Interesting.
My 3e campaign had 44 homebrewed prestige classes (not counting a few that were monster-specific), and my 4e homebrew material includes 60 paragon paths and 18 epic destinies.
I wonder where the average lies? I imagine it's higher in 3e games (given how reliant many groups are on the Character Builder in 4e)- one of my players hacked the downloaded version and programs my custom stuff in, so it's easy to use for us.
You had 44 homebrewed prestige classes in 3e? Wow. That seems HUGE to me. The groups I played with during my 3e days were mostly a bunch of guys at university and both individually and altogether we had extensive knowledge of the rules - and we barely had any homebrew prestige classes. It could have been a factor of our extensive knowledge, that we knew a class or combo existed to give us what we wanted and so we never had to make things up? I don't know. If that is what you are asking ("wonder where the average lies") then I would say MUCH lower than 44 would be my guess. Most other groups I know are fairly close to my group's experience (again rather large group, several games - at one point I personally was in 8 games a week, and there were others - and each game had about 6 people, though some repeats). And yeah, not a whole lot of homebrew. Mostly things were made up when there was not an acceptable equivalent to do a specific thing already, and most homebrews were dropped due to lack of use, overpowered, underpowered, or otherwise just fell out of practice.
Now, on the 4e side. In the few games of that I ever saw (or joined/asked to join) there were many little changes. Mostly when people were swapping powers from one class to another - even then nothing particularly
new was created. But, I do admit it was more common. Though in that case I think it had to do with the relative rigidity of structure of the classes. In 3e there was another class that did the job you wanted to do, so you took it. With 4e it was only ever a single class you could ever take, but swapping powers for what you want to do was not as problematic or broken. (Take a ranger if you want bows, fighter if you want armor, swap powers to get the full set you want.)
Never saw 4e's epic destinies in play, but from what I remember I suspect the numbers for that one might be higher if only by design - you are EXPECTED to make things up for your character, something unique; though again every time I heard of 4e epics they sounded fairly similar (if not exactly the same) as what was in the book - something I thought was a little disappointing.
