Homebrewing 5e for my custom campaign setting

[Penelomeeg]

I'm planing on doing a homebrewed urban fantasy campaign and converting 5e to fit the setting (please no suggestions of other systems, I know there are ones that would likely work for this setting but me and my gaming group have decided on 5e). Rather than do things like elves, dwarves etc I'm going with more paranormal themed races. Vampires, Werewolves, Witches etc. The setting is very much focused on these races existing, being publicly known about, and acting as a sort of "down trodden" minority in the setting. I'm taking some inspiration from media sources such as Being Human, Tokyo Ghoul, Sorcery 101 and Anita Blanche.

My hope is to run a low combat roleplay/story heavy game that focuses more on skills, race, and character background mechanically than classes. However I'm at a bit of a loss. I want to run a very dark, gritty, and realistic style campaign. Where things like starting a shoot out with the local gang can easily have deadly consequences, and don't want any "godly powerful" characters happening among the PCs that can one shot any civilian vampire they run into. What are some options? Homebrewing classes, or putting level caps are things I've considered along with either simplifying classes or doing away with them altogether and just giving out more skills and defined racial/background benefits to players.

I'd also appreciate any feedback on general tips for doing this sort of world building or campaign planning whether from personal experience or understanding of game mechanics. My goal is to create something where the players have a completely interactive detailed story with multiple routes and feel as though their characters are real people and not just PCs to throw at a boss until it dies. I'd be happy for even just general DM tips to help achieve this.

Thank you to anyone who offers advice and I really appreciate the help!

[Laserlight]

My hope is to run a low combat roleplay/story heavy game that focuses more on skills, race, and character background mechanically than classes. However I'm at a bit of a loss. I want to run a very dark, gritty, and realistic style campaign. Where things like starting a shoot out with the local gang can easily have deadly consequences, and don't want any "godly powerful" characters happening among the PCs that can one shot any civilian vampire they run into. What are some options? Homebrewing classes, or putting level caps are things I've considered along with either simplifying classes or doing away with them altogether and just giving out more skills and defined racial/background benefits to players.

I'd also appreciate any feedback on general tips for doing this sort of world building or campaign planning whether from personal experience or understanding of game mechanics. My goal is to create something where the players have a completely interactive detailed story with multiple routes and feel as though their characters are real people and not just PCs to throw at a boss until it dies. I'd be happy for even just general DM tips to help achieve this.

Thank you to anyone who offers advice and I really appreciate the help!

You're asking several different things each worth an extended thread. Quick answers:
a) I know you've decided on 5e, but you also want to minimize or eliminate character classes. Those are incompatible desires--by the time you take all the class stuff out of D&D and rebalance it, it's not D&D. Decide which one is more important to you.
b) There's a worldbuilding forum under Homebrew
c) For the "completely interactive detailed story" bit...the most important thing you can do is have players who actually want to roleplay instead of treating the game as a tactical exercise.
i) pick a system which is more oriented toward social encounters than D&D is.

[Clone]

Its great to see you want to create things that are already there.
In relation to the classes, I'd suggest maybe re-skinning/ re-flavoring some of the classes. That way a Barbarian would actually be a werewolf, and a Wizard a Witch. When making things yourself it tends to be easier to chance something via description rather than mechanics.

For the races, there are some more paranormal related races in the Unearthed Arcana articles, such as Changelings, Shifters and Revenants off the top of my head. The articles are Gothic Heroes and Eberron for those at least.

If you want to have serious consequences for your party, simply have the NPCs be of a high level, or at least on equal terms with the party. That way if they want to randomly attack people, there is the chance they may die in the process. I'd also suggest have an example early on of what happens if they aren't careful, so they know exactly what they are getting themselves into whenever violent encounters come around.

Level-wise, have them gain XP via talking themselves out of situations, or have them gain levels due to completed quests. That way they don't feel they need to kill anything and everything they come across to become stronger, and it tends to result in more creative approaches to situations (and through my experience with talking to various DMs, usually less violent approaches too). Reward them in various ways when they solve problems this way too.

Overall the best way to have a fun RP heavy campaign would be to make sure the players want to play something like that. If they're used to being murder-hobos in previous campaigns, they may not take too kindly to this style of story. If they are all for it though, that is half the battle won.

[Christopher K.]

Consider rereading your DMs Guide for inspiration on making combat riskier; it suggests house rules such as long rests not recovering hit points and instead only providing hit dice, and lasting injuries as results of combat.

As for paranormal races, I'd follow the suggestion to re-fluff classes and race options since that way you have mechanically sound options which represent the population of your setting, without having to homebrew much of anything.

My sister is running a modern campaign using 5e rules, basically replacing crossbows and bows with different firearms and building characters using classes emphasizing their story-relevant abilities(for instance, I'm playing an elf monk on paper, but he's a refluffed Soviet-era psychic weapons experiment; he doesn't sleep and is unnervingly fast and coordinated, but otherwise appears to be another human in an all human setting).

[lunaticfringe]

Try out E6 for 5e. Heard it works better as E8 but I have no Empirical experience with it. It should limit the power level of the game.

[Knaight]

I'm planing on doing a homebrewed urban fantasy campaign and converting 5e to fit the setting (please no suggestions of other systems, I know there are ones that would likely work for this setting but me and my gaming group have decided on 5e). Rather than do things like elves, dwarves etc I'm going with more paranormal themed races. Vampires, Werewolves, Witches etc. The setting is very much focused on these races existing, being publicly known about, and acting as a sort of "down trodden" minority in the setting. I'm taking some inspiration from media sources such as Being Human, Tokyo Ghoul, Sorcery 101 and Anita Blanche.
Altering races is easy - the 5e races generally represent a pretty negligible amount of mechanics for the character, building some new ones instead is not a big deal. There is the matter of these races generally being individually more powerful than humans, and they tend not to fit the downtrodden minority role too well, but setting wise that's doable. Mechanically I would recommend keeping classes, and giving these races racial classes which they then multiclass out of. A vampire gets 3 Vampire levels just for being a vampire, and that makes them dangerous. If you're using the bits of vampire lore about how older vampires or those generationally closer to the original vampire are stronger, that's what higher levels in the Vampire class is for. Having witches as a distinct creature type does suggest that magical classes need to be clamped down on and/or heavily revamped, so I'd probably use a modified Sorcerer for the Witch class, and have them routinely have multiple levels. Werewolves, ghouls, trolls, etc. generally fit the free levels formula pretty well. The other really big thing is hit points, and I'll get into that below.


IMy hope is to run a low combat roleplay/story heavy game that focuses more on skills, race, and character background mechanically than classes. However I'm at a bit of a loss. I want to run a very dark, gritty, and realistic style campaign. Where things like starting a shoot out with the local gang can easily have deadly consequences, and don't want any "godly powerful" characters happening among the PCs that can one shot any civilian vampire they run into. What are some options? Homebrewing classes, or putting level caps are things I've considered along with either simplifying classes or doing away with them altogether and just giving out more skills and defined racial/background benefits to players.
Insisting on using 5e for this is really making this a lot harder, particularly if you're going to do something drastic like get rid of classes. You're basically working to create a campaign that is everything 5e was explicitly designed not to be. 5e was designed to be heavily class based with classes being the defining aspect of a character, 5e was designed for characters to get very powerful and for that power to come in the form of getting much more resistant to harm, 5e was designed for a limited competence range outside of combat that actually inhibits realistic levels of skills on both the low and high end. There's a few things in particular that stand out though.

Inflating HP: 5e characters start with a certain amount of HP and quickly get vastly more than that. A character in 5e doesn't advance from 8 HP to 13 over a campaign, they advance from 8 to 80. It's the primary bonus of leveling, and it's going to be the root cause of a number of other design features that work against you here. It's also antithetical to grit and realism. HP is fine as an abstraction for more realistic games, but it should probably be mostly static. Look at GURPS or L5R.
Low Fluctuation Combat: 5e combat is designed such that most attacks will connect, but when they do it's generally not that big of a deal - against an equivalent enemy it usually takes about 3 hits to take them down, and one long rest and they're all gone. Inferior enemies take a whole bunch more. Compare that to a system where it's assumed that you have more active defenses that usually work, but them failing means you just got hit with a deadly weapon and that gives you problems. Against inferior enemies the defenses work even better, but there's still the risk that something goes wrong. Again, look at GURPS here, where getting shot by a lousy shot is still getting shot.
Restricted Proficiency: In accordance with an HP-increase-first design, proficiency was largely flattened. This is exactly what you don't want to do. A bigger gap between experts and novices makes hard things harder and easy things easier, and that's exactly what you want. Tearing up the proficiency system a bit also helps put more variety in the non combat side of characters, which you want to do.
Irrelevance of Size: Size is a surprisingly small deal in D&D in general. Yes, bigger things tend to start with more hit dice. Yes, there's some attribute variation. However, that HP gap closes and there's not really any mechanics in place for size just making one tougher. GURPS is a good example here again - you will never have as many HP as an elephant, even if you somehow are badass enough to fight an elephant. The scale mechanic in Fudge is an even better example - everyone is on the same wound track, but there's a numerical scale that is approximately the log1.5 of mass, and big scale matters. Shooting a tank with a rifle is just never going to get stuff done. For a game where you want people to fight massive dragons with a sword, 5e's design makes sense. For a more grounded urban fantasy game. Just no.
The Whole Magic System: This is just a wash. Reliable routine spells, spell casters with lots of spells, the spells themselves, nothing transfers well. Magic systems in general are very setting specific and setting defining, and D&D has a magic system that is specific to the wrong thing.
Combat Experience: Experience systems in a game serve two main roles. One is straight up simulation - in real life people get better at things, so the game should have a way to model that. The other is as an incentive for the players to have their characters do the things the game is about. The existing system is a terrible simulation that does a fantastic job directing the game away from what you want it to be about. Ditch it.


I'm not saying use GURPS - I can make a bulleted list about reasons not to do that too - but it does have a lot of good examples of how to design for more grit.


II'd also appreciate any feedback on general tips for doing this sort of world building or campaign planning whether from personal experience or understanding of game mechanics. My goal is to create something where the players have a completely interactive detailed story with multiple routes and feel as though their characters are real people and not just PCs to throw at a boss until it dies. I'd be happy for even just general DM tips to help achieve this.
I'd shy away from this goal, and instead aim for a detailed world that can respond to a bunch of different actions from which a story is allowed to emerge. Thinking in terms of narratives has its place, but it also has a lot of pitfalls, some of which are specific to exactly what you're trying to run. As for the people and not disposable battle-pawns bit, that's on you and the players and not the system. The bit about combat experience still applies - you can incentivize something like displaying the character traits of a character over winning fights - but generally this comes down to the people involved in the game.

Aside from that, there is some general advice I have on world building and campaign plotting. Make a bunch of interesting NPCs and factions in the city of the campaign, connect them to each other in various ways, have the players build PCs that are also connected to them, then figure out how they respond to the setting as it changes. What conflicts are there between them, how do they react to what the PCs do, so on and so forth.

[Sabeta]

I. Races
Homebrewing races is extremely easy. In my opinion, if you're throwing away old races then all we need to do is balance new races against Human.
Human: +2 to Two Ability Scores of your choice, or +1 to all. +1 Skill of your choice
Vampire: +2 Cha, +1 Ability Score of your choice. +2 Skills
Werewolf: +2 Con, +1 Ability Score of your choice. +2 Skills

Don't worry about the Races not having anything else unique right now.

II. Classes
Your race is now your Class. Pick and choose various abilities from different classes and/or spells to create your new class features. I can definitely see Werewolves grabbing Barbarian Rage to stand in for their transformation, for example. I don't know the full scope of the races you plan to implement, but doing things this way will help build a cultural identity for your players while simultaneously getting rid of the pesky class system. Don't forget create multiple routes for your races too. Vampire can easily play a lot like a Rogue with bites instead of Sneak Attacks, but stylizing certain spells to become Hemomancy is equally cool. Oh, and I would recommend avoiding giving your players full spell access. Just create a stock list of re-fluffed spells that can be used at-will by certain race choices. For that reason, avoid anything crazy like "Blood Fireball", and stick to more subtle spells like Mist Form.

III. Equipment
Because you said you wanted a low-combat setting, make sure that the Classes list of powers include as few combat options as possible. However, for this reason you'll want to redo weapons. I suggest adding powerful guns. If you really want to give the non-human races the "downtrodden" feel, make Humans the exclusive user of Silver Bullets. I think that's pretty much it. Stronger weapons will make up for a lack of class features, and giving those weapons to bad guys will make your players more careful.

On that subject though, since Race=Class now, enemy PCs all have class levels. Tada, now you don't have to worry about OP PCs. You can hard limit levels if you want to, but keep in mind that D&D is at its core a Roleplaying Game, and while RP can be fun D&D is fundamentally about Dungeons and Dragons. You NEED some form of progression system to keep players invested week after week, and level ups are a very simple and effective tool for that.

IV. World/Setting
Seed the world with good ideas. Then try to mess it up. Here's an example from my setting:
At some point in history, undead started becoming normal. Not only that, but they retain memories when they die. In the PCs kingdom, the capitol is entirely undead due to sheer numbers helping them win a war ages ago. They've formed a fairly idyllic society that's basically communism where nobody ever wants for anything, and where perfume is the only real product of value.

Sounds like a pretty neat setting, right? Well now we mess it up. The main plot (and if any of my players are reading this, stop now or forever hold your peace) involves an evil shadow organization trying to convince the undead nation to declare war on semi-hostile neighbors. The ideal outcome of this is to create a lot of death which will power up the true final boss some more, while in the short term activating an ancient superweapon for nefarious deeds.

My players are free to explore that setting however they want, but no matter what they do they'll eventually uncover plot threads which leads them to the main story. Right now literally everything they've done has involved Kobolds. They'll eventually learn why Kobolds are so relevant right now, and when they attempt to fix the problem they'll learn some thing that a advances the plot and draws them to the next city. (while also probably taking care of the Kobolds).

What I'm getting at, is it's okay to write a story that your players follow. Just make sure to write that story in such a way that they feel like it was their own choice that lead them along it. Basically, give your players a dozen or so roads that lead to Point A, and from there another dozen or so that leads to B, and so on until they've finished a story. One last thing about Session planning.

A Plot, B Plot. Take a look at television. Most shows divide their time between two stories. A good example is Mythbusters. Adam and Jamie had their Myths that they would work on. So would Kerri and friends. Two plots running in parallel. Make sure you do that. The most rewarding way for your players is to find a way to weave someone's backstory into the plot and let them shine for a little while. The simpler way is to just write a short story that lets you take care of along the way to your next objective. For example, if you're heading to the Mafia Leader's house to take him out, consider dropping in a side story about a family whose house was ruined by the Mafia, and let your players help them out in whatever ways they can.

I kind of started to ramble on a bit there at the end, but I hope I made myself clear enough to be helpful. Good luck.

[Grod_The_Giant]

I'm planing on doing a homebrewed urban fantasy campaign and converting 5e to fit the setting...My hope is to run a low combat roleplay/story heavy game that focuses more on skills, race, and character background mechanically than classes. However I'm at a bit of a loss. I want to run a very dark, gritty, and realistic style campaign.
Okay. Well... that is unfortunately not what 5e is good at. 5e's scaling is weird, especially for combat; you don't get much better skill-wise, but you get a heck of a lot tougher. So, uh...

I'd start by doubling Proficiency and halving hit points across the board. Set AC to (some base number; 8 would be consistent with how 5e usually works, but 10 might be better for what you want)+Proficiency+Dex, with armor providing damage reduction/resistance instead-- I imagine for a modern game it's going to be a rarer thing than standard fantasy. Use the "long rests just restore a few hit dice" rule that was mentioned earlier.

Now you have much more lethal combat, with a much sharper divide between higher and lower leveled critters.