D&D 5E The Ship of Theseus and 5e Homebrewing/3pp

[Aldarc]

When it comes to homebrewing with 5e or writing 5e 3pp, at what point in changing the rules, genre, or mechanics of 5e is better just to create or use another system entirely than 5e? At what point does it become another system entirely and should be distinguished as such?

I'll admit that this thread ties into the oft-discussed topic of whether D&D, particularly 5e D&D, can do everything or should do everything or the various 5e-based chimeras that seem to exist in the market.

 

[TwoSix]

1) If you're moving outside of the realms of fantasy to the point where the equipment list is no longer usable.
2) If you're using a type of magic/effects system different enough that the entirety of the spell list isn't usable.

 

[hawkeyefan]

One area I can think of is in how different rules or game elements interact. If you’re changing one element, then you have to be aware of how it impacts the other elements.

For example, I have a friend who was looking at implementing a more narrative system for damage in place of HP. Basically he wanted the Harm system from Blades in the Dark carried over to D&D.

It’s a cool idea. But changing HP is pretty fundamental. You would have to refigure how many other elements of the game would function.....spells, rest, class abilities, feats....and so on.

So the question then becomes is the juice worth the squeeze?

 

[MonkeezOnFire]

There are sci-fi and cyberpunk third party hacks for the game and I think they work quite well (though not as thoroughly balanced given their indie nature) since it's not hard to exploring an alien ship or raiding a corporate HQ into a D&D dungeon. If you want a game that focuses on action style combat where all characters should be able to meaningfully participate in combat then D&D is a good fit and hack away to adjust the sliders. But if you want to tell a story where fighting isn't a primary concern then I would suggest looking for a system that better handles what you want.

 

[hawkeyefan]

There are sci-fi and cyberpunk third party hacks for the game and I think they work quite well (though not as thoroughly balanced given their indie nature) since it's not hard to exploring an alien ship or raiding a corporate HQ into a D&D dungeon. If you want a game that focuses on action style combat where all characters should be able to meaningfully participate in combat then D&D is a good fit and hack away to adjust the sliders. But if you want to tell a story where fighting isn't a primary concern then I would suggest looking for a system that better handles what you want.

I think that the reliance on combat is a big part of it. D&D Is primarily a combat based game. It's non-combat related rules are fairly slim. They can do the job, and they can perhaps be altered to do it well.....but really, without combat there's little reason to play D&D.

So if you've got a setting that's sci-fi or urban fantasy or modern and the focus of the setting will still largely be about combat, then you can likely refluff things as needed pretty easily. Maybe tweak equipment lists, or shift from melee to ranged combat for a modern setting, add morale or panic rules of some kind, and so on. That's all pretty straightforward.

When you try to change a component entirely is where it gets tricky. I mean, Armor Class is kind of odd in any setting that's not quasi-medieval like D&D, isn't it? So if you wanted to change how Armor works in your setting....maybe you feel like it should be about reducing damage more than about avoiding damage.....then you're in for a tougher challenge. Because then you need to look at all the spells and abilities that interact with AC, and how they'll function in the new system. Then you also need to come up with a replacement for AC, and then how spells and abilities interact with that mechanic. And so on.

Once you're doing more than reskinning the game, then I think you have to sit down and ask yourself if it still makes sense to work with D&D as the design chassis for this game, or if there are other systems that would achieve what you want to achieve, or if you need to cobble together an entirely new system.

 

[Don Durito]

I think the most practical thing to do is imagine you are sitting there helping a new player (with some D&D experience) make a character. Can you explain your house rules without their eyes glazing over? Can you put what they need to know on a one page sheet for their reference?

 

[Celebrim]

When it comes to homebrewing with 5e or writing 5e 3pp, at what point in changing the rules, genre, or mechanics of 5e is better just to create or use another system entirely than 5e? At what point does it become another system entirely and should be distinguished as such?

I can't answer for 5e specifically, but I play a homebrewed version of 3.0e that is at least as different from 3e D&D as Pathfinder is from 3.5e D&D.

I will say that writing up a completely novel rules system is much harder than just amending one to taste. The process of amendment is an incremental one, which at each step of the way leaves you with a playable game. When you go about creating your own entirely new system, if your ambitions are large then you have a year or more of work ahead of you before you even have enough to present to would be players. And you'll still need to go through the process of playtesting the rules and amending them on the basis of lessons learned.

Likewise, I'm of the opinion that the world really doesn't need a brand new RPG system at this point, and given the great depth of time and effort spent on making rules systems, there probably is no potential rules system out there worth reinventing the wheel over. The history of RPGs are littered with hundreds of fantasy heartbreakers that are often no more than tweaked versions of D&D anyway, and the majority of novel game systems are often inferior to old standbys anyway. After several attempts to create rule systems myself, that resulted in unworkable messes once I added all my cool ideas to them, I've largely given up on that myself. There are maybe a dozen solid RPG systems out there - D20, BRP/Pendragon, D6, DitV, Cortex Plus, WOIN, etc. - that can be tweaked to do pretty much anything you could want to do in any setting you'd want to do it in.

So probably the answer is, "Is it actually impossible to tell the sort of stories you want to tell in 5e without tweaking it, and is the amount of effort that would take greater than the amount of tweaks it would take to get a different system to where you'd want it?"

At what point does it become another system entirely and should be distinguished as such?

When it uses both a radically different CharGen and a radically different fortune mechanic or radically different process resolution, then it's probably a different system. If it tweaks only one process in that, it's a different game but it would still be in the D20 system of games - say Mutants and Masterminds or any other True20 game. (Although to be fair, True20 tweaks enough that I could accept the claim it is a different system.) If you make tweaks but you still have classes, levels, hit points, and a fortune in the middle resolution process that depends mostly on the outcome of a D20 plus modifiers, then it's still basically D&D reskinned for a slightly different setting or style of game.

Of course, I don't think that really matters too much, as there is no way to measure really how far you've moved from house-ruled X, to brand new game Y, to brand new system Z and largely that doesn't matter except for conveying how familiar a system is going to seem to someone who knows X. IMO though, Pathfinder, D20 Modern, Star Wars D20, etc. is basically house ruled D&D. M&M or 13th Age is a brand new game based on the D20 system, and PbtA is a brand new system.

 

[Celebrim]

Can you put what they need to know on a one page sheet for their reference?

The outcome of most CharGen is a one page reference sheet, often with an attached 'inventory'. Inventory often turns out to be the most complicated aspect of both CharGen and character management, and it wouldn't be entirely wrong to call old school RPGs (both P&P and cRPGs) "inventory management games".

But if you are actually referring to everything you need to know about CharGen being one page, or all the rules being one page, I doubt any really solid system meant for general meets that ambition. I could manage that with my own SIPS system, but it was meant for running games with 5 year olds and while I'm rather fond of the system, it lacks the complexity in its bare bones version for achieving anything but a pure Narrative game.

The best way to introduce a game to a new player is start them playing. Do not attempt to force the rules or the complexity of CharGen down their throats in the first or even fifth session, unless it's such a basic system that CharGen can be over in 20 minutes tops. It's much better to hand them a stack of pregenerated character sheets, and let them pick one. Your probably much better at knowing how to achieve common ambitions and archetypes at this point than they are, and what they really need to do is get to playing. This is true whether you have a homebrew system or an established system with rock solid credentials.

 

[Don Durito]

The outcome of most CharGen is a one page reference sheet, often with an attached 'inventory'. Inventory often turns out to be the most complicated aspect of both CharGen and character management, and it wouldn't be entirely wrong to call old school RPGs (both P&P and cRPGs) "inventory management games".

But if you are actually referring to everything you need to know about CharGen being one page, or all the rules being one page, I doubt any really solid system meant for general meets that ambition. I could manage that with my own SIPS system, but it was meant for running games with 5 year olds and while I'm rather fond of the system, it lacks the complexity in its bare bones version for achieving anything but a pure Narrative game.

The best way to introduce a game to a new player is start them playing. Do not attempt to force the rules or the complexity of CharGen down their throats in the first or even fifth session, unless it's such a basic system that CharGen can be over in 20 minutes tops. It's much better to hand them a stack of pregenerated character sheets, and let them pick one. Your probably much better at knowing how to achieve common ambitions and archetypes at this point than they are, and what they really need to do is get to playing. This is true whether you have a homebrew system or an established system with rock solid credentials.

I don't mean specifically about Char Gen. I mean just informing the player about what's different in the game before you begin.

It's better to be upfront with this. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of a session and finding out that the rules don't work the way you expect them to because the GM is suddenly springing house rules on you.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't mean specifically about Char Gen. I mean just informing the player about what's different in the game before you begin.

It's better to be upfront with this. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of a session and finding out that the rules don't work the way you expect them to because the GM is suddenly springing house rules on you.

This happens with any game though. Either you find out that process resolution on a task doesn't work like you expected, and as such you've been ignoring perfectly valid options because you thought they were stupidly impossible, or else you try something thinking that it's a perfectly valid move and it turns out that it puts you at an unnecessary disadvantage.

Case in point, first time player of D&D proposed this creative move: "I whip two arrows out of my quiver, one in each hand, and then I rush between the two giant rats and stab them both at the same time!" Points for originality and flare, and I'll reward that, but in the system what you are doing there is using improvised weapons (without proficiency in that) to perform a two-handed weapon attack (without proficiency in that) that leaves you flanked at the end of the movement. It's probably not as efficient as whipping out a rapier you have weapon finesse with and stabbing the nearest rat. After letting her attempt the stunt, I explained to her that while I would give a "cool move" bonus for being creative like that, she had to understand that her heroine was just starting out as an adventurer and would struggle to pull off cool action movie hero moves regularly until they'd gained some more experience and learned some things.

Likewise, one problem with playing Pathfinder if you've played 3.5e D&D is that so many things work ever so slightly differently than you'd expect them to, and the same is basically true of 3.5e relative to 3.0e.

I find it's best to assume all games you play in our house ruled, because in practice they are.

As far as being up front with my rules, "Plop Here is a 600 page word document. You aren't expected to read it and you don't need to know everything in here to play the game. Only a small slice of the rules will really effect your particular character, and you'll gradually master those." If I have someone coming from a 3.Xe D&D background, I'd probably say, "It's basically a combination of the 3.0 and 3.5 srds with a lot of small tweaks. The one that will be a big 'gotcha' for you initially is that the 5' step rule works almost backwards of what you are used to - you can use it to adjust your position in a melee, but if you try to use it as a form of evasion, you'll draw an AoO. So no stepping out of a melee to fire an arrow or cast a spell without penalty. Also, standing up does not draw an AoO, so don't expect to trip lock foes in combat as the clear best melee build."