 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy, and I used to hate homebrew, the idea of changing mechanics of a game that I myself was still trying to get a handle on was a terrifying idea that made me say, bloodhunter, more like, keep this edgy bullshit out of my game, hunter. But as time wore on, I ascended to a higher stream of consciousness where I understood all the rules of 5e, and more importantly, understood how little the rules matter in the grand scheme of things compared to just having a good time. Today I'm gonna talk about homebrew, how to handle it, and why my opinion on this controversial aspect of the game has completely flipped since the beginning of the days of Davy lore. As always, keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you don't want to get drunk on homebrew, like it's the prohibition, feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So homebrew is just a catchall term for deviating from the written mechanics of the game. People have homebrewed new rules, classes, entire magic systems into the game, and I think it's safe to say that you probably use a little bit of homebrew in your own games to make them run more smoothly. Every time you choose not to worry about food or ignore encumbrance, that's homebrew, so as a concept, homebrew is a lot more common than you would think. However, the bigger the changes, the bigger the homebrew, and some people have a low alcohol tolerance, so if you come in with your custom chronomancer class with 15 different special rules, there are a lot of DMs out there who will say that they're too young to drink. And that feeling stems from two major places. The first is very reasonable. If you let a player use custom rules that they found online, then you have to read those rules to make sure that A, you know what you're in for, and B, that they aren't more broken than the nuclear family. It takes time out of your day when you have to study for a new class, and that's time on top of the already time consuming job of being a DM, so it's reasonable for the DM to not want to bother with more. The other reason why Dungeon Masters might reject homebrew is on a much more personal level. They're worried that their player is trying to sneak some broken bullshit into your recreational time. This is one that I've seen a lot. Maybe you don't technically distrust your player out of hand, but you never know if this might be the day that they try to sneak in the rules to play Dr. Manhattan and tell everybody how Steve Jobs died. Honestly, this was my reason for not wanting to use homebrew for so long. I don't want to feel like I'm being taken advantage of. That's shitty. But what broke that mindset for me was a mixture of trusting my players to not think that I'm a fool, and also opening my third eye to a little secret. Some of the stuff in 5e is already pretty busted. Once you realize that you can handle broken homebrew the same way that you handle normal broken game mechanics, the world is open to you. Is your player using an ability that's clearly too strong? Nerf it a bit and everybody wins. If you're playing with your friends, none of them should be out to get you, so hopefully you won't receive much pushback. The only thing that you have to watch out for is that some players try to catch you in a social fallacy by presenting the entire homebrew for you to sign off on right away, and then using that initial approval as grounds to argue for keeping their busted character. Obviously, players should show you their homebrew before they play it, but just looking at the mechanics on a sheet of paper doesn't always give you insight as to how that's going to translate to the table, or how it might synergize with an obscure mechanic. You should make it known to your table that homebrew or not, if something is busted, it's gonna get fixed, and put the responsibility on the players to not bring in something crazy. After all, as the DM, you have the whole game to look after. The players only have their character, so they should be responsible for keeping it in check. That said, once you have that understanding, don't be afraid to go crazy. I have a player in one of my games that wanted to be a lightning dragon sorcerer, but there aren't a lot of good lightning spells, so I just let him change every fire spell in the game to do lightning damage. Haven't run into any problems yet, and if I do, I'll just let him know. I've let players play ferrets with 10 health by level five, created rules for a revenant with only half a body, but very good upper body strength, and I am universally happy with reflavoring abilities into whatever the player wants. None of these things have broken the game, and none of these things can break the game because I am the DM, and at the end of the day, what I say goes. And I actually want to touch on reflavoring for a moment because it's such a huge part of how I create characters nowadays. I cannot emphasize enough how much you should encourage your players to do it. Reflavoring is a subtype of homebrew that technically isn't homebrew, but also sort of is. Instead of creating new mechanics, what I do most often is I take existing mechanics, and I completely change the context around how they exist. For instance, I recently played in the Bards for Bards one shot where I played Borble Bass, Scion of the Damp. I was a bullywog cleric with the ultimate goal of making everything in the world a little more wet. Mechanically, I was a lizardfolk, but I just called myself a bullywog and changed none of the mechanics. My banishment was a bubble that would surround enemies and then pop. And when the party was in trouble, I would heal them with my version of Maskier Wounds, the vast glove. Reflavoring D&D has opened a world of possibilities to me, and I've used it to create characters like a swarmkeeper ranger who controls the power of snow, a cleric that had a polyamorous relationship with multiple gods, and a druid by name only that was actually a pirate navigator with the power of wind and waves who had no idea what a druid even was. If you're a player, you should look through the books to see if a concept you want can't be achieved with the mechanics that already exist. And if you're not actually changing anything, your DM shouldn't have a problem letting you do it. I'm gonna end this video by once again sharing a homebrew that was made by a good friend of mine, Dismal Durge. It was created to explain why characters disappear when players can't make it to the game, and its name is the giant flying purple baby. You can find it on the D&D homebrew wiki. The purple baby descends upon the world and picks people up at random, spurting them away and leaving those who once knew them with no memory of their inclusion in the party. If the baby is so pleased, it may return the stolen victim, perhaps leaving a gift behind for their troubles, and everyone will act as if the party member had never left. Having the creativity to play what you want and do what you want is the reason why people like homebrew so much. If there's any problem that you don't like with D&D, you can fix it with homebrew. It's like modding a video game. And as long as you drink responsibly, you should feel free to fill your cup with as much homebrew as you can, at least until the cops shut down your bootleg distillery. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Be sure to leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, check out all my social media in the description below, and maybe support me on Patreon so that I can pay off the cops to ignore my speak easy. But yeah, dabby out.