D&D 5E Really concerned about class design

[TwoSix]

D&D Beyond has an entire homebrew section. You can create homebrew content and even share it with the entire world, and use it in your campaigns.

Not sure about the other online tools, but D&D Beyond definitely DOES support homebrew content, you just have to do it or find it.

D&D Beyond does not support homebrew classes, unless they've added that feature in the last few months.

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:
Folks,

The passive-aggressive (and just plain agressive) snark is not a good look on any of you. Cut it out. If you aren't going to show respect for folks, then walk away from the discussion, please and thank you.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Not sure about the other online tools, but D&D Beyond definitely DOES support homebrew content, you just have to do it or find it.

No, you're in factual error, sadly. You were responding to a post specifically about classes.

Beyond does not in any way support homebrew classes.

It does support subclasses, however, obviously that locks out a lot of material. Bizarrely they do include Bloodhunter so I suspect they could support homebrew classes but just haven't. It's a pity.

 

[Salthorae]

D&D Beyond does not support homebrew classes, unless they've added that feature in the last few months.

Yes, I'm sorry. You can't do homebrew classes.

Because that would be super complicated from an implementation standpoint.

But you can literally put up homebrew for anything else in the game. Items, Spells, Races, Subclasses, Feats, and backgrounds are all supported.

Bizarrely they do include Bloodhunter

Yes, I acknowledge that above.

Bloodhunter isn't homebrewed by some random person. it's part of hugely followed streamed show with it's own published content, where the team worked specifically with the creator to link their class into the rest of the system.

Classes are big frameworks that take a ton of backend development to make sure they work with everything else in the system. The rest of the system are just simple plug and play into class slots. It's NOT a simple thing to allow homebrew classes for the online platforms. they already give you homebrew for everything that is easy to allow homebrew for.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think you're overstating the difficulty of doing classes. I'm familiar with the homebrew system and it's powerful and elegant. However, I think they have had a lot of higher priority systems to sort out. I believe they could do it.

I also note that I'd honestly be happy to pay for 3PP classes to be added, like I was buying the book IRL. I suspect their contract with WotC prevents that, sadly.

 

[Oofta]

I think you're overstating the difficulty of doing classes. I'm familiar with the homebrew system and it's powerful and elegant. However, I think they have had a lot of higher priority systems to sort out. I believe they could do it.

I also note that I'd honestly be happy to pay for 3PP classes to be added, like I was buying the book IRL. I suspect their contract with WotC prevents that, sadly.

Developing a home brew class is simple with paper and pencil. It's more difficult from a code and development perspective.

 

[Krachek]

Class design is set.
our best hope for coming years is the last UA.
out: weirdo subclass
in: more options to actual class and sub class, including more spells.

adding new class is a mess.
they don’t want to rewrite all spells. So the UA About psionic is a good solution.
it would be awful to have a “mage hand” spell and to rewrite the “mage hand” psionic feature.
but I feel that share material like that is not widely accept, and some people prefer having 100 pages of new material for psionic. But that won’t happen.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Developing a home brew class is simple with paper and pencil. It's more difficult from a code and development perspective.

I do understand, I promise! My job is scripting things and I have two years of a CS degree as well as a decade and a half of knowledge management and IT experience, which is basically what this is at the junction of. I am familiar with how their homebrew system, which involves light scripting, works, and confident they could likely expand it to classes. Question is if they have time to get to it before 6E, I suspect. Especially as near 6E we will likely see a flurry of experimental material from WotC.

 

[Sacrosanct]

I'm in a campaign right now using D&D Beyond with a halfing gloomstallker ranger using the recent UA variant. Is it user friendly? No, but it can be done pretty easy. All you have to do is paste the new features in the notes section. Other fields (like movement) can easily be overridden with values that match whatever class/subclass feature you want. Also, I saw a video from the DEVs about a week or so ago that they are working on including UA options into the software.

Whole classes? No, but there are options to override values and put in your own notes.

 

[Oofta]

I do understand, I promise! My job is scripting things and I have two years of a CS degree as well as a decade and a half of knowledge management and IT experience, which is basically what this is at the junction of. I am familiar with how their homebrew system, which involves light scripting, works, and confident they could likely expand it to classes. Question is if they have time to get to it before 6E, I suspect. Especially as near 6E we will likely see a flurry of experimental material from WotC.

I wouldn't hold my breath for 6E, but there have been other threads about that.

I think the difficulty would be in setting up a workflow to walk people through creating new subclasses. I wrote an app for 3.5 to create classes*, and writing code to build up a class wasn't hard once I had the structure down. But some kind of step-by-step wizard that anyone could use would have been difficult.

In any case, it would be a niche feature, so I'll be surprised if they ever add it. I'm just happy I can create custom monsters and spells. Now if only they could have a decent adventure report I'd be happy. For a while.


*started as a "simple" project to have a spell report and I got carried away.