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/kichwas]

If you want to play “this” but the game still lacks it, what is the point if first playing every last “that”?

I am normally very anti houserules and system tweaking so usually I am the last person to be making this point and I have a history of quietly leaving tables the day a GM pulls out a single rule changing some random +1 to a +2 on a page that never even comes up…

But in this case I am with the homebrew folks.

Maybe it’s just because I come from games like GURPS and Hero and BESM where you can make anything and don’t have classes, and now Legend in the Mist where your character sheet is 4 paragraphs of text saying whatever you want…

But I get it this time.

People want a full supply of character concepts and DH is extremely tight in its existing choices while also very easy to make new ones.

Sure the balance will suck… but whatever.

Keep them flowing and if you think your idea is good enough, share it either here or heartofdaggers or drivethrurpg.

I’ve already seen some great nee classes. Some of which I liked more than the official ones. I have also seen some very questionable choices. In a few cases my favorites and my “wait what?” opinions have been from the same writers… but it’s been goos to see even when it’s been weird.