchers shout great ideas down. A pity really. There are also many very nice number crunchers that offer suggestions for improvements other than this is OP or whatever other acronym fits their thoughts.

Play loose, incorporate ideas from everywhere and have fun

 

[Connorsrpg]

Oh and not having some races, classes, subclasses etc in some settings is definitely part of our games. What is not there helps to define a setting too