One of the best parts of 5e thus far is that people are already homebrewing.

[tlantl]

Um, guys the man said home brew not house rule.

Big difference.

A house rule is done to make certain things you don't like or don't do what you want them to work for you.

Home brewing means adding your own material such as monsters, spells, powers, classes and what have you.

The devs have said on many occasions that the game is yours to do with what you will. D&D has, until recently, been designed so that we as DMs can use or not use, change or add anything we want to the game to make it our games.

As far as I can tell, excepting that there are still a lot of minor rules missing, Next is fairly playable as is. This packet being extremely PC biased not withstanding.

Right now we are here to help determine what's broken and what works as is. Surely you come to the playtest with the understanding that this is a work in progress and nothing near a complete system. Making comments about it's state in reference to a finished game are premature in the extreme. Come back in a couple of years if you want a finished game system.

 

[Scars Unseen]

My groups (all of the three ones that I drift through) basically have this perspective -

We -can- houserule any system in to playability.
Most of us don't have the time to do so.

The game should accept houseruling (like D&D always has, in every edition, forever and ever amen), yes; but it should be playable on its own, and shouldn't require it.

I see a difference in Homebrewing and Houseruling, too.

Homebrewing is content generation - a new monster, a new background, and so on. These are the details; the interior design, if you will.

Houseruling is having to adjust the core to be playable in the scope of your game.

I love homebrewing, and hate houseruling, I think.

Playable on its own to who, though? If games were broken in the same way to all players, all groups would house rule the same stuff. House rules exist to bring a game within the chosen play style of an individual group, not to fix an objective flaw in the game. I can pretty much guarantee you that someone will be happy with 5E RAW. I can definitely guarantee you that others will want to tweak it to fit their preferences. And there will be people that see the game as fundamentally flawed, as has happened in pretty much every edition ever.

The game will be playable. The best thing it can be for the most people, in my opinion, is malleable. And WotC is off to a good start on that.

 

[El Mahdi]

Um, guys the man said home brew not house rule.

Big difference.

A house rule is done to make certain things you don't like or don't do what you want them to work for you.

Home brewing means adding your own material such as monsters, spells, powers, classes and what have.

Without getting pedantic, sometimes there's a difference and sometimes there isn't...it depends on the person. That may be the way you see those words, and it may be the way others see those words, but they aren't the only ways. First of all, when applied to RPG's, neither of those words' accepted non-rpg definitions mean the same as what you just said they do.

For many gamers, homebrew and houserule are interchangeable words. If you don's see it that way, fine. But declaring that people are wrong with their usage because it disagrees with your understanding of them, is certainly not the way to carry on a constructive conversation.

And even using your definitions, 5E appears to be very modifiable from a homebrew and a houserule perspective. I believe that's by design. And that's a good thing.

 

[Ahnehnois]

For many gamers, homebrew and houserule are interchangeable words.

Personally, I look at them as overlapping. A houserule is any game rule that you use that isn't in the book, and homebrew describes anything you create yourself, rule or otherwise (after all, settings can be homebrewed). Homebrew classes/races/spells etc. are houserules. Changes to the way initiative works, alternate hit point systems, new ability generation techniques and the like are not homebrew; they're modifications of existing rules.

 

[Steely_Dan]

Total, I have done monster conversions, and am working on a Monk (largely based off of the 1st Ed one).

The basic chassis of 5th Ed is delightful to work with (bounded accuracy rocks, IME).

 

[slobo777]

I think one of the flaws of 4e's design is that it made it very difficult to homebrew. If you wanted to create a custom class, you had to write out 30 levels of powers and a handful of paragon paths. With the trend of 5e towards a simplified design (and more unified mechanics), I think homebrewing is going to be a lot easier (and thus more prevalent).

The ability to homebrew races and monsters is important to me. Classes less so.

PC races seems just as easy as before. I'm fond of the strong guidelines that cropped up early in the 4E community, and of how racial powers can be made to scale and stay relevent in that game. D&D Next's combination of editions past doesn't seem to have the same focus on a central design "best practice" (at least not a published one), but it looks very do-able. I could convert my own game world to D&D Next easy enough here.

Monsters in D&D Next, I don't know yet. I got used to both 3E and 4E, and could generate them very quickly. 4E's monster guidelines make it a breeze, and over 3/4 of the monsters in my games are homebrewed just for use in a single encounter. It rarely takes me more than an hour per monster, including writing out the full usable stat block. Not yet got a "feel" for D&D Next for comparison. My first thoughts are that it would be just as fast, perhaps faster provided I'm not picking 10 spells from a Cleric spell list just to complete a monster.

I think class homebrews have always been difficult and time consuming. I did make a few for 3E, never bothered in earlier or later versions, Everything important about a D&D Next class is in the class-specific mechanics, and these are critical to it finding a place amongst the other classes. It's very easy to have a cool idea and generate some mechanics, but then pitch the relative power too high or low. So classes need extensive playtesting. That's probably more time-consuming part of the process, even than generating say 20 sample powers for heroic tier in 4E (but yes this is obviously extra compared to Next, unless you are aiming for a spellcasting class and want it to have lots of unique spells).

 

[Yora]

I think with the next playtest files that have been announced for october and going up to 10th level, things are going to become really interesting in that regard.
With just 5 levels, you really just can work on new types of goblins and kobolds and maybe orcs, but even with ogres it already becomes difficult to judge how things will affect higher levels.
With 10 levels, you actually have the full range that people play the most and that many groups always stay confined to. Then you can have actual 10th level builds as benchmark and also monsters with abilities meant to fight such characters as references. I think then we're really going to see interesting new stuff.

 

[Rhenny]

I don't know if this fits into homebrewing, but the fact that I can cobble together an original 6 or 7 encounter adventure (some combats and some non-combat) with exploration opportunities and opportunities to interact with NPCs, in about 1 hour is a really good sign.

 

[braro]

Playable on its own to who, though? If games were broken in the same way to all players, all groups would house rule the same stuff. House rules exist to bring a game within the chosen play style of an individual group, not to fix an objective flaw in the game. I can pretty much guarantee you that someone will be happy with 5E RAW. I can definitely guarantee you that others will want to tweak it to fit their preferences. And there will be people that see the game as fundamentally flawed, as has happened in pretty much every edition ever.

The game will be playable. The best thing it can be for the most people, in my opinion, is malleable. And WotC is off to a good start on that.

Lets say playable means in specific that the game can be played with the default design assumptions of the developers - Dread can be played for single horror scenarios, and that is fine, and Vampire stuff lets you play a vampire and work fine.

In this case, specifically, I would think that with the stated design goals in D&Dnext, I should be able to take the game I am playing today (the characters, the story, the world), and plug it in to D&D Next and run fine - making obvious allowances for what races and classes are available. (For example, my wife's Sorcerer/Paladin becomes a Dragon Sorcerer with the Acolyte feat).

To me, I was thinking that anything made to adjust the seasoning and the feel is actually home brew, or an adjustment.

From your response, which I think is fair and brings up good points, I think there are actually three categories of home developed rules -

Home Brew - "We have GOT TO HAVE Spellthieves ALL UP IN THIS PLACE!"
House Rule - "Since the game assumes dungeons, but we are doing all overland adventures all LotR style, an Extended Rest requires Rivendell."
House Patch - "Glancing blow actually works."

 

[Emerikol]

No game on God's green earth will make everyone happy. Every version has been playable and unplayable for someone. So when they deliver it, someone will play RAW and have fun. If you have to change it then thats fine but thats not a flaw in the game itself (necessarily). Of course we all want a game where we don't feel compelled to change to much. For me there is a threshhold. Once the number of changes exceed the threshhold I give up on the game.

I like that they recognize this challenge of tastes and are designing a game built to be changed. By using object oriented principles, they are devising components that are not as interdependent as they used to be. This why when you don't like a rule you can change it without crashing the rest of the game.