What is homebrew?

Broadly speaking, homebrew refers to content that is meant to be used with an existing game, such as D&D, but is not official, published, or sanctioned by them in any way.

A more narrow approach is that it is content created by a player or a DM to be used in a specific campaign or ongoing game.

Good, Bad, or…?

Homebrew covers a wide range, and that’s why we’re looking at this as a series this week. Here’s a general synopsis of my thoughts:

Good homebrew is functional, balanced, applies unique elements of a character to their functional gameplay mechanics, and makes the game world a more interesting place.

Bad homebrew is usually broken, unbalanced, gives an inordinate amount of power, often without regard to character, and removes much of the risk, and thus adventure, from the world.

Side note: I’m going to be talking a lot about balance in the next few articles and that’s not something I’ve given much definition to. I will talk about balance more in depth in the near future, but what you need to know right now is that balance means it’s not going to upset gameplay significantly beyond what is expected. Overpowered means tipping things too far in favour of a player, underpowered tips towards the creatures and NPCs.

Examples:

I’m going to borrow a couple of the homebrew subclasses listed on dndbeyond.com. I’m only going to look at early level features for the sake of brevity and example.  

First, something that I think is a reasonably good example: Circle of Seas Druid.

Underwater Affinity: When you take this subclass at 2nd level, you gain a connection to water. You gain a swimming speed equal to your walking speed. Being underwater has no affect on you attacks or spell casting. These benefits do not carry over into beast form.

So you gain a swim speed, which isn’t unusual for a class or race, so it’s not an overpowered ability; and You can cast spells underwater. We’re not told if this means that we ignore verbal components or if we are able to speak (but not breathe) underwater, but again, compared to other 2^nd level druid abilities, it’s not really that much. It gives us a flavour (sea druid) and function (swim speed and underwater casting).

Circle Forms: At 2nd level, you are able to transform into sea creatures with your Wild Shape. You ignore the restriction for Swimming Speed in the wild shape table. In addition, whenever you transform into a creature with a swim speed, you gain temporary hit points equal to your Druid level.

This is a bit wordier than necessary; essentially, we are just ignoring the swim speed restriction for druid wildshapes, but not the CR limit of 1/4. Additionally, the temporary hit points aren’t going to be all that significant, but they will afford a bit more survivability. When we contrast this with the circle of the moon, who can wildshape into a CR 1 beast as a bonus action, this really isn’t overpowered at all.

I would define this as good homebrew, since it affords the opportunity to do things most other characters can’t (explore underwater and change into creatures that can breathe water), without providing any abilities that would routinely unbalance the game.

Next I want to look at one example of what I would consider bad homebrew: Aberrant Origin Sorcerer.

At 1st level, you choose one type of aberration as your ancestor. 
Aboleth: You gain telepathy for 120 ft.
Balhannoth: You have advantage on all ability checks to see through illusions of 1st Level or higher. Illusions created by cantrips are seen through automatically. Illusions not created by spells are not subjected to this effect.  
Beholder: You have advantage on all perception checks. In addition, you cannot be surprised unless there is some sort of visual impairment, such as darkness or the blinded condition. 
Cloaker: You have advantage on Stealth checks. In addition, you can use the hide action as a bonus action. 
Gibbering Mouther: You are immune to acid damage, as well as the poisoned condition.
Illithid: You are immune to the Charmed condition.
Morkoth: You gain the ability to breath air and water, as for the amphibious trait. In addition, you gain a swim speed that is equal to your movement speed +20.
Slaad: As a bonus action, you can regain hit points equal to 1 plus your Charisma modifier. 
Star Spawn: You have immunity to psychic damage.

You can speak, read, and write Deep Speech. Additionally, whenever you make a Charisma check when interacting with aberrations, your proficiency bonus is doubled if it applies to the check.

OK. So first off, this is messy. There’s eight different sub-subclasses to pick from at level one. Secondly, from a lore perspective, I don’t even know how most of these would work, since beholders, gibbering mouthers, illithids, slaadi, and star spawn don’t really procreate in the usual ways, so how could you have one as an ancestor?

Let’s look at the power level of some of these abilities:
Aboleth: We’re not given details on the nature of the telepathy (do we need a shared language?), but let’s assume that it’s the same as the awakened mind feature of the great old one warlock. Balanced.
Balhannoth: So this is…almost truesight? At level one? Overpowered.
Beholder: This seems confused: should the perception checks only be those related to sight, since that seems to be how the immunity to surprise works? Powerwise it’s a mix of a barbarian’s danger sense and the alert feat. Overpowered.
Cloaker: One level in sorcerer, then everything in rogue? Or anything else just to get the bonus action stealth? Advantage on all stealth checks and a rogue skill. Overpowered.
Gibbering Mouther: Immunity to a damage type and a condition. Oddly enough, if immune to the poisoned condition, why not the damage as well? Overpowered.
Illithid: Immune to a condition doesn’t seem OP to you? At level one? BTW, illithids aren’t immune to charm, so you’re actually more powerful than they are. Overpowered
Morkoth: Amphibious, and if you run a level of this with a tabaxi monk you could swim 320 feet in a single turn (or 58.5 km/h). Seems legit. If you can swim faster than an actual morkoth it’s probably overpowered.
Slaad: A healing potion would use an action to regain 2d4+2 hp (4-10), but as a bonus action you can potentially regain 4-6 every turn (assuming a CHA mod of 3-5). Way overpowered at lower levels, probably balanced for mid-game or higher.
Star Spawn: If you add one level of sorcerer to your path of the totem warrior barbarian, you can have resistance to all forms of damage except psychic, which you are immune to. No power build exploits here…Overpowered at level one.

Adding deep speech and advantages to communicate with aberrations is appropriate for a level one trait.

Fixing Broken Homebrew

I don’t want to rant on whoever came up with the aberrant origin too much. It does have some interesting potential both with RP and function. It attempts to capture the spirit of D&D, it just misses on the function aspect.
Instead, let’s look at how we can take something that’s a tad broken and move forward with it.

Simplify

Instead of a broad category of aberrations, pick one. Let’s go with illithid. We could pick any of them really, with a similar background story, or for that matter, we could apply the same concepts to creating almost any hybri

RP wise, let’s assume some sort of infusion, rather than ancestry, maybe a wizard experimented on you or your family, or you escaped from illithids who were doing strange things to you. Now we can move forward with a specific focus (Illithids), rather than a broad focus (aberrations).

Balance

Probably the easiest way to check balance is to compare with published subclass features first. Then ask if the trait or ability is going to significantly alter the course of an average game. As a rule, early abilities should give flavour to our character’s uniqueness, as well as a particular (but not overpowering) combat advantage of some sort. Mid-game abilities are obviously going to be more powerful and are likely to include significant damage abilities, flight, or other highly powered advantages. Late-game abilities are what enables characters to fight ancient dragons, demon lords, and so on, and will provide the most powerful buffs and attacks in the game.

Example:

Using existing sorcerous origins as a guideline, we can tweak a few things to create a sorcerous origin that ties us to illithids, makes use of their abilities, provides specific combat advantages, and gives us a lot of room to role play something genuinely different. I have only done the first couple features as an example.

Level one: Illithid Intellect: You gain telepathy out to a range of 120’. You don’t need to share a language with a creature, but they do need to understand at least one language for you to communicate with them in this way.

You have advantage on attack rolls and targets of your spells have disadvantage on saving throws when you cast an enchantment or a spell that deals psychic damage.

Level six: Psychic Affinity: When you deal psychic damage with a spell, you can add your Charisma modifier to the damage. At the same time you can spend 1 sorcery point to attempt to charm, frighten, or stun a creature. This ability does not benefit from your Illithid Intellect trait.

If you’re a DM, it’s up to you if you allow homebrew or not. If you do, work with your players to build something functional, balanced, and fun.