The totally homebrew campaign

[Dogbrain]

A "totally" homebrew campaign, wherein one designs core classes, pretty much everything de novo from the SRD.


Pro: It's all your world.
Con: It's all your work.

Pro: Far lower chance of players citing some "official" source or another that, if accepted, can mess things up, and if rejected is at least irksome to have to reject then and there.
Con: Far lower chance of players having enough of a clue at the start to do anything.

Pro: You can break out of all the gaming cliches you don't like.
Con: You and your players don't have all those cliches to stand upon.

Pro: You can have a rich and quirky setting full of fascinating things.
Con: You can thoroughly disorient the players--and you're probably far less brilliant than you thought you were at 3:00am when you designed some of those quirks.

Pro: You might have a better chance of dismissing those spurious pseudo-historical arguments that some players make.
Con: Your players (and you) could get totally lost with insufficient pseudo-historical referents. (No, not a speling erer, I mean "referents".)

Pro: You can present a truly unique world, rich in depth and background.
Con: It's probably not really that unique, and your players get catatonic at the amount of alien information to ingest.

Any more?

 

[Nightfall]

Con,

It's not the Scarred Lands. But that's just my con.

 

[Dirigible]

I certianly feel conned.

It's even worse, dogbrian, when you use an entirely homebrewed rules system

 

[Acid_crash]

Con

It's not Dawnforge.

 

[Turjan]

Pro: You can pick from all your favourite game elements you really like and diss those you despise.
Con: Your players most probably hate the elements you picked and complain about every single piece you left out, because that was allegedly their most beloved thing out of all D&D.

 

[Jeph]

Bah. It's not totally homebrew unless you make the system from scratch!

Pro: You can create system elements to elegantly enhance themes that you want in your game.
Con: Requires a bit of hard thinking and playtesting.

Pro: The system will be specifically tailored to the preferences of you and your friends.
Con: You have to get your friends to actually tell you what they want, discover that when they siad X they meant Y, fiddle and twiddle some more, repeat.

--Jeff

 

[DrZombie]

Pro : your imagination is the limit.
Con : your imagination is the limit.

Pro : You can design your own convoluted twisted sick backstabbing politics, glorious heroes and black, evil villains.
Con : your players will totally ignore all your hard work, fall for the sucker plots, and walk away without a scratch, the basterds...

 

[Sir Whiskers]

Pro: You don't have to read umpteen published sourcebooks.
Con: You have to write your own.

Pro: You can get the setting just right, as opposed to all those other setting designers out there...
Con: You can't blame all those other setting designers when your campaign stinks.

Pro: It's fun.
Con: It's work.