D&D General How often do you use Homebrew in your own games?

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

In my most recent session about half of the monsters I used were homebrew. None of the party is of a homebrewed race, class, or subclass, but they do use homebrew magic items.

I have a ton of homebrew player options that I've made over the years, but my players are satisfied with the official options so we don't often use them.

I can't actually remember if we've ever used any homebrew spells.

So we constantly use homebrew monsters and magic items, but only rarely homebrew anything else.

 

[GrimCo]

Player options almost never.

Everything else, almost always. House rules, setting with all it's quirks, monsters (some of which are modified MM), items ( both mundane and magical). Only time i use only published stuff is when i need to cobble together one shot on short notice.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

I can’t imagine DMing without homebrewing monsters and items and a handful of house rules and tweaks to published settings/adventures. But I do like to run a tight ship on player options as it simplifies my prep, adjudications, and, frankly, the players' grasp of the game mechanics, IME. I'm already surprised (especially looking at you Control Water) enough as it is by bog-standard published player-facing options - of which there are virtually unlimited permutations - I don't need anything homebrew messing with my workload, lol! Players have been very accepting of what could be perceived as "limitations" over the last decade of my 5e.2014 DMing tenure.

A nice side benefit: homebrewed monsters and items can keep things fresh for folks who have been around the D&D block a few times as they discover new things.

One minor "issue" I've run into with homebrewed items (or even items taken from, say, the KP Vault of Magic) is that players may ask if I've added said item(s) to DnD Beyond. I don't use DnDB any more and don't ever plan to go back to it. I fear our hobby is getting more and more reliant on it to the detriment of game flow... but that's a topic for another thread.

 

[sevenbastard]

You can play rpgs without homebrewing?

 

[Umbran]

I don't find this to be a D&D specific question.

It depends what you mean by "use homebrew". Like, I make up stats for monsters, both in premeditated and on-the-fly ways all the time. I create NPCs. I create an occasional faction here or there that's not in the official setting I'm using. For any given system I probably have a handful of interpretations or changes to rules that I use.

 

[Stormonu]

My RPG life is homebrew. I can't count the hours, ink and paper I've used up developing my own homebrew stuff. Even some of my own RPGs over the years. Just for 5E I'm sitting on 3 MM's worth of homebrew monster, a 600 page customized version of the 5E rules and about the same amount of pages of tweaked, imported from prior editions and homebrew spells. Then, there's the adventures I've done up.

It's just too damn fun not to.