Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 21 - Homebrew 101 - Ghoulash

Episode Date: May 17, 2020

With a mishmash of homebrew topics remaining, none of which warranted a full episode, Jeremy throws them all into the cooking pot and makes an episode out of it.  Topics covered include getting player help for worldbuilding, the 3 Hex method, and lessons learned about adding new rules to existing systems. For more info about the 3 Hex method, see this great article. 

This week's episode of the Taking20 Podcast is brought to you by the Doggy Style Animal Salon. Sometimes the best way to get ahead is to start from behind. I know this is the type of highbrow content you've come to expect from the Taking20 Podcast, so welcome to episode 21, Homebrew 101, Homebrew Goulash. Before anyone emails, I know that's not how goulash is spelled. It's a pun on... never mind. If you have some feedback for us, please send it to feedback at taking20podcast.com. Good, bad, or meh, I'd love to hear from you. So I was putting together this entire series of homebrewing, and it's a huge undertaking putting together this entire series of homebrewing,

and it's a huge undertaking when we start talking about homebrewing worlds, campaigns, adventures, items, etc. And it's a difficult topic to cover adequately. In reviewing my previous episodes, I realized I have about eight-ish other homebrewing topics I wanted to discuss, but they don't fit squarely into any of the other episodes, and none of these are big enough to warrant an episode of their own, so I wanted to go through these eight items very, very quickly here. Please forgive the mishmash and hodgepodge, or if you will, goulash. You see, it's funny because... Never mind. Number one, if you have a great idea for homebrew, before you start designing

everything from scratch, see if someone else has done it. If so, use that as your basis for your build, or maybe even use it wholesale, and then maybe give them some credit if you actually wind up improving it. Maybe send it back to them with some feedback. Two, let your players help build your world, but don't be afraid to say no. Ask your players for details about his or her character's backstory, and then use some of those details to help fill your world. If the player wants something or has something in their backstory that doesn't quite fit with your world, ask them to adjust. They'll almost always be willing to do so.

Then you can place that character's backstory in your world and have it fit well with established lore that you've created. Another thing you can do to let players help build your world is to ask them for the names of new locations and new people that you run into. It gives the players buy-in, but just so you know, it can result in, let's just say, some interesting names. Across this bridge is the ruins of the elven village of... What do you think? What's its name? Um... Poopville? Poopville.

And what happened to this town? Why did they all die? Dysentery. Poopville, once the home of 175 elven souls, all lost to a bad case of the trots. What a shithole. Three. Always be able to write down thoughts as they come to you, because believe me, they're going to come to you at random times throughout the day.

You may be at work, you may be at home, you may be about to go to sleep, you may be on the toilet, and a great idea comes to you for your world. Back in the old days, back when dinosaurs thundered across the plains of North America, we used to have to keep notebooks in our pocket. These days, keep them online. Always available. Use some sort of service that makes that text file, documentation, word doc, whatever available to you so that you can edit it anytime you need to. Four, there's a great blog post called Just Three Hexes by Michael Shorten. In it, he asserts that you can start homebrewing with the smallest of smalls, just three hexes on a big map. So imagine an empty map with a city where the players are starting. You just pick three hexes around that city and populate it with possible adventure ideas.

And the reason we picked hexes, by the way, in first edition, every overland map was drawn with hexes instead of grid. It made north-south easy, but east-west, you wound up having to straddle hexes and things got messy. Now most game systems support overland travel through hexes or grid or even theater of the mind. So enough about bad old days. Let's start talking about now. Same theory, by the way, holds if you

use grids instead of hexes. So you have a town. Use three sentences to describe that town. The town of Port New Rock is located on the highest point overlooking the river Stead. It is home to vampires led by a Mrs. Adwell. The town grows rare plants which are of great importance to the people of Harren and its financial success. Three quick sentences about the town. Now you can start building some adventures within the town if you so chose. Now select three hexes around that town or three grid spots around that town. Use some existing dungeons that you have or maybe re-flavor them a little bit to give them purpose and some adventure in those hexes. For each hex, maybe you have two to three sentences per hex. Maybe the first hex is where the bloodbutt goblins live. They now have a new leader called Crackletooth who wants to make a name for himself.

Another hex has a bridge over a small river with bandits who collect tolls to anyone who crosses the bridge. The bandits are two to three experienced thieves with the rest being farmhands out of work thanks to a local crop plague. The third hex is the ruined city of Falrath, died out to plague 150 years ago. Locals say the city is cursed, but the city actually has clues to the dangers that lie beyond. I'll put a link to the webpage in the description and on the resources page in case you want to go there and read more about it. To this point, I've primarily focused on homebrewing worlds, but there are some more generic tips that could apply to items, feats, rules, etc. For example, number five. When it comes to homebrewing rules,

if you want to add a new rule to the existing system, keep it simple. Complexity is the enemy of fun. The more complicated your homebrew rule set is, the less fun it will be to roll out to players. So, if you have an idea for a new rule, here's what I would suggest. Write down your idea in a document by itself. Step away from it for a few hours. Now sit down, try to write the same thing, but simplify it. Then step away from it for a couple more hours. Now come back to it and try to write it even

simpler still. My suggestion is you think very carefully before homebrewing new rules into the system. And if you do add new rules and you do start testing with it and it does kind of unbalance things, don't be afraid to back it out. If it creates a balance issue, if the players don't enjoy it and you wind up not enjoying running it, any of those three, you pull it back out of the game. The other thing you do is you only actually roll it out after extensive testing. Otherwise, you wind up with players with laser rifles who raffle stomp every encounter and no one's having fun anymore.

Number six, like good Cajun cooking, put a little something of you in everything you make. Homebrewed solutions in general should be something that you think should be in the rules, but aren't. Maybe an aspect to an RPG that you enjoy. Do you love weapon histories and think that magical weapons should be these legendary things and should have at least a brief history all their own? Homebrew it. Add it to every single magical weapon that they find. Whenever the players cast the Identify spell or whatever the system equivalent action is, give it a quick history. Please note, quick history. Not two pages, single spaced,

eight point font about everything this sword has ever experienced. One sentence, for example, this sword belonged to Karlak the Impotent. He took out his rage on half the Western world. Instead of weapon histories, do you like monsters? Get to homebrewing. Do you want to make some goblins that can breathe lava? Some basilisks that can be tamed and can use their gaze attack at will rather than constantly? Yeah, that sounds good. Maybe a, I don't know, hyper-intelligent immortal mimics who aren't predators

but are slowly steering history towards some benevolent future. Sounds great. Would love to hear the story about that one. Rule seven, make sure the items, feats, or character options that you homebrew are of the same power level as similar items at similar levels. For example, if you homebrew a trait in Pathfinder, most traits tend to give, for example, a plus one constant bonus or a conditional plus two bonus. So make sure your traits do the same thing. Power creep is a real issue here because it can be tempting to give the players more and more and better and better, but it can easily make the game turn boring. make the game turn boring. You may be tempted to give your first level character a plus five vorpal, flaming burst, life-stealing, intelligent longsword that communicates via calliope music. But that's going to be so far out of whack with a power level a third level character should have

that that sword would be the key to solving just about every single problem they have. So just keep things within a certain power level. Make sure you try the homebrewed rule or skill or item or feat in a solo session. Make up a party of four characters, give the homebrewed item to the characters, roll some combat encounters, don't fudge the rolls, let's see how it works out. If it works well, try it in a one-shot with other players. Believe me, they're going to think of ways to exploit the rule change that you never did. Dovetailing off that topic, number eight, playtest, playtest, playtest, and then playtest some more. Once you've playtested it and you've

playtested it within a one-shot, maybe you have the characters playtest it with a longer adventure. At that point, maybe you post it on the internet and ask for feedback. Most importantly, whether you're talking about people you know who you game with or people on the internet who are anonymous and can be complete dickwads, don't take any criticism personally. There are a lot of people on the internet that want to help, but a lot of times their helping comes off as personal attacks, if you take it that way. It's not intended that way. Okay, I take that back. I've been on the internet before. Some of

the things that people post may be personal attacks, but the vast majority of people, I would argue, are wanting to help you improve this homebrewed item. Put it out there. Ask for feedback. Don't take the responses personally if somebody doesn't like it. Then when it's ready, maybe you give it a shot. Homebrewing is so much fun. It really can be. It scratches creative itch. It can be inspiring and rewarding when done right, but it does need to be done with care. Otherwise, you wind up giving one character the ability to use a gun while everyone else uses a bow and arrow can completely break your game. The example I would use, and I say this with all the love in the world, there's a podcast called

Glass Cannon, and one of the characters is a gunslinger, and it looks like he comes from a long line of former dwarven gunslingers. I won't spoil the history or whatever. He is the only creature they've run into after almost five full books of an adventure path that uses a gun. And he is also, by the way, the only character in the party that has survived all five books. By no means am I criticizing the DM's choice to allow a gunslinger in that campaign. All I'm saying is that if you have one character or one set of people who has one set of rules, and the rest of the universe is under a completely different set of rules, it can be game-breaking if

you're not careful. This is going to be a very short episode, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. It gives us time to listen to other podcasts and the like. Tune in next time where I talk about alignments and how to role play them. Thank you so much for listening to Taking 20, episode 21, the ending of the Homebrew 101 series, Homebrew Goulash. I once again want to thank our sponsor, the Doggy Style Animal Salon. Remember, more pillows means better comfort. I'm Jeremy Shelley, and here's hoping that your next game is your best game.