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General Tabletop Discussion
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what is the worst homebrew you have seen?
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<blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 8847063" data-attributes="member: 3400"><p>One fecund source of bad home-brew is a little too much specific knowledge unleavened by game play considerations. I'm sure we've all encountered it - the player at the table who has some more advanced or in-depth knowledge of a topic that will bristle at the abstraction approach a game makes. They have trouble letting the minutiae they know go in order to make the game playable.</p><p></p><p>Example 1: Back in the 2e era, some people compiled a Netbook of Proficiencies. It was a mix of convenient reference for non-weapon proficiencies that appeared in a variety of sources as well as home-brewed examples. Someone, undoubtedly full of their hard-won, amateur knowledge of heraldry (I'm betting a membership in the Society for Creative Anachronism was involved), broke specific aspects of heraldry out into separate proficiencies of Blazoning, Differencing, and Draftsmanship to bloat the Heraldry proficiency from 1 slot to 4 slots and making it a burden nobody would want to play (with the possible exception of the person who designed those who, no doubt, felt their effort validated by needing FOUR slots to master).</p><p></p><p>Example 2: This is from personal experience. A friend of mine home-brews up variations on character classes for his personal setting. Most are OK, if a bit over powered. But that's a calibration for everything so it, more or less, works out. The specific problem in this case was with some bardic music options and his background as a musician (he has published CDs and taught music, so it's a significant expertise). His knowledge of performance had him pretty much requiring concentration on every form of bardic music, meaning a bard who wanted to inspire courage had to keep using his standard action to do so, even just to give his companions a +1 morale bonus for more than one round. It really hampered the action economy for the bard and party in general. This is a player who normally understands the action economy and working it from the player's perspective, but here, his expertise in musical performance overrode how cumbersome it had become to play that bard.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="billd91, post: 8847063, member: 3400"] One fecund source of bad home-brew is a little too much specific knowledge unleavened by game play considerations. I'm sure we've all encountered it - the player at the table who has some more advanced or in-depth knowledge of a topic that will bristle at the abstraction approach a game makes. They have trouble letting the minutiae they know go in order to make the game playable. Example 1: Back in the 2e era, some people compiled a Netbook of Proficiencies. It was a mix of convenient reference for non-weapon proficiencies that appeared in a variety of sources as well as home-brewed examples. Someone, undoubtedly full of their hard-won, amateur knowledge of heraldry (I'm betting a membership in the Society for Creative Anachronism was involved), broke specific aspects of heraldry out into separate proficiencies of Blazoning, Differencing, and Draftsmanship to bloat the Heraldry proficiency from 1 slot to 4 slots and making it a burden nobody would want to play (with the possible exception of the person who designed those who, no doubt, felt their effort validated by needing FOUR slots to master). Example 2: This is from personal experience. A friend of mine home-brews up variations on character classes for his personal setting. Most are OK, if a bit over powered. But that's a calibration for everything so it, more or less, works out. The specific problem in this case was with some bardic music options and his background as a musician (he has published CDs and taught music, so it's a significant expertise). His knowledge of performance had him pretty much requiring concentration on every form of bardic music, meaning a bard who wanted to inspire courage had to keep using his standard action to do so, even just to give his companions a +1 morale bonus for more than one round. It really hampered the action economy for the bard and party in general. This is a player who normally understands the action economy and working it from the player's perspective, but here, his expertise in musical performance overrode how cumbersome it had become to play that bard. [/QUOTE]
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