Aug 31, 2008
RPG Carnival #2 – Homebrew
Over at The Flumph Sanctuary the second round of the RPG Carnival has just started. Get your entries in by the last friday of September if you want to be included in this one. I think thats the 26th if you want to get the details right.
Homebrew means many different things to many different people. Some might take the simplest house rule to qualify to be called homebrew and some might need the entire system to have been built from scratch. Personally if it hasn’t been completely written by yourself I’d never even think of referring to it as homebrew. I’ve seen campaigns where 90% of the rules had been fiddled with and it was still always just thought of as house rules.
With this in mine I’ve only ever seen two homebrew systems in my gaming career. The first was written by my friend who had played AD&D but wanted to play in a Warhammer 40k universe. Almost overnight he managed to write up a system that was as simple stat-wise as AD&D but still felt like it was meant for W40k. We had 4 different classes and almost all of them were variants of Space Marines with the only other choice available being a Titan pilot. With five stats, a handful of skills and the equipment list procured from the Rogue Trader rulebook it’s bordering on not counting towards my definition of homebrew but we were 14 years old at the time so I think we can be forgiven.
The other system I never got the pleasure to play or even read the rulebook. It was however a big part of my gaming days at university purely on amount of conversation it generated. On my one and only night at Glasgow University’s Gaming Society most of the talk coming from behind our group was about one of the GM’s systems that he’d been writting for the last year or so. He had a bound copy of the rules that he seemed to take everywhere with him which was completely handwritten and he was always going on about his maps and cards. Everything that wasn’t in the rulebook he had laminated so they wouldn’t wear away. It didn’t matter where you went to play there would always be someone passing by, if it wasn’t actually one of your players that is, that would make a comment about this guys system. The strange thing about it though was that you never ever heard of anyone actually playing the game. You got the impression that if he ever did run campaigns it was behind closed doors and invite only. By the end of the year the stories changed and apparently he’d found a publisher. To this day I’ve still never found out if it ever was published but if it was does that mean it was no longer to be regarded as homebrew?
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Welcome to the carnival! Too bad we missed you for round 1 – one of the big benefits of carnivals is to spread the links around so everyone can get some more exposure, traffic, and maybe chime in themselves. Glad to have you on board for round 2!
Homebrew for me has never been about thew crunch – but more about the fluff instead. Sure I’ve had my fair share of house rules, but maybe I’m not brave enough to write up my own rules from scratch. heh…
Most recently I ran a homebrew Forgotten Realms campaign – yeah… wtf is that? Basically I took a completely undeveloped area of the FRCS setting and built my own homebrew setting with that area: so it was a homebrew campaign on a local level, but we still had a fair dose of annoying dual-wielding dark elf drizzt ripoffs….
My definition of Homebrew is a little different, as I am also a programmer that is currently making a “homebrew” game for my DS. Since I use existing technology and code libraries to make homebrew video games, I think of homebrew table top games in the same fashion.
In this day and age, it would be nigh impossible to create a game that doesn’t borrow some mechanic from a system that already exists… So I tend to think of homebrew systems as anything where 1) a core structure of a game has been changed and 2) it hasn’t been commercially published. Like if Mutants & Masterminds was only being played in the developer’s home and hadn’t been published by Green Ronin, it would be a homebrew by my definition.
I apply the same rules to settings. So Jonathan’s FR campaign would be homebrew by my standards. So to me a homebrew is like brewing your own beer, you will be using fundamental ingredients like hops & barley (or Ability Scores & d20s) but adding your own blend like chocolate and cherries (or Point Buy and New Races).
See I come from the days when Forgotten Realms wasn’t as developed as it was before the recent reboot. If you wanted to play anywhere other than Waterdeep You basically had to draw up everything yourself anyway so I really just see that work you’d need to do anyway to run a game in those kind of settings.
I can see how people could consider it homebrew though because as you guys say its a shedload of work the DM has to put into it. Its really only the game mechanics that are unchanged and lets be honest 95% of a campaign comes from the setting and players not from the basic rules which you’d carry over.
I’m actually trying to get a hold of Morton Smith who helped write SLA Industries back in the 90’s. I was talking to him a few years ago and I’m sure he was working on something himself and so was wanting to get his opinion on homebrew.
I picked up a copy of Call of Cthulhu today and I’m really tempted at having a go at ‘kitbashing’ it, Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons to make a new game.
Will depend on how much time I have with Uni.
It’s a game I’ve always meant to pick up but never got around to it.