Make It Yourself

[TwoSix]

Creating a whole new game is a lot of work, as you suggest.
However, creating new house rules or small subsystems for an existing system is less work, because you can leverage the design that's already been done. You aren't designing the whole thing from scratch, you are expanding in minor ways upon the base system.

It's tough to say. For one of my recent characters, I homebrewed a custom subclass, made it look pretty in GMBinder, and the whole thing took about an hour? Not a big struggle.

But realistically, out of the 20 people I play with regularly, maybe 5 of them would have the combination of game knowledge and tech savvy to be able to do that? The rest are dependent on the material in the game books or have to talk to myself (or another DM) and hope they're willing to work with them.

 

[Tony Vargas]

TTRPGs are an inherently DIY hobby.

I mean, they were because they had to be, and that feel has remained, especially for us older gamers, but there have been good, reasonably complete, reasonably balanced/playable-as-is games, even TTRPGs for a long time. Maybe not D&D for very long, but they've existed.

So I don't think it's inherently that way, anymore - not the way TTRPGs are inherently cooperative games, for instance.
Of course, D&Ds dominance may mean that the idea of fixing up bad games and making your own slightly less bad versions of them as a labor of love, continues to be revered for the foreseeable future. Is that a good thing? IDK, it feels good to me as an older gamer....

 

[MichaelSomething]

There are all kinds of places where GMs are thin on the ground; and some people actively don't want to GM. They want to play. So in practice these are non-solutions for them.

www.startplaying.com

 

[Reynard]

I mean, they were because they had to be, and that feel has remained, especially for us older gamers, but there have been good, reasonably complete, reasonably balanced/playable-as-is games, even TTRPGs for a long time. Maybe not D&D for very long, but they've existed.

So I don't think it's inherently that way, anymore - not the way TTRPGs are inherently cooperative games, for instance.
Of course, D&Ds dominance may mean that the idea of fixing up bad games and making your own slightly less bad versions of them as a labor of love, continues to be revered for the foreseeable future. Is that a good thing? IDK, it feels good to me as an older gamer....

Other than in forms of organized play, I have never encountered any real people that only play with rules as written running adventures exactly as written with nothing made by the participants other than die rolls.

 

[Tony Vargas]

Other than in forms of organized play, I have never encountered any real people that only play with rules as written running adventures exactly as written with nothing made by the participants other than die rolls.

Organized play is far from a trivial amount of the gaming that has been going on... sheesh, like the last 20, 30 years? Since the RPGA, whenever that launched?

And before that, I'd often encounter people playing by what they were convinced were the rules as written.

And, no, I don't consider making your own adventures or rolling up your own character 'DIY.' Not like modding rules or making up new classes and races from whole cloth. The former are things the game gives you tools for, the latter is fixing those tools because they're borken, or making your own tools that were left out of the game's kit, entirely.
World of difference, IMHO.

 

[Reynard]

Organized play is far from a trivial amount of the gaming that has been going on... sheesh, like the last 20, 30 years? Since the RPGA, whenever that launched?

What percentage of D&D players play only or primarily AL, do you think?

And, no, I don't consider making your own adventures or rolling up your own character 'DIY.' Not like modding rules or making up new classes and races from whole cloth. The former are things the game gives you tools for, the latter is fixing those tools because they're borken, or making your own tools that were left out of the game's kit, entirely.
World of difference, IMHO.

It is a difference of scale, not kind. You create an adventure and in it a monster and that monster has a unique ability and that ability looks like a class ability or spell. Or you let the fighter player trade a round some proficiencies to get a swashbuckler feel or a sorcerer take some druid spells to get a primal magic feel.

This discussion was never about people writing whole game systems or designing classes from no reference point. it was and is about people making something good enough for their games as an alternative to having nothing.

 

[Tony Vargas]

What percentage of D&D players play only or primarily AL, do you think?

significantly fewer than the 70% who don't play at all, certainly, but I don't recall hearing a specific stat... and, while it'd be easy for WotC to count AL participants, it'd be harder to estimate home games.

Edit: I expect it's an underwhelming number, as they don't trumpet it at the top of the AL page. If it were a million people or something, they'd be shouting it from the rooftops.

It is a difference of scale, not kind. You create an adventure and in it a monster and that monster has a unique ability

You can just pick a monster from the MM.
Creating a monster or adding abilities to it, that's design work. Unless the game gives you at least guidelines, preferably a robust system to build monsters, of course.

That's the line, using the game vs re-designing the game.

In the olden days, we re-designed the game, a lot. That's what DIY in that context meant to me.

 

[Thomas Shey]

www.startplaying.com

I think you missed the point; they probably already play. With people using the rule chunks they dislike. Switching to other GMs most likely using the same rules chunks fixes nothing for them.

 

[MichaelSomething]

I think you missed the point; they probably already play. With people using the rule chunks they dislike. Switching to other GMs most likely using the same rules chunks fixes nothing for them.

If there is demand for playing with different chunks, then I'm sure at least one DM there will have done the chunk changing for their game. Or, being a paid professional, are skilled enough in judgement so that the chunks you don't like won't matter in the actual campaign!

 

[Thomas Shey]

If there is demand for playing with different chunks, then I'm sure at least one DM there will have done the chunk changing for their game. Or, being a paid professional, are skilled enough in judgement so that the chunks you don't like won't matter in the actual campaign!

If the chunks involve a particular class or the like, that's not actually an encouragement, and there's no assurance that anyone who has changed the part you like has any spaces.

I mean, in general, if people were changing the part they disliked all over the place, they'd already probably have a solution.

(Assuming, of course, the changes weren't as big a problem as the original; its not hard to fix one problem by making another).