your homebrew - what's your motivation?

[Torm]

I like being the authority on the campaign setting.

Aside from the obvious - a creative outlet - this has been one of the biggest reasons for what I've been working on, too: We have a few rules-lawyerish guys in our group - great guys otherwise, good friends, but they have a tendency to ignore rule 0 and argue with the DM whenever what the DM wants to adjudicate about a situation contradicts the campaign materials. Even if the DM has a valid story reason for doing so. So I'm working on a world that is all MINE, and that way when I run it, there won't be any of that, and everyone will have fun. Or, the aforementioned players will dislike not having references so much that the whole thing will collapse after one session. One or the other.

 

[Algolei]

My motivation is to have an end result containing fewer flaws than anything I can find ready-made. And being able to fix the flaws myself without having someone else explain it in a more complicated and less believable manner which intertwines itself into future game rules.

Egad, my motivation for creating a homebrew world may just explain why I prefer earlier editions of D&D! Because I fixed the problems I found then, and newer editions are extremely flawed in comparison!


*has an epiphany*

*then dies of old age*

:gak:

 

[reason]

...

First for the sheer employment of creativity - the ideas are going to be there anyway, so I should record and make use of them rather than let them go to waste. Very utilitarian, I suppose.

Later on, I had this mad urge to get something into a publishable form, since it seemed to be a waste to have all this stuff sitting around that only I was looking at.

Later still I realized that any traditional form of publication was silly, given my constraints on time, perfectionism, distaste for crunch, preferred framing devices, small potential audience, desire to go back and change things, etc. There are simply better ways to share my ideas.

So we're back to sheer employment of creativity, with sharing with others enabled by the same modern technology that makes it possible for me to continue to set my ideas down in a reasonable way given my lack of time.

Reason
Principia Infecta

 

[Ry]

For my homebrew (see Last Age design thread), it was because I had some objectives for my campaign that could not be met without drastically diverging from a published setting. Although I'm using Dark Sun and Planescape for some content, then modifying, the process is really motivated by what I want to show the players (the exact same motivation that GlassJaw has to avoid homebrews).

 

[ThirdWizard]

The world fitting the plot can be quite superior to the plot fitting the world.

 

[Ace]

I made my homebrew for 3 reasons

I had bit and pieces from short games to use

I didn't like any of the existing commerical worlds at the time

I wanted a world built on the premise "What if D&D was true, how would people act and live"

 

[painandgreed]

Also like the act of creation. I get ideas in my head and want to get them out. In high school and college, my homebrew was a ring world. Whenever I'd make up a new world, I'd just move it over 10 or 20 thousand miles and sit it next to my old world. Teleport transportation between "worlds" and flat maps were some of the advantages. Caused some interesting problems with things like moons and such but those were easy to get around.

Another reason is so that I know the world. It all fits and isn't a patchwork of different styles and such and i get into it.

A third reason, is because then the players are depedant on me for information. With published systems, it's ineveitable that other players will also be DMs who have or even run games in those published settings. Then their out of game knowledge gets too mixed up with in game knowledge and hard to get out of player's heads. If my world doesn't sync exactly with the published setting, then they get confused and can never remember the changes I've told them about in history and setting. With a homebrew, there's nothing to confuse them and none of the players are going to know the official history better than the DM.

 

[warlord]

Call me a converted Tolkienite but I just can't get enough of the sub-creation thing and I love combining genres. Plus something has to fill the gaping void that will appear in my life after May 19th.

 

[nopantsyet]

I am in love with an empty canvas.

 

[Starglim]

I'll agree with joy of creation in itself, but I also find that I can reuse for other purposes large chunks of what I create for even the most off-the-wall setting.