 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie and it's time to break the mold and play with that crazy putty that is Homebrew. I'm going to talk about the concept of Homebrew when you should use it, when you should leave well enough alone, and I'll give a few examples of how I spice up the bed life of my own D&D campaigns. Keep in mind, as always, that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like this is a face that you wouldn't want creeping around your Homebrew, feel free to run your game however you want, but with that out of the way, let's begin. So, Homebrew is the idea of taking the rules of the game, bringing them into your local science fair, and stapling a bunch of experimental nonsense onto them that a 12 year old made in a basement somewhere. In the hands of a good DM who knows how to separate the crop from the crap, this can be a breath of fresh air that helps players to invest in the game that can otherwise only have so many options. In the moist sweaty hands of a bad DM, Homebrew turns a once recognizable, lovable game of might and magic into an unrecognizable cesspool, where Edge Lordington and Weeb Protaginton have to travel on their warble horses to defeat Darth Vader in the power of going home before bedtime. The world stops making sense, the borders between cardboard and reality blur, and you will no longer be able to unlock Steam achievements. It is for this reason that you need to know when and when not to add Homebrew material to your own games. Do add Homebrew, because you find a cool mechanic that can help people enjoy the game more, you want to add more options for players in an admittedly options-like edition of the game, or for the meme. Do not add Homebrew, because a player approached you with his totally legit subclass that couldn't possibly have any imbalances, what do you mean? You want to make EA proud and blindside your players with surprise mechanics, or for the meme. If a particular Homebrew is able to fit in with the type of game that you and your players are trying to play, then awesome, feel free to add it in. But if a Homebrew item feels intrusive and too much of an unwanted distraction from the core game, then don't be afraid to say no to it, or remove it after the fact if you had implemented it without understanding the full ramifications of what that would bring. Mostly with Homebrew, you sort of want to start slow, baby steps, and change one or two things in your game just to see how it reacts to other things of its type, like changing a damage value and comparing it to damage values that weren't changed. Once you start to understand the nuance of how the rulebook ecosystem works, which honestly you'll start to figure out naturally the more you play the game, then you'll probably start to figure out what Homebrews will fit right into whatever your group finds the base game lacking in, and what Homebrews will just be awful. In my experience, there are two main types of Homebrew. The ones that are simple changes to the base game or adjustments to the rules, and the ones that are completely new mechanics that change the way the game is played in its entirety. Now, in the past, I've been very vocal about my dislike of Homebrew. It's bad, it's unregulated, it's illegal. But if you've ever played Payday with me, then you know that the C in Chappy stands for crime. So in my games, I have a lot of edits to things that I feel make my games run a bit more smoothly. For instance, I remove negative ability scores on the Cobalt in New York. I give the Dragonborn the Dragonhide feat for free because Dragonborn just don't have enough in their base format. I pull back the Lucky Feet's power so that it can only be used on your own roles and only before you know the outcome. And I changed Healing Spirit, the most broken heal in the game, to only heal each person that enters at once. I've got other little things like that, but I think you get the picture that all of these changes were done to either streamline the game or fix something that I perceived as either somewhat lacking or completely downright broken. Luckily, since these changes are so minor, if a group really hates that alteration, it's a simple fix to undo it and just go back to our game. But when you get to the bigger Homebrew changes, that's when you have to be careful because now we're playing with the primordial soup that is game design. The biggest changes to the game affect the way that it's played on a much more drastic level, with most prominent of them being things that will completely change the way the game is played. For instance, in my games, if you go down to 0 HP and then are picked back up via magic, then you also gain a level of exhaustion to go with it. To reflect the idea of your character literally just having gone through the horrors of being stabbed 47 times, only to be pulled back into the waking world by a demigod and a nightgown and told to do it again. In mechanical terms, the change prevents players from just having one tank in front that'll get knocked down and then picked up and then knocked down and picked up and knocked up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, start, over and over and over, with no consequence to playing so fast and loose. But, as I was pointing out earlier, this changes the ecosystem of the game because now there's suddenly a new method of gaining exhaustion that appears very, very often and exhaustion has always been hard to get rid of, which is why the Berserker Barbarian isn't invited to parties. So, when I made the change that makes exhaustion much more common, I also had to change exhaustion to make it easier to get rid of. Now, instead of only losing one level of exhaustion per long rest, you instead get rid of all of them, so it actually helps buff the Berserker Barbarian a little as well. The balance of the ecosystem is what you have to think about when implementing homebrew into your games. But, if you can figure that part out and make sure that nothing becomes too powerful, then you'll be able to do more than just stick a bunch of homebrew at the wall and throw darts at them. Other major homebrew rules that I use are a new mechanic for the wizard that lets them roll arcana when they see a spell being cast and if they roll high enough, then they understand the properties well enough to add it to their spellbook, provided they can still afford the normal cost. And I also maintain that if you roll a 1 or 2 on your dice when firing at someone who has half cover due to someone else being in the way, then your shot will hit the person in the way to compensate for firing towards that person, even if that's not who you meant to hit. All these things are mechanics that change the way my players approach encounters, since they now have to position themselves in places where they won't have negatives applied to them, but they also know that enemies need to do that as well. So, now, armed with both the knowledge and examples of how to pull on the threads of the game to make a whole new crochet of crap, you can go forward and brew all the homes you want. But, that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, join my Discord, join my Patreon so that I can forward lamb sauce to go with my brewery. And remember that the reason why our housing economy is so terrible is because the boomers already brewed all the good homes. But yeah, dev'ya.