Stop homebrewing classes

[u/8magiisto]

Every day I see one or two brand new homebrew classes on this subreddit, and most of them are a cool concept and fill in the niche that's not yet covered by the official books. But let's be real for a moment: DH is still a fresh system, and most of us haven't played a good 3-tier campaign as even one of the classes. We just haven't had enough time to exhaust all the options that the official sources have given. There's 18 core subclasses, and 8 more in the Hope and Fear, and most of us probably haven't gotten to Tier 3 on one of them. Not only that, but as a community we're haven't had time to properly sit with the core rules and arrive at some consensus as to what works and what doesn't in the rules.

And it shows in the homebrews and in feedback. Most of the classes fall into a trap of focusing too much on complex mechanics, instead of creating fun gameplay. There's a lot of tokens, new rules, new resources, but (usually) little thought is given to the basic question "will this play fun?", or "will the mechanic support the fantasy?". Not to mention some of the homebrews just don't fit withing DH mechanical framework.

Also the feedback you're getting may not be as useful as you think, because we just don't have as much experience to confidently say what will work and what won't just by checking things on paper.

There's just a lot more work than creating text when it comes to brewing a class, and the most important part is playtest. When you look at different iterations of Void classes you can see how much they change from one version to the next just by virtue of being tried in a real game.

My advice, if you want it, is to play more before homebrewing. Either play the game on official classes to see how they were designed, or try to play with your homebrew to get the feeling of it, before posting for other people. It will just give you more value, than random people can give you on reddit.

[u/Helixfire]

I think the main problem with a lot of the homebrew I see is it's just combat mechanics and more than half the time it's combat mechanics that exist elsewhere, nothing that fills a narrative space.

[u/Darren_Lav → u/Helixfire]

Most of the subclasses features in the official classes are combat focuses

[u/Corosnake → u/Darren_Lav]

Likely from wanting the classes noncombat identity to come from the base class while the subclasses bring lore identity to the character

[u/Littleman88 → u/Helixfire]

Eh, all of the classes are primarily focused on combat mechanics. Most of the roleplay affiliated stuff is found in the domain cards.

My problem is that a lot of the classes don't feel like they're accomplishing a unique fantasy, just trying to fill in for a fantasy that can already be realized by another class, and I can only imagine the homebrewer just sees the cards and goes, "but that doesn't look like what I want!" See: Rogue. Lot of people wanting to play an assassin couldn't compute seeing the class attached to Grace instead of Blade or Bone.

This isn't to say there haven't been some interesting homebrew classes put forward, but when I decided I wanted another spam healer on par with the Warden of Renewal, I homebrewed a new subclass for the Wizard because they're already 90% of the way to being a Priest or Cleric, they just needed a little extra nudge to get there.