What do you think of the Playgrounds homebrew materials?

[The Vagabond]

Just wondering, what do you guys think of including various materials homebrewd by the folks on the forum? Do you think the systems are balanced? Workable?

I'm think about Tome of Radiance (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?258654-Tome-of-Radiance-Mastering-the-Power-of-Love-and-Justice), the Mythos system (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?364949-Mythos-Homebrew-Discussion-II-Where-Simplicity-Goes-to-Die), and Gramarie (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?252794-She-Blinded-Me-with-Science!-(Magitek-That-Doesn-t-Make-Me-Cry-Myself-To-Sleep))? I want to hear the folks on the playgrounds gripes, comments, and recommendations with theses subsystems.

[Demidos]

The last two, at least, are incredibly high powered and have the option of snapping your campaign setting in half like a rotten twig. Of course, so could an optomized wizard, but they're on a similar power scale.

Very fun? Sure.
But just be aware of that.

[Snowbluff]

I'm not a fan of the Tome of Radiance. It's rather messy, and the character in the game I played it with was pretty Munchkiny and annoying.

The Beeseecher is looking pretty good (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?422391-Beeseecher-Discussion), but it could use some input. I heard the author is quite the looker, too.

[Flickerdart]

From what I've seen of Gramarie, it's really only nominally D&D, and could very well be considered its own d20 game. There's only so much mixing between a gramarist and a regular character when the former's go-to solution for problems is "let's build a magic castle."

[Zancloufer]

Not sure about the Mythos system and Gramarie, but did start a game with heavy use of the Tome of Radiance recently. It is a little confusing and first and the classes come a little front-loaded, but once you get the hang of it the classes are pretty flexible. Biggest issue at first glance is the nova damage they can do at low levels. Solid Tier 3 for the most part, with the main niche being blowing up everything. The only thing that gets any kind of cheesy is the Stargazer and/or Frostfell Maven IF they abuse their magical item creation.

Will shock the DM if they're not ready for some smart use of device and illumination synergy and it will make the Warlock look like a PoS 80% of the time, but that class was a little weak to start with. Big numbers where never the true game breakers and that's the only place they excel at. Would recommend it if you have any sort of semi-optimized group and don't hate the concept of Magical Girls. Or a Frontliner that dumps Str and Con and still somehow hits like a truck and has tons of HP. A well build Champion after level 6 is probably the most SAD "Martial" class I've seen.

[Sayt]

The Mythos is, overall, pretty damn well written (especially Xefas's 'contributions' (He was the concept designer, IIRC)), but they tend to have extremely high optimisation floors and I wouldn't dream of asking to play one in my regular group.

[Vhaidara]

Never used any of them, but I've heard good things about Radiance and gramerie (though I've also heard that gram requires even more system mastery than most TO wizards).

Mythos I've had nothing but bad experiences with, though that might be who I see using it. I see them get approved, then people show up with 8th level characters throwing mountains and recruiting hundreds of minion followers a day, and usually get really angry whne the GM calls them on the fact that they are completely outclassing everything else submitted by whole orders of magnitude. Like, the last time was a pbp where the guy who started up the idea was going Fighter//paladin of tyranny, and some literally submitted a moon thrower.

[AmberVael]

Just wondering, what do you guys think of including various materials homebrewd by the folks on the forum? Do you think the systems are balanced? Workable?

I'm think about Tome of Radiance (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?258654-Tome-of-Radiance-Mastering-the-Power-of-Love-and-Justice), the Mythos system (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?364949-Mythos-Homebrew-Discussion-II-Where-Simplicity-Goes-to-Die), and Gramarie (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?252794-She-Blinded-Me-with-Science!-(Magitek-That-Doesn-t-Make-Me-Cry-Myself-To-Sleep))? I want to hear the folks on the playgrounds gripes, comments, and recommendations with theses subsystems.

I've had a lot of experience with Tome of Radiance, and I am quite fond of the system. I've seen a number of attempts at a "build your own magic" system, and most turn out poorly, but Tome of Radiance seems to have managed it, and that alone gives it a lot of versatility (its useful for way more than just magical girls).
The power level of it is perhaps a notch higher than average, but I think it settles around high tier 3. It doesn't quite get any world breaking powers, but the options the classes receive generally pack a punch. The main point of criticism I'd level at it is that some of its effects scale too far in the late game, and that its definitely going to outshine tier 4 and below characters.


Mythos I have not touched on directly, but I've seen characters built and abilities discussed, and I'm wary of it, and disinclined to see it used in my games. It can get some prodigious bonuses, and its abilities tend to break the basic rules of the game in order to function- circumventing immunities (or anything that can be construed as immunities) in order to punch a lich dead regardless of phylactery, that sort of thing. It seems to me to fall into too high a tier while simultaneously encouraging mechanics that break and harm narratives.


Gramarie is something I've seen less of, but I've heard and seen a little. I really like what it is: a completely unique crafting style system. But its incredibly complicated and equally powerful in the right hands from what little I've seen. Definitely a tier 1/2 style system given its game shaping powers.

[Xefas]

Like, the last time was a pbp where the guy who started up the idea was going Fighter//paladin of tyranny, and some literally submitted a moon thrower.

I've always strived to make it clear that a Mythos class is something you use when you feel like punching and stabbing in a group of Tier 1 and 2 classes played by people that know what they're doing. A Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Artificer party doesn't need a Fighter. They can produce a variety of permanent meatshields that do a better job without expending any of their immediately relevant resources. They can, however, use a Teramach, because while they all have a myriad of vastly powerful and far-reaching effects that the Teramach has no equivalent to, none of them is quite as good at full-attacking a small mountain range as the Teramach is, or tearing through 800 consecutive forcewalls, or permanently killing a Lich that put more than six minutes of thought into how to hide their phylactery. He has a niche in that group - something that no official punching-and-stabbing themed class has.

Submitting one to a game with a Fighter//Paladin in it is entirely contrary to one of the fundamental reasons they were made.

That's my two obols, anyway.

[Vhaidara]

That's my two obols, anyway.

I have nothing against you (well, aside from the entire disagreement that T1-T2 should be balanced around instead of excised from the game). It's just that I have never seen someone actually do something that wasn't just a massive pile of numbers with Mythos, and it has left a really bad taste in my mouth.

[Eldan]

Grammarie really doesn't mix with other characters or with "standard" adventures. My experience with it, with four grammarist characters, was also quite tedious as a GM. The problem was crossing a jungle quickly. Ingame? About ten minutes. Out of game? Over an hour of calculations and a stack of paper withe me just sitting there, waiting. Though that was probably also because everyone was new to it.

[Xefas]

I have nothing against you (well, aside from the entire disagreement that T1-T2 should be balanced around instead of excised from the game).

I actually agree entirely. High tier classes are defined by their capacity to come up with a perfect solution to a problem given a relatively short period of time to prepare, or to render their problems irrelevant entirely. To use AmberVael's words, their most basic nature is to "break and harm narratives". A Wizard does not consult arcane forces and gamble with powers beyond their control, undergoing supernatural trials and tribulations to solve a problem through risk and daring - they snap their fingers and push a button, no mystery, no mysticism, no fuss, no muss, no drama, no story.

But for every hundred stories made irrelevant, some new story can be told, albeit not very well in D&D. Superman and the Hulk tell stories that Robin Hood just can't very well. For these stories of world-shaking titans with the hearts of men, people should be playing Mythender or a high-powered Fate hack or something (Exalted's 3rd Edition pdf just got sent out to its kickstarter backers). But there are some who just really like D&D, so my homebrew has an audience.

I think D&D would be about a thousand times more coherent as a storytelling device if its spellcasting was gutted and reshaped into something more manageable, and some Fighter-with-slightly-more-engaging-mechanics was the yardstick for power. But I just don't think I'm the person to write that. Someone should. Not me.

Or you could just play Torchbearer, Burning Wheel, or Dungeon World I guess.

[Milo v3]

Grammarie really doesn't mix with other characters or with "standard" adventures. My experience with it, with four grammarist characters, was also quite tedious as a GM. The problem was crossing a jungle quickly. Ingame? About ten minutes. Out of game? Over an hour of calculations and a stack of paper withe me just sitting there, waiting. Though that was probably also because everyone was new to it.

Admittedly, this is why I made gramarie classes that can fit into a standard adventuring party better, like anabolist, autopilot, arcwielder, biojack, gunslinger. But generally yeah, gramarie is more an excerise of world-building than something that can be dropped into a standard D&D game. Me and one guy are actually currently working on a remake of gramarie that is it's own system rather than it being somewhat messily part of 3.5e.

[bekeleven]

Never used any of them, but I've heard good things about Radiance and gramerie (though I've also heard that gram requires even more system mastery than most TO wizards).

Mythos I've had nothing but bad experiences with, though that might be who I see using it. I see them get approved, then people show up with 8th level characters throwing mountains and recruiting hundreds of minion followers a day, and usually get really angry whne the GM calls them on the fact that they are completely outclassing everything else submitted by whole orders of magnitude. Like, the last time was a pbp where the guy who started up the idea was going Fighter//paladin of tyranny, and some literally submitted a moon thrower.

I've described Mythos as "You tried, and succeeded, to make something even stupider than a full caster."

I have a whole rant about it somewhere on these forums...

[Eldan]

Admittedly, this is why I made gramarie classes that can fit into a standard adventuring party better, like anabolist, autopilot, arcwielder, biojack, gunslinger. But generally yeah, gramarie is more an excerise of world-building than something that can be dropped into a standard D&D game. Me and one guy are actually currently working on a remake of gramarie that is it's own system rather than it being somewhat messily part of 3.5e.

My problem, I think, was more that I couldn't figure out how to make the characters actually do something. We had a sandbox. Small adventurey town, few political factions, adjacent wasteland full of dangerous stuff and ancient technology to be salvaged.
It went the same all evening. The group finds what they think could be an interesting problem. Then they take out their papers and start writing down formulae for various machines that could hep them and debating the most efficient solutions for tens of minutes at a time. THen they'd go "yeah, this should solve it, we do that" and that was pretty much all that happened. I tried the usual tricks, too, surprises, random encounters, diplomacy, politics, etc.

It was really, really dull to DM since I was basically not part of the game.

[AmberVael]

Grammarie really doesn't mix with other characters or with "standard" adventures. My experience with it, with four grammarist characters, was also quite tedious as a GM. The problem was crossing a jungle quickly. Ingame? About ten minutes. Out of game? Over an hour of calculations and a stack of paper withe me just sitting there, waiting. Though that was probably also because everyone was new to it.

This seems like a pretty accurate observation. On the other hand, as someone who plays a lot of Play By Post, it seems like the PbP medium would be ideal for this- you could get all your calculations and proposed builds done in the fairly standard wait time between posts.

[Milo v3]

It was really, really dull to DM since I was basically not part of the game.

Yeah, it can be ridiculously hard to GM. Personally, me and several other Gramarie people have agreed that it shouldn't actually be played as a standard game at all, instead it should just be all the players (including GM) using gramarie for a while and then, once you guys have made a few tech things you start a normal game with those things in the world. Basically, gramarie is better as a world-building element than to be used in standard play, unless you're using one of my "standard play gramarie classes", which are designed to be used in the above mentioned gramarie'd setting.

Though I should say, I'm surprised they did that much calculation. The only calculations really necessary in my experience are for ELDK to determine speeds.

[Eldan]

Maybe I should have said planning instead of calculations. They were mainly debating ideas, sketching things, talking about how to combine their various ideas.

[Bluydee]

I've described Mythos as "You tried, and succeeded, to make something even stupider than a full caster."

I have a whole rant about it somewhere on these forums...


My TL;DR of mythos is "You set out to build something even stupider than a full caster. Congratulations, you succeeded."

From there half of my complaints are on the classes themselves:

Their abilities are NOT Concise, well-organized, or indexed, at least the ones I've looked at recently.
Half of the mythos I've seen are "Let me invent a subsystem that would normally be the focus of a whole book, you get it at level 6 along with three other ones." I read one yesterday where a level 1 mythos was "You are an Ozodrin", which for the record is by itself one of the highest-powered tioer3s on the board. Also for the record, the class didn't link the Ozodrin anywhere. Gee, I thought this class was only 25000 words, turns out it's actually got another 13k in another user's posts from 2010.
And just a general complaint on the balance point of "This ability lets you (Ex) True Res yourself every time you die unless you drown" and "You gain the aquatic template" being three paragraphs apart, or other stupid "Can't be stopped by anything even if something specifically says it stops this ability" clauses that litter the subsystem.


The other half are on how the classes interact with the petri dish of GitP:

How the classes, when first introduced, all had the least helpful names possible. (What exactly is a castle built of someone's agony, and how does it differ from a castle built of anyone else's agony?) It looks like now they're at least putting the word "Mythos" into the titles. There were a few I opened thinking, "how did a spam thread get fourteen replies without any reports?" So, a lot of my early exposure to the system was unwilling.
How somehow, the idea of lolbonkers non-caster characters has convinced people in the play-by-post forums that tiers under 2 are no longer fun to play. I have a fighter-centric archer build with a dozen prestige dips designed that's never found a home in any game, because anything that starts above level 1 is fighters need not apply, and anything that starts at level 1 dissolves before level 3.
Related: Half of the homebrew approval requests I've seen on PbP are for mythos classes, and I don't have any numerical evidence for this, but I started PbP right around when Mythos were getting popular and I swear the wizards went from 50% optimized Iot7V/SCM, 30% Jenky Fatespinner/Mage of the Arcane Order, and 20% for-fun arcane tricksters and Divine Oracles to 80% Initiates and Shadowcraft Mages (or Wyrm Wizards, or Hathrans, etc.). Sometimes, when I see a mythos class requested for approval on a thread with a novice GM or one that hasn't used the phrase "High-op" anywhere, I suspect that the player is trying to sneak one over on the GM.
These ones are a lot more subjective and, well, self-centered (in that mythos harms my enjoyment of the forums). But if you want to know why I don't like mythos classes, they play a role.

Found it for you, and I respectively disagree with you, but I don't really see the need for the hostility prevalent in how you phrased some of your points, like that snarky TL;DR.

Nowadays, you see Mythos classes requested at most one game in the recruitment forums a month and usually only in high-powered games where everyone plans on playing high-optimization caster gestalts anyways, making it safer for those who want to play some PbP without continent-busting demon monsters. Though I do have to echo all the people with the complaints of people bringing Mythos content into normal games. I think it's great and all, and a welcome piece of homebrew in my group's home games when we don't want to bust out Exalted, but it definitely doesn't mesh well with other non full-caster classes. In particular, my very first system went poorly, as a member of the forums who is now banned would always ask for and try and play Bellators, in games where people were playing ninjas and marshals. It's all in perspective, and it's the same kind of feeling when people are playing paladins and kineticist and someone else wants to play Path of War initiators that blow everyone else out of the water. Is it well-made and fun? Yes. Does it particularly go well with the people trying to play a subpar Avataresque bender who kills themselves everytime they try to do something cool? No.

[Zale]

Quite frankly I love both the Mythos and Gramarie. They're not perfect, but they're highly entertaining.

Mythos tries to capture very interesting narrative concepts in a way that feels very fun. They're very high powered; try to match the power of high tier classes.

Of course they're going to stomp a Fighter//Paladin into the ground.

Gramarie can be terribly broken, because it is a powerful world-building tool. Using classes with full Gramarie access means seceding some, or all, power as a DM. The system is really fun to use to create elements within the setting: A setting with cool magic-tech elements can be really fun to play in, especially when the system behind it is something players could theoretically have access to.

If you play with Gramarie, you need to decide if it' going to be a game about making it, or a game about using it. Those are very different; they have to be treated differently.

As for why I love Gramarie: I can make light sabres. HOW COOL IS THAT?

[Milo v3]

I was wondering how long it'd take for Zale to get here. :smalltongue:

[Zanos]

I like the mythos classes that Xefas wrote himself. I think the Bellator does a really good job of making a fighter character who can be simultaneously good at a lot of different things depending on the situation. Some of the abilities are kinda ridiculous, sure, but I still think the class is overall fairly well designed. While subjective, I find Xefas's writing style and ability descriptions fairly engaging.

The Teramach is ... perhaps less well designed, because it focused on pretty much raw stats and hurting stuff as much as possible. Only so much you can do with barbarian as a base. People think its more powerful than it is because they forget about the restrictions that a lot of Teramach abilities impose, such as not being able to retreat from foes at all if you're in a rage. Beyond the fact that you can't run from a losing encounter, it also makes it fairly difficult to tactically reposition within one. Also to be fair to the class, I'm fairly certain that the throw mountains ability isn't selectable until you reach the highest tier of mythos, which is level 16. And you could already do that without the class by making a (War)Hulking Hurler.

I haven't played the other two he made since they aren't finished. The necromancer one looked fun, if the abilities seemed a little scattered, mostly as a side effect of not being finished, I suppose.

Never bothered with the elementalist.

The Mythos classes I've looked at that aren't by Xefas are...highly variable. Some of them are absolutely horrendous. Some are okay. They lean towards being terrible, though.

[Gnorman]

Gramarie is the most ridiculously ambitious homebrew project that I have ever seen. I can't even begin to fathom how long it took to design everything, and make sure that it was not only well-designed, but internally logically consistent. I have yet to see a piece of homebrew that I am more in awe of, and I have yet to ever play with it, and I doubt I ever will.

The Mythos classes are all intensely awesome as well, absolutely dripping with intriguing flavor, but I never find myself with the opportunity to play them. If I ever played an absurd high level campaign, though, it might be a lot of fun.

I had not seen Tome of Radiance before, but my gut reaction is that it just isn't my style. I tend to gravitate towards whatever the opposite of Magical Girl genre is. Design-wise, it looks a bit complicated, but effective once you grok the system.

Of course, the most balanced and workable bit of homebrew on the forums, in my humble opinion... well, you can see my signature. You get the idea.

[Kazyan]

For the Playground at large, maybe, but for me, no. Unless a piece of homebrew is underwhelming by Playground standards, it's not getting anywhere near my tables, because we're not playing the metagame that those homebrews were designed for.

For some reason, none of the real-time games I've been in have had all of the board's optimization principles apply--and during my PbP career, the only games that did were the absolutely absurd ones that only actually started about half the time and never made it to a second encounter, so they didn't get to demonstrate.

While, in principle, it might be okay to use e.g. Tome of Radiance or something based on the performance of built casters and melee brutes, it has never ever worked that way at my tables, so I wouldn't allow most GitP homebrews that are recognizable by more than a couple of people besides their creators.

Big numbers aren't the measure of power. It doesn't really matter that homebrew tends to have bigger numbers. ...but for some reason, big numbers are the most important indicator of power at my tables. Have you ever played a character with a Spot or Listen modifier in the +20s? It's extremely useful.

Melee can't have nice things, and every other kind of martial is near-useless, so it's very logical to give them very nice upgrades. ...but for some reason, melee is already perfectly serviceable, and archers have the highest survival rate of any character type.

Casters can just cast the correct spell and win, if they aren't being idiots by blasting, so you should totally get something that lets you keep up with PC casters and shut down enemy ones. ...but for some reason, when the guy with the sword gets within 5 feet of an enemy caster, rarely will that caster survive another 6 seconds. For some reason, battlefield control can rarely arrange things in a convenient way, casting save-or-X often means you're wasting your spell slot, and the spells that save the most bacon are the ones where you get to roll some d6s against one guy.

My tables are just weird. Most Playground homebrews would not fit.

[Jormengand]

I don't greatly like gramarie because I feel it would be better as its own game. Mythos... I have to agree with bekeleven on basically every point. Radiance looks cool. I haven't got to play it, but having made a character it seems fine.

Overall, a lot of the homebrew on this forum is such stuff as Sturgeon's Law is made of, and then there's a few bits of it which work and are really cool.

[Fizban]

Tome of Radiance: makes me tear up every time I read it. Plays havoc with some base assumptions the game makes requiring a shift in encounter design/goal setting/monster choices, but awesome. I made a very long post today over here (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?454449-quot-Very-Challenging-quot-encounters-Over-CR-to-compensate-for-no-resource-depletion) trying to help with overcoming those problems. It fairly easy to switch from reading as a player and knowing what you're unstoppable at/afraid of, to DM planning how to keep them under control. I would assume those who say it's not very powerful already face those types of monsters and encounters with higher tier characters as a matter of course, but from the lower perspective it looks a bit daunting.

Mythos: difficult to grasp as much of it's split into different threads and there are many contributors past the original Xefas, but also generally awesome. I can't seem to find if there's a concrete way of gaining mythos points without taking a mythos that gives you a method and I'm not sure they really should be allowed to learn more (I think that's more of a "keeping up with the printed classes" thing), but it's good. I love the narrative empowerment thing, but as others have mentioned above it's pretty disruptive if that's not what you actually want your players to be capable of.

Grammarie, never got into it and it seems they're partway through a major overhaul or something. I expect it's much more complex since the point is you pretty much get blocks of tech you can build into whatever you want, so it's impossible to evaluate without just building every possible machine. And reports here indicate that may take a while.

I'd also plug Tome of the Holy Grail (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?362608) (basically my favorite homebrew ever), Power of Cybernetics (http://www.minmaxboards.com/index.php?topic=8693.0) (he posted a GitP discussion thread which is how I knew about it), and the recent cross-posting of Tome of Ritual Magic (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?369884-Tome-of-Ritual-Magic-Alternate-Magic-System) (that guy put up a bunch more stuff I haven't read yet either), along with countless other classes and supplemental materials. There's only so many PCs in the game, so as long as they're picking stuff that's on par with each other, I'd let them use just about anything I've previously voiced approval for. I'd beg for it even, maybe make it a requirement that everyone use some sort of homebrew. I've not actually had the enjoyment of playing very much DnD, and whenever I see someone suggest a "standard base class X" I die a little inside from all the awesome that's not being used.

[Magikeeper]

What do people think about the various versions of the Ozodrin (Original, Pathfinder, 3.5 updated version, 5E), and the Evolutionist?

---------------------

Opinions:

Mythos: I think I largely agree with Zanos, although I admittedly haven't seen many mythos PCs in action.

Grammarie: I have only delved into grammarie once, but I'd generally agree with Zale and the others on this thread. A game whose players are mostly use grammarie engineering to solve their problems (instead of just using it to make a sweet base and/or the occasional gizmo) is going to become more of a cooperative world building exercise than a normal campaign. The DM isn't likely to enjoy that without a way to join in on all the engineering going on (rival manufacturing society, dmpc, whatever).

ToR: I have made some ToR using PCs, but none that really went anywhere. That said, I generally like it, although there is little reason to take all 20 levels in Champion instead of PrCing out.

Evolutionist: I was very iffy on the evolutionist initially, as it does look pretty nuts at first glance, but after building a PC with it / seeing other people build PCs I suspect it would be fine in a single-class (non-gestalt) game. It has problems in gestalt as it can fill the "passive bonus secondary class" niche way, way too well. In a normal game the evolutionist-side of the crazy gestalt builds I've seen wouldn't be very good by themselves, though. Admittedly, it may be the best 1-level dip ever, if that's an issue (I'd normally consider it an issue but having everyone dip Evolutionist is a lot like letting everyone take +1 LA only better balanced).

Sadly, on the forums evolutionist is basically only seen in gestalt games as the PbP offerings tend to fluctuate between "No homebrew / no complex homebrew" and "I allow everything, game is high level, game is gestalt, you are all filthy rich".

Ozodrin: I am obviously a bit biased regarding the 3.5 update / 5E version, but I did play the original for years and I think it held a lot of potential, the flavor was fantastic, and it was pretty solid mechanically. It did take a bit too long (OOC) to swap features, some of the mechanics had a tendency to become a weird RL time-consuming mini-games, and the high spot / grapple checks - although not causing a problem in any of my games - did seem to be less popular aspects of the class. I suppose the 3.5 update serves as my critique on the original. I've never seen the pathfinder version in action (and haven't played pathfinder).

Tome of Holy Grail and Such: I am unfamiliar with the classes Fizban plugged, so I can't comment on them. :(

[Curmudgeon]

I think Sturgeon's Revelation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_law) applies here as it does generally (with odd exceptions like Hollywood productions in 1939 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_in_film)). You'll find a few useful bits, but mostly what you get is unworkable for one reason or another. (Specific reasons have already been mentioned in this thread, so I'll just stop here.)

[Magikeeper]

Y'know what? I'm going to disagree with the people bringing up Sturgeon. Most of the homebrew on this site is okay. It's not going to revolutionize fun or make your life an endless parade of smiling rainbows, but it's decent when compared to the official stuff. It does tend towards mid/high-op, but the most of the folk in the homebrew section are very much concerned with making their stuff work.

I realize I haven't read the recent flood of homebrew-no-one-commented-on, but the portion of usable stuff is definitely better than 10%.

I suppose if you also consider 90% of the official stuff crap, though, then the law continues to apply to the forum.

[Sacrieur]

It varies wildly. I'm going to agree with Curmudgeon on this, most of it is just not really worthwhile.

I am not a fan of new created subsystems. I think they're too hard to pull off. And even if done well, too complicated to adopt. In short, don't, just work with what there already is.

[Curmudgeon]

I suppose if you also consider 90% of the official stuff crap, though, then the law continues to apply to the forum.
With official base and prestige classes we've got about 1,000 classes available in D&D. I've put together hundreds of characters in the life of 3rd edition D&D, and haven't used more than 10% of the available classes.

Ted Sturgeon was a smart guy.

[Jormengand]

I realize I haven't read the recent flood of homebrew-no-one-commented-on, but the portion of usable stuff is definitely better than 10%.

The thing is, most homebrew goes under the radar because it's bad, so everyone forgets about it.

[Magikeeper]

The thing is, most homebrew goes under the radar because it's bad, so everyone forgets about it.

Eh, the number of times I've looked at a GitP homebrew thread and felt "Eh, it's okay." and moved on is greater than the number of times I've looked at one and felt "Oh wow, this is a disaster, I don't even know where to begin with helping this class" and moved on. Most homebrew, on this site anyway, that don't get any feedback are simply okay. They don't excite anyone, or make them feel driven to post improvements. Bad homebrew often gets people suggesting improvements to it, and if the creator isn't obstinate the homebrew gets fixed. Terrible, unworkable homebrew can get ignored, sure, but I don't think that is very common on this site.

Is most of it worth the effort of adding it to your game? Nah. But if someone at the table wanted to bring Gitp homebrew X in would that be okay? Sure. It might need some tweaks but it'll probably be fine.

I suppose I more oppose the idea that most of the homebrew is actively toxic/unworkable/etc instead of being just meh. Curmudgeon's views are consistent with this, I think, he just used the word "unworkable" and got me riled up. :P

[Kymme]

I like all three of those subsystems, but they all have different fundamental assumptions and aren't appropriate for all types of games.

I'm a pretty big fan of Mythos classes in particular, but I'd never let somebody use them in a game where the rest of the party was of a lower power level. My breakdown is:



Wizard
Bard
Adept


Bellator (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?336731-quot-Today-is-victory-over-yourself-Tomorrow-is-your-victory-over-lesser-men-quot)
Warblade
Fighter



Any of these classes can be fun, but they've got to be played alongside classes of the same power level. That's just common sense, to me.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I've generally been pretty impressed. I'm not familiar with the specific subsystems in question, but there are some very talented and creative people working over there. I'd say that the average homebrew here is at least as good as a random bit of WotC published material, if not better.

Optimization floors do tend to be higher than WotC's, admittedly- more Warblade then Fighter- but that's not necessarily a bad thing. And you're a lot less likely to run into a Druid or Truenamer.