We’ve talked some about homebrewing before, in terms of beer, and then less obviously when talking about building your world, your NPC’s, and your own story. All of these things are unique to you, and therefore are known as homebrew. But what if you don’t like the way D&D uses a rule or another RPG uses a rule, can you homebrew your own rules as well? The answer to that is yes, but do so carefully.

How do you do that carefully?

With that I mean, don’t do anything that will be game breaking. If you decide to home brew some guns into your game and think, okay a gun will do 2d10 damage, that’s going to be game breaking. There are weapons that other people can get that do 1d12 or 2d6 damage, but 2d10 is a whole lot more. Especially if you put it onto a class that gets multiple attacks. So keep the damage inline, if someone has a gun, make it do 2d6 damage, still very powerful, but there are other weapons that do that. And since it is ranged, make there be a downside. It’s dex based for sure, and it’s going to jam sometimes, on a natural one, or maybe the ammo has to be carefully counted, is expensive, and cannot be reused, same with gunpowder. Figure out that way where it falls into the boundaries that the D&D rules framework gives you.

Another example would be our critical hit roll in Dungeons and Flagons. If someone is taken down with a critical hit, you don’t just become unconscious, but you take a wound. Something that is going to affect your character for a little while. In the case of our game, I picked something, a bruised leg for Nim that was going to hurt her dexterity checks. But since then I’ve created a table that I could roll on. It goes from one day of disadvantage on certain types of checks up to a week of disadvantage, and if I roll a 96-97 on a D100 (or 2d10), they fail a death saving throw, if it’s 98-99, they fail 2, or if it’s all the way at 100, they are just dead. This adds some more tension to the game, doesn’t really break anything, and makes it interesting to role play that out in the future.

What if I want to change that something means?

Certainly, go for that. We actually  have done that a few times in Dungeons and Flagons. The first thing is when we started the game Nim was a ninja type character so the player wanted shuriken and nunchucks. Neither of those weapons are in the players handbook, so what did we do, we just picked weapons that did a similar type of damage, darts and club and the player just renamed them. We’ve also done this with hit points. There is a bit of the idea with hit points that this is where you get 10 arrows sticking out of you when someone hits you. But that’s now how we play it anymore as a group. We use them as exhaustion points more than hit points. It takes effort to block or dodge out of the way of a sword swing or to move when an arrow is being shot at you, or getting a shield up to stop a morningstar. It’s only on that last hit that takes you down does it open up a wound and probably not that bad of a wound, but that’s when you are bleeding and have a chance of dying. So those are two common examples of changing the meaning of something.

What about intimidation?

This is one that I wanted to address separately and is something that I’ve been tossing about homebrewing into our campaign. No  matter how a player describes something, the roll is always charisma based. If a half orc looks down at you, flexes, and slaps the edge of a long sword onto his hand, is he really doing that off of charisma? Are you going to go up to that half orc and look at it and go, man, that isn’t that scary, you’re just a big softy, why is my head flying through the air? Nope, you aren’t going to do that, he should be scary even if he is terrible in social situations trying to persuade someone to do something. So there are a couple of options as to what you could do here. The first being, make it based off of strength instead of charisma. A big hulking creature like that should be able to make a show of strength and get someone to back down. Even a fairly small dwarf fully armed in plate mail should be scary when making a displaying of strength, so let them roll their intimidation using strength instead of charisma. The other option would be give them advantage, meaning that you roll twice and take the higher or the two. I actually like the first way more as it would probably help them as much as advantage would and it would still give room for them to do something very amazing and still get advantage on their roll.

Now, I talked about RPG’s in general at the beginning and all of these examples have been Dungeons and Dragons examples. So, how would this work in another system?

The example that I have of this is from AcadeCon in our Star Wars Age of Rebellion game. The GM had Kristen do a roll and she succeed on it while talking to Space Lucas. He then asked her to do a George Lucas voice in response to say that Space Lucas said. It was a bit of extra role playing and was funny at the table. Since Kristen went along with that, he flipped one of the dark side points (which makes the player’s rolls harder normally when flipped) to a light side (which the players can use) because Kristen did a good job at it. It’s a tangible reward for doing something well that isn’t written into the Fantasy Flight Star Wars RPG system, but made sense and made it more fun while we were playing the game.

We have some examples up there about how you can change your game. The biggest thing to remember is to keep it balanced, to keep it fun, and be willing to do it. Sometimes, even now, when playing Star Wars RPG or Dungeons and Dragons, I won’t know a rule. I’ll then look it up later, but instead of letting things stop in the middle of your game, make up the rule for that night or until the break, and keep the game going. People will be happier that way, and you’ll have a more fun game night. Figure out what rules you’ll misuse or add and enjoy it.

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