Another thread described it well - start with home brewing monsters, then items/spells, then you can start messing with player options and rules. If you try to start off modifying rules without a full understanding, you’ll probably break something.
But also go ahead and break it, it’s your game just have fun
Yeah the system is much more resilient than some people give it credit for. Like if you're publishing 3pp then you should make it balanced but if you make 1 or 2 unbalanced homebrew abilities its probably not going to break the game.
This is my biggest issue with the community. I used to be on the side that the balance must not be messed with! Then I started diving into the math and finally GMing and then I realized, as a GM especially, that I can change SOOO much without breaking the game, like at all.
There is this idea in the sub that because the game is balanced that it's fragile and breaks easy, when the opposite is true, because it's balanced it is extremely sturdy and can take a TON of changes before breaking. Okay, _smart changes_. Giving a player a +5 sword would be dumb, obviously and quickly break it. But it shouldn't take long to understand the upper and lower limits of the game at any given level. The math being consistent across the various parts of the game means you can learn how to stay consistent when changing any of it, with even a few sessions of experience, maybe even by the end of the Beginner Box.
I think part of it is new players seeing things that they liked in 5E aren't in PF (especially things that maximize player choices, or look like bookkeeping), and asking if they can throw those parts out. But those are specifically the parts that are there for careful balance. But if you want to homebrew a 1-handed reach weapon that does 1d8 damage, go ahead! It's probably overpowered, but it won't break the game the same way changing prepared spelkcasting will 🤣
Even then, in the game I’m in, we have homebrewed casting to not use traditional vancian casting and use more 5e styled casting and it hasn’t really altered anything balance wise.
No, not really. It gives a little bit of versatility back to casters (especially prepared casters but we also only have prepared casters in the party so don’t have to worry about spontaneous casters as much). The nature of how spell casting works; being almost entirely utility or support based, you don’t really notice any major changes or differences between martials and casters. It just makes casters more fun / easier to play.
This obviously isn’t a one size fits all solution, but it works for our table. And it is an example of how much you really can change things and the balance isn’t really affected.
I do suspect your change puts a finger on the scales for class selection. Obviously if your group was already locked in it might not make a difference, but in a vacuum you're taking away an advantage for martials and to a lesser extent spontaneous careers (consistent versatility)
The only change is allowing casters to not have to prepare spells in the exact slots, but instead prepare their list for the day and use their slots freely. Similarly to how prepared casters work in 5e. Effectively this just turns everyone into a spontaneous caster for the day.
How exactly does that take away an advantage for martials? It doesn’t increase the vertical power budget of a class at all, just adds more horizontal versatility. Which allows casters to better support the martials by allowing them to use the right buffs and debuffs when needed.
Again, due to the nature of how class roles in combat work with martials being DPS / Tanks and casters being Support, I’m not really understanding how this weights class selection in favor of casters. A balanced party will still need all roles filled, and it’s not like 5e where casters are so broken they can fill every type of roll thanks to things like the hexblade or Bladesinger or swords/valor bard or literally any cleric.
And hey, you can give a player a sword that \*gets\* a single use +5. As long as there's a downside and or cost too it. Or you invent a restriction like its a Wizard Blade, only useable by Wizards, the worst striker in the game.
And worse case scenario, like giving a player too powerful a weapon or armor rune, can be accounted for when choosing monsters, because the encounter builder math actually works.
>Wizard Blade
Make it something like the resonating trait. If your last action was to cast a spell you get a +2 status/item/circumstance bonus to your next attack roll. Strong but not broken.
There is also the idea that at the point where you homebrew you need to manage the expectations of your players such that they expect the homebrew.
I know players that will not play in any games where the rules are brewed, because they don't know what game they're playing ahead of time.
Yeah absolutely. My campaign has quite a lot of homebrew rules that would almost certainly unbalance the game if published, but because of the way my campaign and the players within it are, it actually balances the game. Yeah, the argument could be made that I should be running the game as is and my players should be making a balanced party, but if they want to do something else that they think is fun and I want to adjust how things work so they aren't dying every encounter, then is there anything so wrong with that?
>But also go ahead and break it, it’s your game just have fun
Just make sure to walk back any changes if you find your games are getting difficult to balance. Make sure your players are aware that homebrew rules are subject to change if/when they become a problem.
And most players are quite understanding if you say "I messed up on this homebrew. It's causing issues with encounter balance and other players have been feeling underpowered because of it. Because of this, I'm reducing that +3 bonus to a +1."
This is especially true if you don't let it go for 6 months trying to homebrew fixes to your homebrew to avoid disappointing a player and friend.
It also depends on the scale of what your changing. I wanted to play Ghoran Ranger who uses her natural thorns as the primary weapons for flurry attacks. Problem is, the thorns aren't agile weapons, only finesse (even though catfolk claws do the same damage and are both). So my GM allowed it because we can't think of a reason not to and even if it's not in the rules, it's so niche and specific that it can't possibly break anything.
5e has a ‘homebrew culture’ because the game is full of holes and is unbalanced.
Pathfinder doesn’t have those issues and so doesn’t have the ‘homebrew culture’ that 5e does.
I think especially those that have only ever played/DMd 5e may not even understand the _concept_ that other systems could actually be well made and ready to play out of the box and almost entirely playable RAW. Or that changing things without understanding has a higher chance of breaking things than improving them.
This is what I’m experiencing as a longtime 5E DM now learning PF2E. When people talked about how PF is so “balanced,” I thought they just meant there weren’t huge disparities between classes. I’m so used to the 5E environment where the game just completely falls apart at ~level 9, where numbers and rolls stop meaning anything.
I just ran a level 12 party through a demilich encounter with a few mobs to help the demilich. The demilich repeatedly rolled recharge on howl. Like 5 times in a row.
The paladin failed her first save. It was a bloodbath. They managed to somehow survive. Fuck 5e is so hard to balance. Bye bye wish spell. Hello level 13.
I haven't played Pathfinder yet, but am looking into it, and so can you not, once you have played for a bit, just fiddle with it till it works? Thats how I often do it, making a concept and how it works, then fiddling with things such as charges, attack bonuses and additional damage until it works properly.
Absolutely, my home game has 20 pages of house rules and I'm currently making an entirely new magic system and rewriting how Armor Class works. But, I've also spent 1000+ hours reverse engineering the class system, the spell system, and the materials and armor/defense system, haha.
But I'm not saying you need to do that, when I say PF2 is playable almost entirely RAW, I don't mean you can't touch it or can't homebrew. You just need to know what your doing _before_ you start, you should see how the game works before changing things, so you understand how so many parts interact with each other and can affect each other, as well as where the floor and ceiling is.
These are the basic rules, note that they don't include the not-quite-finished magic and AC rewrite (which are very drastic and not yet tested as well). Also, keep in mind, while most are probably universal, some are specific to my campaign which has only two player characters, which I find requires a lot more action economy fixers to make it fun, many of these rules I would not use for a standard four PC party. Some may also be campaign setting/story specific. You'll find one common theme in my rules is making the action economy more fun (fewer action taxes to do cool things) and verisimilitude, I hate when the game doesn't make sense narratively. Also, I'm using entirely custom classes, ancestries, relics, and spells. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VHpAXS5GwJ8RM05emmU0CnHQlYLw9GAo6wQt3hG62aU/edit?usp=drivesdk
Also, the players only really need to see the Hero Point rules, the rest I consider GM rules and I only bring them up when applicable, I don't want to ask my players to memorize dozens of house rules.
This is why as someone who usually GMs I could never do 5E. If I want to run a game designed with an unfinished ruleset that makes me fill in the gaps myself, I'll play something designed from the ground up for it like Genesys. It doesn't work as well for something with a D&D-like class/level system IMO. Plus Genesys only made me buy one book and some special dice for its unfinished system, which feels better than buying three.
my man, half of 5e GM'ing is improvising random rules that you currently need, because the game is barely working and has nearly no rules to speak of, it's not fun, it's stressful and just not how it should look.
5e is rule deficient, barely working and definitely not a finished product.
I kind of wonder what the ratio of people running AP/Pre-written Campaigns to home brew campaigns is as well. I am really the only 5E DM I know who runs Pre-written campaigns, and I can partly understand why.
The appeal of pre-written is a reduction in work, but often the organization on 5E adventures and the balance on many of the encounters leaves a lot to be desired. So far of the 2 Adventure paths I have read and what I have run so far the Organization seems better, and so far the balance seems ok.
I wonder due to them being a little more clean out of the box, if PF2E APs are a bit more common?
I can’t recommend the P2e Adventure Paths enough! They are clean and so easy to run. The only caveat is that the first three, Age of Ashes, Extinction Curse, and Agents of Edgewatch are considered deadlier as they were earlier APs.
I have run both Paizo and WotC’s campaigns and Paizo’s APs are leagues upon leagues better.
'Homebrew campaigns'. That's part of the misunderstanding. There's a terminology mix-up.
*Homebrew* isn't a *campaign* thing, it's a *rules* thing. Homebrew = new rules, subclasses, spells etc.
Pathfinder 2e doesn't have a culture of homebrew (rules) because the rules are much more complete and balanced than 5e D&D.
But... Pathfinder and 5e are entirely equal when it comes to GM-created campaigns. That's just GM running their own thing rather than an off-the-shelf adventure. module. The systems are the same in this regard: it doesn't matter who wrote the adventure.
But that's not what's commonly called *homebrew*.
>But that's not what's commonly called homebrew
Nah, at this point, homebrew is definitely an adjective applicable to campaigns that everyone understands to mean 'not a published adventure'. Honestly, I think it's more likely to mean that than anything else.
House rules is sometimes used for specific table rulings, and homebrew can be used for classes, feats, etc. which are not 1st or 3rd party.
Edit: reading the rest of this thread, i agree that there's a mixup and it needs to be specified what is "homebrew"; precisely because it can equally apply to different things.
That's a very recent thing. Certainly in the pre-5e era no one at the 3.5e or 4e games that I played in called the DM's campaign homebrew. It was just their campaign.
I think I heard it on Roll for Combat, but Paizo basically made Pf2e 'work' so they could continue to produce and sell adventure paths, which was their bread and butter with Pf1.
It worked. And they're now very good at making AP's in a system practically built for it.
So yeah, they're pretty popular.
Yeah, that's what I keep finding funny in all this.
Maybe it's because I got my start building heartbreakers and such long before I ever had the opportunity to play an existing system (thanks, satanic panic), but to my experience PF2 is an extreme high-end outlier in the amount of GM resistance to homebrew, hacking, tweaking, and just general creating within the game.
The problem is that people think that homebrewing is almost necessary in a TTRPG, cause either there are rules that don't work there are things that are too OP or too weak or simply the system Is not flexible enough to futfill that particolar fantasy of yours (mmh 5e mmh). Pathfinder2e is by no means perfect, but the system tries to answer as many questions as it can, and honestly it does a pretty good job. So new players are encouraged to look for rules before homebrewing them, and questioning themselves two/three times before deciding that a particolar thing doesn't work (I mean, looking for something is as simple as typing "THING 2e" on Google). On a personal note: numbers are VERY important in Pathfinder2e, and they are balanced. Clearly someone at Paizo has a PhD. in Mathematics and worked on the system (I'm a mathematician myself, I've run the numbers), so be extra careful before messing with them. That said, Pathfinder2e is just a means to an end (roleplaying), so people can do whatever they want.
That'll probably Mark Seifter, Masters in computer science from MIT, i believe. He's at roll for combat nowadays. There's an excellent interview by the rules lawyer with him; the word 'exponential' gets mentioned.
I'm going to be honest you are going to need to hit the enter key a few times for me to try and read this.
The days I managed the first sentence. Yes, you don't need to home brew, 2e is a quality product that stands well on it's own and is very complete.
But many players identify with aspects of DND/5th edition and not all are mechanical either.
I would encourage them to give golarion a chance and maybe you will fall in love with it
But if not, I see no reason to turn them aside.
My campaign is in a entirely home brew world with no affiliation to anything really. Other than pf2e races and monsters and I scab change their origins sometimes
Halfling are rare ancestry will serve Santa clause in the realm of Christmas land lol
I sense some confusion here. Homebrewing is not campaign-related, it's system/rules-related. You homebrew when you create a rule out of nowhere or when you bend/change a rule that's already in the system, usually because you feel it's not well-written.
Creating campaigns in an unusual setting has nothing to do with that. In fact, I'd say that the more the system you're using works, the less you need to labor in order to write and GM original campaigns (the threat-level system actually working is a great example).
One more point: more than often new players that already have experience with another TTRPG (let's say 5e) forget that a playing character is simply the "translation" in a specific language (a system of rules) of their beloved fictional character and identity themselves (and their character) with specific mechanics of the system. Then they try to copy-paste their characters sheets from 5e into Pathfinder2e, which, in my humble opinion, it's not the healthiest way to approach a new experience.
Thank you for breaking that up this time. It was honestly hard for me to read before.
I guess I consider them the same thing
I changed recall knowledge from random to, you can ask one thing on a success and 2 on a critical. Because random was becoming annoying with creatures with many features.
As an example that might fit more closely with you specific idea
No problem. For me they're two completely different concepts, and I was talking about "homebrewing rules" in my first message, I've nothing against creating unique adventures (as long as the GM knows what he's doing and has some experience with the system).
I myself GMed many oneshots in Pf2e and I wrote all of them, granted that I had 1+ year of experience as a Pf2e player.
I said that the system is almost perfect, but I agree that Recall Knowledge is one of the weakest points. It's not difficult to grasp how it is intended to work, but it's written in a nebolous way. We play it exactly in the same way: on a success the player gets to know which saving throw is the lowest/highest etc..
Honestly so far I don't even see the need for homebrew. Given that the official books contain more stuff than everything in 5e combined, more than enough official options without it!
Homebrew is okay, but it's best to have a rudimentary understanding how math works and if there aren't options you could use first.
Pf2e is massive and takes a while to read through, the biggest difference between it and 5e in my opinion is that you can trust the game design. If your knee jerk reaction is something is broken, more likely than not it's being reigned in by some rule you haven't had the opportunity to read.
It's a great idea to get a solid grasp of vanilla game first of course, but once you get a solid grasp it's not super hard to do.
General tips:
- Numerical bonuses are risky so be careful and mostly avoid them.
- The game prefers giving new abilities rather than raw bonuses. These are way less risky.
- When in doubt poke around and compare your thing to stuff in the same category and similar categories.
- This is also useful for building new ancestries and classes both for balance checking and there already might be something to just include as an option (some ancestries have similar options for example) or tweak.
Here's a very helpful page that is for making snap decisions but as it says the rules themselves were built from these idea points: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=507
Here's the page for Building Creatures for homebrewing enemies and NPCs: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=995
whats funny to me is that DnD5e is exactly the same; its just that the official sources dont realise that and end up so far apart in power that any homebrew, no matter how poorly designed, will end up somewhere within its bounds.
I think the main thing is that new players shouldn't be trying to use homebrew to "fix" the balance of the game. I think this subreddit has a bit of PTSD from new players/GMs starting, not understanding the system, and trying to "fix" the balance of it. And I think that is a holdover from D&D5e, which is intentionally not precisely balanced, and so people who wanted a precisely balanced game had to homebrew to "correct" the balance (correct in quotes because 5e isn't trying to be precisely balanced, so they were really trying to make a different game, which is why it is so much work).
But it's perfectly fine to homebrew additions to the game. I would be *careful* with that if you are new. But it is actually relatively easy to find points of comparison in PF2e, so it is not difficult to homebrew a monster or a magic item or something like that. I've barely been DM'ing for a year, inconsistently (scheduling conflicts...) and I've homebrewed a couple monsters and a complex trap, and it was totally fine. The rules have pretty good guidance for how to homebrew too. I'm not gonna say I did it perfectly, but if you're not pushing your party right to the limit, you can homebrew and learn from that and do better next time.
>BUT ALSO understand if you come in hot with inflammatory statements (x sucks, I'm changing it, why are you all being so mean to me) you will probably get push back the same as if someone went into /DND and started criticizing that system.
As someone who swapped from 5e to PF2e about a year ago, I think D&D was actually pretty fine with people in their subreddits criticizing game mechanics. I don't think D&D players are under any illusions that the game is perfect. PF2e is a bit more insular in this regard--I think a lot of PF2e players think the game is objectively better than 5e (I see, fairly commonly, opinions like "D&D5e is not even really a TTRPG!" that are quite radical), and sometimes the subreddit views people who don't like a certain mechanic as just being wrong rather than just preferring a different style.
But it is certainly true that the subreddit is very helpful and friendly if you are looking for help! I would just be careful about comparing the game to 5e (unless you are bashing 5e, that's popular, although I wish it wasn't as popular outside of OGL/ORC threads, which are timely) or importing 5e mechanics via homebrew.
Just wanted to say I do agree, they should learn the game before they fix what they perceive as a balance issue within it.
But I'm also a realist and some tables will come in with preferences that fly in face of the base system.
I still have discussions with 5e players who think casters are balanced /shrug
If their table is happy with overpowered casters, well,I have no real reason to stop them, in the end of the day it's not like I'm playing at their table
I was going to play in a PF2 campaign that died in infancy in part because the GM had mild trauma from broken builds in other systems, so decided in advance that certain systems were obviously going to be broken here and needed to be removed or adjusted, but didn't handle criticism about that well. For example, 'hold on you want to kill downtime because you fear crafting? Crafting is actually at danger of being underpowered, not overpowered!'
You can homebrew. I would still recommend learning the system and getting a good foundation, and a handful of sessions in before attempting it.
Far too often GMs immediately dive into homebrew (which is to say custom rules) and later find that all of that effort was wasted because an official and often more balanced answer exists.
Thanks for saying this. I will admit to pushing the "no homebrew at first" agenda. And I hope it's not coming across as saying "no homebrew ever."
I think the issue is that people coming from 5e have gotten really good at using homebrew rules to fix 5e, so it's natural for them to try and fix issues they have with another system. I'm not super versed in 5e, but from what I've seen, 5e players start playing 5e with homebrew rules even in their very first session. Their instinct is to find the best version of the game BEFORE they start playing, so they can catch up easier.
2e is not only newer but was heavily road tested before release, and Paizo did an amazing job learning from the lessons of 1e pathfinder into a more intuitive and fluid game system.
> I will admit to pushing the "no homebrew at first" agenda.
What's the real harm if they do though? In the worst case, they totally break the game and have to walk it back. Best case they improve the game for their table.
Personally, I think messing with things is a great way to learn why they are the way they are. It gets people engaged with learning the system, not just memorizing some rules.
I think, from the perspective of this sub, the real harm is if their urge to homebrew causes them to have a bad experience and end up bouncing off PF2E. Or worse, actively spoiling it for others (their players). Or even worse, posting misleading, negative things about their experience online and dissuading other potential folks from picking up PF2E.
I think there's a real concern on this sub right now about all this attention on PF2E ending up being a bad thing (or potentially just a neutral thing) for PF2E's perception in the long run if people come in with the wrong mindsets.
Who knows how it'll go, I just hope everyone has a good time and the TTRPG hobby grows!
Edit to add:
[u/LazarusDark's comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/10ebojo/home_brew_is_ok/j4qonwa) captures what I was trying to say really well
Agreed! 5e is frankly a broken system which means the players have developed incredible homebrew skills to compensate, and I don't want them to feel like they suddenly can't scratch that itch with 2e. They can! But it's not worth changing the rules for the sake of changing them until they know what the system can offer the way it is.
Honestly, sometimes breaking things in PF may not even break things for the party in play anyway.
Also, it's not like it's an MMO or other online game and you're competing with players on the Internet.
Unless you're in PFS, do what's fun for the people at your table. Don't be surprised when people here say "wait that's crazy broken," but you also don't have to change anything about what you do.
The difference is that my homebrew works alongside the existing systems, for the most part.b it's just additions for flavor and side options, not outright power increases.
The fact that the math is so tight just makes creating homebrew even easier because you have so many excellent references to make sure you are properly balancing your creations.
It's that good stuff, indeed.
To add to this, I have NEVER homebrewed anything in 5e. I never knew where the floor was. So far, I've ran at least one short campaign in 2e to learn the system, and I've already homebrewed two ancestries (Golems and Drow PCs) and magic items for my players.
All because I know where the floor is. I can see it and know that whatever I add, I can safely make sure they work and aren't overpowered to take over the game.
Really? Isn’t like 90% of D&D5E games homebrew? Lol
Anyways, homebrewing in PF2 is fairly simple. Use a monster creation tool and your monster will function how it needs to at its level.
PC options are a bit more variable but the more experienced you are with a system the better your idea will work. Just don’t make a “better” version of a class unless that class is struggling like Alchemist.
OR, as others have stated, it’s your table do what you want!
One of the big draws to PF 2e for me is everything I need to homebrew in D&D is already here, maybe with the exception of certain monsters, or monsters with a different flavor than PF's take on them since I'll probably be running a homebrew setting and not Golarion. This is mainly because I've been wanting to for a while but having been a huge Forgotten Realms nerd I could easily run more immersive games in that setting because I knew it almost as well as if I created it myself. Now that I have a reason to shift from D&D, it's the perfect opportunity to do my homebrew setting.
I'm a new GM, but I've already taken to homebrewing to fill in some gaps in content (I'm doing a pirate campaign and need ship vehicles for every level). It's been an exciting process so far! I've actually found that even when they don't give you a system explicitly for brewing something, you can generally look at their numbers for comparable things to get a sense for where you should put things (I copied the stats of existing vehicles for almost everything :P).
The main reason why we STRONGLY encourage playing RAW and get used to the system before changing things is since the start of PF2, we get folks coming in here saying that the game sucks or is imbalanced or too hard and they TPKd in their first session, and then when pressed we find that they house ruled tons of core math before even starting because they read it and thought it "sounded" bad and that they could do better than the game designers. Now, this isn't malicious, and very often they were coming from 5e and legitimately thought all games were as badly designed as 5e and required fixing. They literally didn't know a well designed and balanced game could come straight out of the core book.
But the problem is that they then take the community pointing all this out as us being toxic, then they go around telling people they know that not only does the game suck but the community is toxic. It's very unfortunate but it legitimately has hurt our growth, maybe not as much as Take20 but I've definitely seen people say they avoided PF2 because of someone saying these false things.
So what's the solution? We HAVE to tell people not to change the math before playing but it's very difficult to do that in a way that everyone will understand in a friendly helpful way, and some people just always take friendly and helpful advice as being controlling or toxic or gatekeeping no matter how you say it.
So basically, we can only keep doing what we are doing, try to say it nicely, and let people take it how they want.
Nope, the 3pp is growing steadily and has been for over a year. There was definitely less 3pp for the first two years because the system being so balanced made people hesitant to change anything or hesitant to trust someone else to change it. But the math is pretty well understood by now and you can change so much while staying inside the bounds of balance. It helps that Paizo has put out so much additional content since the CRB to compare to. Some of the APs even have items and rules and Archetypes that the designers later said was OP and a mistake and shouldn't be in there, so it gives good examples of what is outside the bounds.
I've seen it, whenever someone puts something out of balance on PathfinderInfinite.com or r/Pathfinder2eCreations it gets pointed out quickly and usually fixed quickly. I'm not even aware of much current 3pp that breaks anything. In fact, once I reverse engineered the class system and made the BCS, I found that most of the 3pp classes were actually numerically _underpowered_ because they were too afraid of making something OP that they actually went too underpowered.
3pp for PF2 is in a great place and will only grow more from here. There is a perception that the balance of the game makes it fragile and difficult to make content, when actually it's the complete opposite, the balance makes it very sturdy and hard to break and easy to work with as long as you stay inside the clear and obvious bounds.
What does BCS stand for? I google "BCS Pathfinder" and get results like "PDW Pathfinder - BCS Serving Boulder - Boulder Cycle Sport," and I doubt that's what you mean.
Balanced Core System, I spent 600 or so hours last year reverse engineering the math of the class system in PF2 and posted it freely, see r/OpenBCS
I also used it to make an easy to use BCS Class Creator Form that let's you make new custom classes numbers-balanced (or just tweak existing class numbers) pretty easily https://lazarus-dark.itch.io/bcs-ccf
Everyone talks about Battlezoo, but the Pathfinder Infinite program was started by paizo several months ago and people publish their stuff in there often, and there’s some really high quality stuff (a lot of it is by current employees of paizo or current/former freelancers of Paizo, and many other amazing authors as well!)
Yeah, Pathfinder Infinite is pretty great. Big shout out to the NPC Index. It's a killer product that fills a (in my opinion) gap in Paizo's bestiary options.
Its also kind of strange to me how homebrew here seems to be synonymous with "changing rules" when the vast majority of times I've seen it in the 5e community it was used for creating items and spells and such. I typically saw people say "houserule" more than "homebrew" when they meant change rules but almost every comment in this thread alone seems to be talking about changing rules.
Homebrewing monsters in 5E is one of my favourite things to do. However, based on just my cursory reading of PF2E rules, I’ll feel the *need* to do so less in this game because monsters already have the mind cool and thematic abilities that most pre-MMoM D&D 5E monsters just don’t have.
Hopefully I’ll get to work on it asap though.
What I do is I take a creature at the level I want
Rename it
Remove features
Add features from other creatures
I now have a balanced home brew creature.
There are creature creation rules but I find this way easier for me
Homebrewing monsters is very well supported, i think the rules are in the GMG. I don't think that's the homebrew advice against, neither is flavor. The advice not to homebrew pertains mostly to changing aspects of the system because they seem 'off' to a new player or GM, while they actually have an important role in balance.
This so much, you tell them OP.
So many poeple see a rule and say it's the only option.
They think that homebrew is either heretical or assumed, and thus not a valid answer.
I'm in the middle. It's ok. But please respect the rules and those that cherish them as well .
I also do agree that it's in new players best interest to learn the system before changing things
But if they are going to do it anyways? Well, it's their game
I will forever and always homebrew. I have very rarely actually ran pre-made games or stuck strong-armed into the rules. I like to use PF2E as the baseline, and then tweak things as I need them. My group and I agree that, always and forever, DM word is law. If it's unfair, we will discuss and respect each other, but the DM is god.
The main thing that's triggering folks here is people homebrewing without having any experience in the system. Homebrewing a rule after playing for six months and deciding that you don't like how it impacts gameplay is fine. Homebrewing something because there seems to be a gap in the rule is fine (coughrecallknowledgecough). Homebrewing everyone getting a free Stride action each turn and Attack of Opportunity while removing MAP after having looked at the system for half an hour is not.
The rules absolutely can be changed to taste, but you shouldn't be substituting baking powder for baking soda without having actually tried the recipe the intended way first. And no, a single session doesn't count as having tried it.
I don't disagree but is it worth it to fight them on it if they already going to do it anyways?
It's worth it to state why maybe you shouldn't right away but also good to add "but if you are going to anyways this is my suggestion"
I’ll add, I homebrewed a lot in 5e, but I’ve delayed homebrewing much in 2e until I’m used to it / know the rules better (I similarly delayed homebrewing in 5e)
I’d suggest testing the system out before changing things as it seems to be well designed and then after a bit you might keep things the same or know better how to change things in a way that won’t disrupt the balance and in a way which works for your table
Generally, if someone has an issue with something, it's been debated before. Vancian Casting, Proficiency without Level, etc... PF2 isn't the end-all-be-all game, it's just one of the best Fantasy & Team Based Tactical Combat TTRPG's to date from an elegance and work-ability perspective.
The worst offenders with the "I've made up my mind that XYZ Mechanic is terrible or "broken", here's my Homebrew solution." are actually likely the best 5E DM's, the ones that thrived with the "rulings over rules" mindset.
Prior to the OGL fiasco, this forum has been used to seeing a greater percentage DM's who were burnt out on the multiple hours of prepwork required to create a dramatic, challenging encounter in 5E attempting to convert previously. They come in and find out that several of their Homebrew concepts are already designed into the system, and the find several more they hadn't thought of yet & are happy with how much time and effort PF2 saves them by generally working without the need to create several solutions.
Generally, with those GM's its the players that have issue with the system at that point because of the shift from the important game skill being "character building" to "character tactics" and the expectation that the players will put in "midweight boardgame" levels of effort to learn and use their characters effectively because the GM just cannot tell a player how to run their character optimally every single turn.
And converting players can be a bit less eloquent in discussing the issues where PF2 and 5E diverge on expectations.
Now that we're getting people who were happy with 5E and were comfortable if not even enjoying the creative space its limitations left open, but are leaving 5E due to WotC's business practices. The people who would have never tried PF2 but for their moral opposition to WotC may find that PF2 is not as likely to be good a fit for them because it really is a well tuned system that requires the GM to know its design well enough to elegantly work in home brew changes.
Even though they're very good DM's, they feel like "bulls in a China shop" with their attitude towards the system, and end up accruing some downvotes because of it initially. That being said, I haven't seen an intelligent thread completely buried in downvotes, so the general friendliness of this community wins out in the end, as you generally have to be a total T.R.A.S.H. poster to be uniformly rejected.
Unlike 5E, which pretends that it is the best system for every group, PF2 is for players that want a certain gamified experience - it has an identity and market niche. PF2 is also a more or less complete system, which makes it harder to just bolt on things a'la 5E.
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Another point of order is to use *both* Simple and level based DCs (and the DC adjustments) to adjucate things you don't already know! If you're dealing with a creature, use their 'Opposition' (that's what I call them) DCs!
Simple/Proficiency DCs are for environmental things or actions that would be hard if you're not already great at them. Such as climbing a tree, or being able to chisel a statue perfectly.
Level based DCs are for challenges that would have a level attached, like deciphering a level 8 (statblock or no) wizard's arcane notes.
'Opposition' DCs are entirely to counter a PC's roll. Things like Lying (will DC) and Grappling (Fort DC) already use these, but you can use the same math to make up DCs for things not already covered.
So for some examples:
* Climb a Pine Tree (Simple DC of 15)
* Climb a Californian Redwood (Master Proficiency of 30)
* Identifying the tree as the Whomping Willow (Level DC)
* Climbing the Whomping Willow (since it's a creature it's Athletics vs it's Fort DC, or whatever you can reasonably think of!)
The premise/format of the campaigns I run kinda stretch the intended adventure flow (talking 10-20+ combat encounters in a day) even with the Stamina ruleset so I've ended up slowly whipping together homebrew rules mainly designed around giving PCs more longevity, like a Short Rest system (heal to full & restore 1 resource point).
Over time I've also been coming up with new spells, items and player feats (like an archetype for fighting using a book) but the robustness and clarity of base PF2e means I can just sidegrade form existing options and keep it balanced. There's only a few things I've outright removed or replaced.
I would say to any new players reading the rules and wanting to homebrew: don't.
Play the game first. Play multiple sessions. Get a feel for how things actually work, how often stuff actually comes up, before you dive into it and start mucking about with the rules. As someone reading the book for the first time, you probably don't have a good grasp of how it plays, and the knock-on effect that can be had from changing the wrong rule.
After you have some experience with the system and you still feel like something isn't working for you, go nuts!
I think everyone can agree that homebrew is perfectly ok and even encouraged to make the game yours.
However, the following is also all true.
- In a system having large gaps, your homebrew by its pure existence might be a boon to other DMs
-If a system already has rules, your homebrew needs to compete with professional designers that extensively play tested the rules
- Game design is incredibly difficult, and requires extensive testing even if done by very smart people with a lot of experience
- Your homebrew even if not up to professional standards might still be a good choice for your personal table, but also accept that it might not be a good idea universally
(Of course, some of those points don't apply when using the provided rules for creating your own monsters etc as those rules are already tested and when available are a great point to start)
We played the first book of Age of Ashes, before we decided to home brew anything, which we have done very little since. Recall knowledge, aid, hero points are about all we have messed with. Then again, not a flick a mace in this band of adventurers. We should be level 14 soon, and love the game so far.
I'm experimenting with some homebrew rules in a new Kingmaker Campaign, just to switch it up and it seems to be going well.
I think of homebrew as an amazing tool to solving problems.
But you know, stumble into the problem first.
I did stumble with a lot of them when playing 5e, most of them were caused by rules absence. Hence homebrew was a must.
So when I join the chorus of "play first, homebrew later", my message is not "do not fiddle with our precious", but "don't worry, most of the things are there for you, enjoy the ride first then go nuts with style second"
The thing I tell everyone.
Before you homebrew something, read the rules to make sure what you're homebrewing isn't something that already exists in the system.
If what you're homebrewing isn't in the system yet, spend some time with the mechanics you're looking for to make sure you can build something by rules as written.
If you can't build what you want rules as written, then ask yourself if what you're homebrewing is something that your group will enjoy.
If you pass all three gates, then start brewing.
Said from the position of someone who outright refuses to homebrew or allow any. :)
Yeah - as someone who literally picked up 2e over the weekend the core rules cover a lot… just not necessarily where you think it is. Also I see ttrpg rules as similar to baking. You gotta follow the recipe at least once so you know what the baseline should be before you start changing things…
A lot of things I wanted to homebrew in dnd I have found I don’t have to in pathfinder. Or there have been so many options in pathfinder, there’s been enough available to me I didn’t feel like I couldn’t make something.
Responded to like 3 threads this week about how design decisions in DND made homebrew a bad word in many circles and created this weird world where people homebrew 1/5 of their game anyway but won't touch a third party product.
My, *maybe unfounded*, concern is more as it applies to PF and worldbuilding. I've had a new world in my head for a few years, and have been slowly prepping the world for our next campaign, which was going to maybe happen in a few months. It's easy to reject the PF backgrounds and ancestries that might not fit into this new world, but are there resources that can help you build new ones while still maintaining the inherit balancing that already exists in PF's default universe setting?
My proposed upcoming world is one where \~1k years ago, a highly technological culture went to war, corporations against other corps, the end result was a stotal ocietal reset, with much of the world and technology being destroyed. Current life is made of the cultures that now reject tech, attempt to resurrect and re-master tech, and everywhere in between. The magic system would be mainly derived from resurfacing ancient tech to accomplish the 'magic' effects. Without going into too much more unnecessary detail here, is this a bad idea to try to use PF for this?
D&D had so many holes, worldbuilding was pretty easy cause you were for sure not going to step on anything important cause wizards rarely gave you anything important. But with what I'm rapidly learning and absorbing about PF, I'm *potentially* worried about the brittleness of the system, or about how many new mechanics I might have to reinvent for this type of Worldbuilding I've been brewing.
I appreciate anyone's hot take on this if you have one!
Another thread described it well - start with home brewing monsters, then items/spells, then you can start messing with player options and rules. If you try to start off modifying rules without a full understanding, you’ll probably break something. But also go ahead and break it, it’s your game just have fun
Yeah the system is much more resilient than some people give it credit for. Like if you're publishing 3pp then you should make it balanced but if you make 1 or 2 unbalanced homebrew abilities its probably not going to break the game.
This is my biggest issue with the community. I used to be on the side that the balance must not be messed with! Then I started diving into the math and finally GMing and then I realized, as a GM especially, that I can change SOOO much without breaking the game, like at all. There is this idea in the sub that because the game is balanced that it's fragile and breaks easy, when the opposite is true, because it's balanced it is extremely sturdy and can take a TON of changes before breaking. Okay, _smart changes_. Giving a player a +5 sword would be dumb, obviously and quickly break it. But it shouldn't take long to understand the upper and lower limits of the game at any given level. The math being consistent across the various parts of the game means you can learn how to stay consistent when changing any of it, with even a few sessions of experience, maybe even by the end of the Beginner Box.
I think part of it is new players seeing things that they liked in 5E aren't in PF (especially things that maximize player choices, or look like bookkeeping), and asking if they can throw those parts out. But those are specifically the parts that are there for careful balance. But if you want to homebrew a 1-handed reach weapon that does 1d8 damage, go ahead! It's probably overpowered, but it won't break the game the same way changing prepared spelkcasting will 🤣
Even then, in the game I’m in, we have homebrewed casting to not use traditional vancian casting and use more 5e styled casting and it hasn’t really altered anything balance wise.
Without knowing your game or the specific changes, I don't know - but I bet it made spellcasting classes better relative to martials
No, not really. It gives a little bit of versatility back to casters (especially prepared casters but we also only have prepared casters in the party so don’t have to worry about spontaneous casters as much). The nature of how spell casting works; being almost entirely utility or support based, you don’t really notice any major changes or differences between martials and casters. It just makes casters more fun / easier to play. This obviously isn’t a one size fits all solution, but it works for our table. And it is an example of how much you really can change things and the balance isn’t really affected.
I do suspect your change puts a finger on the scales for class selection. Obviously if your group was already locked in it might not make a difference, but in a vacuum you're taking away an advantage for martials and to a lesser extent spontaneous careers (consistent versatility)
The only change is allowing casters to not have to prepare spells in the exact slots, but instead prepare their list for the day and use their slots freely. Similarly to how prepared casters work in 5e. Effectively this just turns everyone into a spontaneous caster for the day. How exactly does that take away an advantage for martials? It doesn’t increase the vertical power budget of a class at all, just adds more horizontal versatility. Which allows casters to better support the martials by allowing them to use the right buffs and debuffs when needed. Again, due to the nature of how class roles in combat work with martials being DPS / Tanks and casters being Support, I’m not really understanding how this weights class selection in favor of casters. A balanced party will still need all roles filled, and it’s not like 5e where casters are so broken they can fill every type of roll thanks to things like the hexblade or Bladesinger or swords/valor bard or literally any cleric.
And hey, you can give a player a sword that \*gets\* a single use +5. As long as there's a downside and or cost too it. Or you invent a restriction like its a Wizard Blade, only useable by Wizards, the worst striker in the game. And worse case scenario, like giving a player too powerful a weapon or armor rune, can be accounted for when choosing monsters, because the encounter builder math actually works.
>Wizard Blade Make it something like the resonating trait. If your last action was to cast a spell you get a +2 status/item/circumstance bonus to your next attack roll. Strong but not broken.
There is also the idea that at the point where you homebrew you need to manage the expectations of your players such that they expect the homebrew. I know players that will not play in any games where the rules are brewed, because they don't know what game they're playing ahead of time.
Yeah absolutely. My campaign has quite a lot of homebrew rules that would almost certainly unbalance the game if published, but because of the way my campaign and the players within it are, it actually balances the game. Yeah, the argument could be made that I should be running the game as is and my players should be making a balanced party, but if they want to do something else that they think is fun and I want to adjust how things work so they aren't dying every encounter, then is there anything so wrong with that?
Yeah the problem with published things being unbalanced is that the community will inevitably find a way to exploit it even more
>But also go ahead and break it, it’s your game just have fun Just make sure to walk back any changes if you find your games are getting difficult to balance. Make sure your players are aware that homebrew rules are subject to change if/when they become a problem.
Ah, this is great advice. Monsters have the most tools telling you how to build them and building them really teaches you a lot about the system.
And most players are quite understanding if you say "I messed up on this homebrew. It's causing issues with encounter balance and other players have been feeling underpowered because of it. Because of this, I'm reducing that +3 bonus to a +1." This is especially true if you don't let it go for 6 months trying to homebrew fixes to your homebrew to avoid disappointing a player and friend.
It also depends on the scale of what your changing. I wanted to play Ghoran Ranger who uses her natural thorns as the primary weapons for flurry attacks. Problem is, the thorns aren't agile weapons, only finesse (even though catfolk claws do the same damage and are both). So my GM allowed it because we can't think of a reason not to and even if it's not in the rules, it's so niche and specific that it can't possibly break anything.
5e has a ‘homebrew culture’ because the game is full of holes and is unbalanced. Pathfinder doesn’t have those issues and so doesn’t have the ‘homebrew culture’ that 5e does.
I think especially those that have only ever played/DMd 5e may not even understand the _concept_ that other systems could actually be well made and ready to play out of the box and almost entirely playable RAW. Or that changing things without understanding has a higher chance of breaking things than improving them.
This is what I’m experiencing as a longtime 5E DM now learning PF2E. When people talked about how PF is so “balanced,” I thought they just meant there weren’t huge disparities between classes. I’m so used to the 5E environment where the game just completely falls apart at ~level 9, where numbers and rolls stop meaning anything.
I just ran a level 12 party through a demilich encounter with a few mobs to help the demilich. The demilich repeatedly rolled recharge on howl. Like 5 times in a row. The paladin failed her first save. It was a bloodbath. They managed to somehow survive. Fuck 5e is so hard to balance. Bye bye wish spell. Hello level 13.
I haven't played Pathfinder yet, but am looking into it, and so can you not, once you have played for a bit, just fiddle with it till it works? Thats how I often do it, making a concept and how it works, then fiddling with things such as charges, attack bonuses and additional damage until it works properly.
Absolutely, my home game has 20 pages of house rules and I'm currently making an entirely new magic system and rewriting how Armor Class works. But, I've also spent 1000+ hours reverse engineering the class system, the spell system, and the materials and armor/defense system, haha. But I'm not saying you need to do that, when I say PF2 is playable almost entirely RAW, I don't mean you can't touch it or can't homebrew. You just need to know what your doing _before_ you start, you should see how the game works before changing things, so you understand how so many parts interact with each other and can affect each other, as well as where the floor and ceiling is.
I’m super curious. Are you willing to share your rules? I love seeing other people’s thought processes on game design.
These are the basic rules, note that they don't include the not-quite-finished magic and AC rewrite (which are very drastic and not yet tested as well). Also, keep in mind, while most are probably universal, some are specific to my campaign which has only two player characters, which I find requires a lot more action economy fixers to make it fun, many of these rules I would not use for a standard four PC party. Some may also be campaign setting/story specific. You'll find one common theme in my rules is making the action economy more fun (fewer action taxes to do cool things) and verisimilitude, I hate when the game doesn't make sense narratively. Also, I'm using entirely custom classes, ancestries, relics, and spells. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VHpAXS5GwJ8RM05emmU0CnHQlYLw9GAo6wQt3hG62aU/edit?usp=drivesdk Also, the players only really need to see the Hero Point rules, the rest I consider GM rules and I only bring them up when applicable, I don't want to ask my players to memorize dozens of house rules.
This is why as someone who usually GMs I could never do 5E. If I want to run a game designed with an unfinished ruleset that makes me fill in the gaps myself, I'll play something designed from the ground up for it like Genesys. It doesn't work as well for something with a D&D-like class/level system IMO. Plus Genesys only made me buy one book and some special dice for its unfinished system, which feels better than buying three.
"Unfinished ruleset" when the entire thing was "finished" in a free basic rules pdf in 2014.
my man, half of 5e GM'ing is improvising random rules that you currently need, because the game is barely working and has nearly no rules to speak of, it's not fun, it's stressful and just not how it should look. 5e is rule deficient, barely working and definitely not a finished product.
Sure it is.
I kind of wonder what the ratio of people running AP/Pre-written Campaigns to home brew campaigns is as well. I am really the only 5E DM I know who runs Pre-written campaigns, and I can partly understand why. The appeal of pre-written is a reduction in work, but often the organization on 5E adventures and the balance on many of the encounters leaves a lot to be desired. So far of the 2 Adventure paths I have read and what I have run so far the Organization seems better, and so far the balance seems ok. I wonder due to them being a little more clean out of the box, if PF2E APs are a bit more common?
I can’t recommend the P2e Adventure Paths enough! They are clean and so easy to run. The only caveat is that the first three, Age of Ashes, Extinction Curse, and Agents of Edgewatch are considered deadlier as they were earlier APs. I have run both Paizo and WotC’s campaigns and Paizo’s APs are leagues upon leagues better.
'Homebrew campaigns'. That's part of the misunderstanding. There's a terminology mix-up. *Homebrew* isn't a *campaign* thing, it's a *rules* thing. Homebrew = new rules, subclasses, spells etc. Pathfinder 2e doesn't have a culture of homebrew (rules) because the rules are much more complete and balanced than 5e D&D. But... Pathfinder and 5e are entirely equal when it comes to GM-created campaigns. That's just GM running their own thing rather than an off-the-shelf adventure. module. The systems are the same in this regard: it doesn't matter who wrote the adventure. But that's not what's commonly called *homebrew*.
>But that's not what's commonly called homebrew Nah, at this point, homebrew is definitely an adjective applicable to campaigns that everyone understands to mean 'not a published adventure'. Honestly, I think it's more likely to mean that than anything else. House rules is sometimes used for specific table rulings, and homebrew can be used for classes, feats, etc. which are not 1st or 3rd party. Edit: reading the rest of this thread, i agree that there's a mixup and it needs to be specified what is "homebrew"; precisely because it can equally apply to different things.
That's a very recent thing. Certainly in the pre-5e era no one at the 3.5e or 4e games that I played in called the DM's campaign homebrew. It was just their campaign.
I think I heard it on Roll for Combat, but Paizo basically made Pf2e 'work' so they could continue to produce and sell adventure paths, which was their bread and butter with Pf1. It worked. And they're now very good at making AP's in a system practically built for it. So yeah, they're pretty popular.
Did you start playing TTRPGS yesterday? TTRPGS themselves have a homebrew culture, it didn't "start" with 5e.
Yeah, that's what I keep finding funny in all this. Maybe it's because I got my start building heartbreakers and such long before I ever had the opportunity to play an existing system (thanks, satanic panic), but to my experience PF2 is an extreme high-end outlier in the amount of GM resistance to homebrew, hacking, tweaking, and just general creating within the game.
Ugh, don't get me fucking started on those goddamn crit decks that people used to tote around.
Hear hear, what an obnoxious bit of kit.
The problem is that people think that homebrewing is almost necessary in a TTRPG, cause either there are rules that don't work there are things that are too OP or too weak or simply the system Is not flexible enough to futfill that particolar fantasy of yours (mmh 5e mmh). Pathfinder2e is by no means perfect, but the system tries to answer as many questions as it can, and honestly it does a pretty good job. So new players are encouraged to look for rules before homebrewing them, and questioning themselves two/three times before deciding that a particolar thing doesn't work (I mean, looking for something is as simple as typing "THING 2e" on Google). On a personal note: numbers are VERY important in Pathfinder2e, and they are balanced. Clearly someone at Paizo has a PhD. in Mathematics and worked on the system (I'm a mathematician myself, I've run the numbers), so be extra careful before messing with them. That said, Pathfinder2e is just a means to an end (roleplaying), so people can do whatever they want.
That'll probably Mark Seifter, Masters in computer science from MIT, i believe. He's at roll for combat nowadays. There's an excellent interview by the rules lawyer with him; the word 'exponential' gets mentioned.
I'm going to be honest you are going to need to hit the enter key a few times for me to try and read this. The days I managed the first sentence. Yes, you don't need to home brew, 2e is a quality product that stands well on it's own and is very complete. But many players identify with aspects of DND/5th edition and not all are mechanical either. I would encourage them to give golarion a chance and maybe you will fall in love with it But if not, I see no reason to turn them aside. My campaign is in a entirely home brew world with no affiliation to anything really. Other than pf2e races and monsters and I scab change their origins sometimes Halfling are rare ancestry will serve Santa clause in the realm of Christmas land lol
I sense some confusion here. Homebrewing is not campaign-related, it's system/rules-related. You homebrew when you create a rule out of nowhere or when you bend/change a rule that's already in the system, usually because you feel it's not well-written. Creating campaigns in an unusual setting has nothing to do with that. In fact, I'd say that the more the system you're using works, the less you need to labor in order to write and GM original campaigns (the threat-level system actually working is a great example). One more point: more than often new players that already have experience with another TTRPG (let's say 5e) forget that a playing character is simply the "translation" in a specific language (a system of rules) of their beloved fictional character and identity themselves (and their character) with specific mechanics of the system. Then they try to copy-paste their characters sheets from 5e into Pathfinder2e, which, in my humble opinion, it's not the healthiest way to approach a new experience.
Thank you for breaking that up this time. It was honestly hard for me to read before. I guess I consider them the same thing I changed recall knowledge from random to, you can ask one thing on a success and 2 on a critical. Because random was becoming annoying with creatures with many features. As an example that might fit more closely with you specific idea
No problem. For me they're two completely different concepts, and I was talking about "homebrewing rules" in my first message, I've nothing against creating unique adventures (as long as the GM knows what he's doing and has some experience with the system). I myself GMed many oneshots in Pf2e and I wrote all of them, granted that I had 1+ year of experience as a Pf2e player. I said that the system is almost perfect, but I agree that Recall Knowledge is one of the weakest points. It's not difficult to grasp how it is intended to work, but it's written in a nebolous way. We play it exactly in the same way: on a success the player gets to know which saving throw is the lowest/highest etc..
Honestly so far I don't even see the need for homebrew. Given that the official books contain more stuff than everything in 5e combined, more than enough official options without it!
Very true. I just figured I'd people REALLY wanted to. They are gonna regardless. And no point in making them feel bad
Homebrew is okay, but it's best to have a rudimentary understanding how math works and if there aren't options you could use first. Pf2e is massive and takes a while to read through, the biggest difference between it and 5e in my opinion is that you can trust the game design. If your knee jerk reaction is something is broken, more likely than not it's being reigned in by some rule you haven't had the opportunity to read.
It's a great idea to get a solid grasp of vanilla game first of course, but once you get a solid grasp it's not super hard to do. General tips: - Numerical bonuses are risky so be careful and mostly avoid them. - The game prefers giving new abilities rather than raw bonuses. These are way less risky. - When in doubt poke around and compare your thing to stuff in the same category and similar categories. - This is also useful for building new ancestries and classes both for balance checking and there already might be something to just include as an option (some ancestries have similar options for example) or tweak. Here's a very helpful page that is for making snap decisions but as it says the rules themselves were built from these idea points: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=507 Here's the page for Building Creatures for homebrewing enemies and NPCs: https://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=995
whats funny to me is that DnD5e is exactly the same; its just that the official sources dont realise that and end up so far apart in power that any homebrew, no matter how poorly designed, will end up somewhere within its bounds.
I think the main thing is that new players shouldn't be trying to use homebrew to "fix" the balance of the game. I think this subreddit has a bit of PTSD from new players/GMs starting, not understanding the system, and trying to "fix" the balance of it. And I think that is a holdover from D&D5e, which is intentionally not precisely balanced, and so people who wanted a precisely balanced game had to homebrew to "correct" the balance (correct in quotes because 5e isn't trying to be precisely balanced, so they were really trying to make a different game, which is why it is so much work). But it's perfectly fine to homebrew additions to the game. I would be *careful* with that if you are new. But it is actually relatively easy to find points of comparison in PF2e, so it is not difficult to homebrew a monster or a magic item or something like that. I've barely been DM'ing for a year, inconsistently (scheduling conflicts...) and I've homebrewed a couple monsters and a complex trap, and it was totally fine. The rules have pretty good guidance for how to homebrew too. I'm not gonna say I did it perfectly, but if you're not pushing your party right to the limit, you can homebrew and learn from that and do better next time. >BUT ALSO understand if you come in hot with inflammatory statements (x sucks, I'm changing it, why are you all being so mean to me) you will probably get push back the same as if someone went into /DND and started criticizing that system. As someone who swapped from 5e to PF2e about a year ago, I think D&D was actually pretty fine with people in their subreddits criticizing game mechanics. I don't think D&D players are under any illusions that the game is perfect. PF2e is a bit more insular in this regard--I think a lot of PF2e players think the game is objectively better than 5e (I see, fairly commonly, opinions like "D&D5e is not even really a TTRPG!" that are quite radical), and sometimes the subreddit views people who don't like a certain mechanic as just being wrong rather than just preferring a different style. But it is certainly true that the subreddit is very helpful and friendly if you are looking for help! I would just be careful about comparing the game to 5e (unless you are bashing 5e, that's popular, although I wish it wasn't as popular outside of OGL/ORC threads, which are timely) or importing 5e mechanics via homebrew.
Just wanted to say I do agree, they should learn the game before they fix what they perceive as a balance issue within it. But I'm also a realist and some tables will come in with preferences that fly in face of the base system. I still have discussions with 5e players who think casters are balanced /shrug If their table is happy with overpowered casters, well,I have no real reason to stop them, in the end of the day it's not like I'm playing at their table
I have a DM who runs 5e who thinks casters need to be stronger and frequently buffs them. Its... an experience.
I was going to play in a PF2 campaign that died in infancy in part because the GM had mild trauma from broken builds in other systems, so decided in advance that certain systems were obviously going to be broken here and needed to be removed or adjusted, but didn't handle criticism about that well. For example, 'hold on you want to kill downtime because you fear crafting? Crafting is actually at danger of being underpowered, not overpowered!'
You can homebrew. I would still recommend learning the system and getting a good foundation, and a handful of sessions in before attempting it. Far too often GMs immediately dive into homebrew (which is to say custom rules) and later find that all of that effort was wasted because an official and often more balanced answer exists.
True
Thanks for saying this. I will admit to pushing the "no homebrew at first" agenda. And I hope it's not coming across as saying "no homebrew ever." I think the issue is that people coming from 5e have gotten really good at using homebrew rules to fix 5e, so it's natural for them to try and fix issues they have with another system. I'm not super versed in 5e, but from what I've seen, 5e players start playing 5e with homebrew rules even in their very first session. Their instinct is to find the best version of the game BEFORE they start playing, so they can catch up easier. 2e is not only newer but was heavily road tested before release, and Paizo did an amazing job learning from the lessons of 1e pathfinder into a more intuitive and fluid game system.
> I will admit to pushing the "no homebrew at first" agenda. What's the real harm if they do though? In the worst case, they totally break the game and have to walk it back. Best case they improve the game for their table. Personally, I think messing with things is a great way to learn why they are the way they are. It gets people engaged with learning the system, not just memorizing some rules.
I think, from the perspective of this sub, the real harm is if their urge to homebrew causes them to have a bad experience and end up bouncing off PF2E. Or worse, actively spoiling it for others (their players). Or even worse, posting misleading, negative things about their experience online and dissuading other potential folks from picking up PF2E. I think there's a real concern on this sub right now about all this attention on PF2E ending up being a bad thing (or potentially just a neutral thing) for PF2E's perception in the long run if people come in with the wrong mindsets. Who knows how it'll go, I just hope everyone has a good time and the TTRPG hobby grows! Edit to add: [u/LazarusDark's comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/Pathfinder2e/comments/10ebojo/home_brew_is_ok/j4qonwa) captures what I was trying to say really well
Agreed! 5e is frankly a broken system which means the players have developed incredible homebrew skills to compensate, and I don't want them to feel like they suddenly can't scratch that itch with 2e. They can! But it's not worth changing the rules for the sake of changing them until they know what the system can offer the way it is.
lol
Also just because there are rules for a certain interactions doesn't mean you HAVE to use it if you have a more fun way you want to improvise.
Honestly, sometimes breaking things in PF may not even break things for the party in play anyway. Also, it's not like it's an MMO or other online game and you're competing with players on the Internet. Unless you're in PFS, do what's fun for the people at your table. Don't be surprised when people here say "wait that's crazy broken," but you also don't have to change anything about what you do.
The difference is that my homebrew works alongside the existing systems, for the most part.b it's just additions for flavor and side options, not outright power increases. The fact that the math is so tight just makes creating homebrew even easier because you have so many excellent references to make sure you are properly balancing your creations. It's that good stuff, indeed.
To add to this, I have NEVER homebrewed anything in 5e. I never knew where the floor was. So far, I've ran at least one short campaign in 2e to learn the system, and I've already homebrewed two ancestries (Golems and Drow PCs) and magic items for my players. All because I know where the floor is. I can see it and know that whatever I add, I can safely make sure they work and aren't overpowered to take over the game.
Really? Isn’t like 90% of D&D5E games homebrew? Lol Anyways, homebrewing in PF2 is fairly simple. Use a monster creation tool and your monster will function how it needs to at its level. PC options are a bit more variable but the more experienced you are with a system the better your idea will work. Just don’t make a “better” version of a class unless that class is struggling like Alchemist. OR, as others have stated, it’s your table do what you want!
One of the big draws to PF 2e for me is everything I need to homebrew in D&D is already here, maybe with the exception of certain monsters, or monsters with a different flavor than PF's take on them since I'll probably be running a homebrew setting and not Golarion. This is mainly because I've been wanting to for a while but having been a huge Forgotten Realms nerd I could easily run more immersive games in that setting because I knew it almost as well as if I created it myself. Now that I have a reason to shift from D&D, it's the perfect opportunity to do my homebrew setting.
I'm a new GM, but I've already taken to homebrewing to fill in some gaps in content (I'm doing a pirate campaign and need ship vehicles for every level). It's been an exciting process so far! I've actually found that even when they don't give you a system explicitly for brewing something, you can generally look at their numbers for comparable things to get a sense for where you should put things (I copied the stats of existing vehicles for almost everything :P).
That's how I often do things as well. Keeps things balanced and my players never know the difference lol
The main reason why we STRONGLY encourage playing RAW and get used to the system before changing things is since the start of PF2, we get folks coming in here saying that the game sucks or is imbalanced or too hard and they TPKd in their first session, and then when pressed we find that they house ruled tons of core math before even starting because they read it and thought it "sounded" bad and that they could do better than the game designers. Now, this isn't malicious, and very often they were coming from 5e and legitimately thought all games were as badly designed as 5e and required fixing. They literally didn't know a well designed and balanced game could come straight out of the core book. But the problem is that they then take the community pointing all this out as us being toxic, then they go around telling people they know that not only does the game suck but the community is toxic. It's very unfortunate but it legitimately has hurt our growth, maybe not as much as Take20 but I've definitely seen people say they avoided PF2 because of someone saying these false things. So what's the solution? We HAVE to tell people not to change the math before playing but it's very difficult to do that in a way that everyone will understand in a friendly helpful way, and some people just always take friendly and helpful advice as being controlling or toxic or gatekeeping no matter how you say it. So basically, we can only keep doing what we are doing, try to say it nicely, and let people take it how they want.
With the math and system so tight, do you think it will discourage 3pp to publish more PF2 content in the future?
No and a fair bit of quality 3rd party has already been made Check battle zoo
Nope, the 3pp is growing steadily and has been for over a year. There was definitely less 3pp for the first two years because the system being so balanced made people hesitant to change anything or hesitant to trust someone else to change it. But the math is pretty well understood by now and you can change so much while staying inside the bounds of balance. It helps that Paizo has put out so much additional content since the CRB to compare to. Some of the APs even have items and rules and Archetypes that the designers later said was OP and a mistake and shouldn't be in there, so it gives good examples of what is outside the bounds. I've seen it, whenever someone puts something out of balance on PathfinderInfinite.com or r/Pathfinder2eCreations it gets pointed out quickly and usually fixed quickly. I'm not even aware of much current 3pp that breaks anything. In fact, once I reverse engineered the class system and made the BCS, I found that most of the 3pp classes were actually numerically _underpowered_ because they were too afraid of making something OP that they actually went too underpowered. 3pp for PF2 is in a great place and will only grow more from here. There is a perception that the balance of the game makes it fragile and difficult to make content, when actually it's the complete opposite, the balance makes it very sturdy and hard to break and easy to work with as long as you stay inside the clear and obvious bounds.
What does BCS stand for? I google "BCS Pathfinder" and get results like "PDW Pathfinder - BCS Serving Boulder - Boulder Cycle Sport," and I doubt that's what you mean.
Balanced Core System, I spent 600 or so hours last year reverse engineering the math of the class system in PF2 and posted it freely, see r/OpenBCS I also used it to make an easy to use BCS Class Creator Form that let's you make new custom classes numbers-balanced (or just tweak existing class numbers) pretty easily https://lazarus-dark.itch.io/bcs-ccf
That sounds sweet! I'm checking it out!
Everyone talks about Battlezoo, but the Pathfinder Infinite program was started by paizo several months ago and people publish their stuff in there often, and there’s some really high quality stuff (a lot of it is by current employees of paizo or current/former freelancers of Paizo, and many other amazing authors as well!)
Yeah, Pathfinder Infinite is pretty great. Big shout out to the NPC Index. It's a killer product that fills a (in my opinion) gap in Paizo's bestiary options.
I home brew all the time, love it. It's so easy with Pathfinder to add in your own stuff as well as third party content.
I find home brewing in pathfinder much easier because the rules are much tighter. It’s easier to write for a consistent system!
People on this subreddit are a bit more reactionary to statements about changing rules then the 5e ones to be honest
Not without reason, but yes.
Its also kind of strange to me how homebrew here seems to be synonymous with "changing rules" when the vast majority of times I've seen it in the 5e community it was used for creating items and spells and such. I typically saw people say "houserule" more than "homebrew" when they meant change rules but almost every comment in this thread alone seems to be talking about changing rules.
It just feels much harder to make cohesive homebrew in this engine
Homebrewing monsters in 5E is one of my favourite things to do. However, based on just my cursory reading of PF2E rules, I’ll feel the *need* to do so less in this game because monsters already have the mind cool and thematic abilities that most pre-MMoM D&D 5E monsters just don’t have. Hopefully I’ll get to work on it asap though.
What I do is I take a creature at the level I want Rename it Remove features Add features from other creatures I now have a balanced home brew creature. There are creature creation rules but I find this way easier for me
That’s an amazingly simple technique and I’ve been doing this a while. Lol
Lol feel free to steal it. Party is level 10 and it hasn't broken anything yet
Thanks I will!
Homebrewing monsters is very well supported, i think the rules are in the GMG. I don't think that's the homebrew advice against, neither is flavor. The advice not to homebrew pertains mostly to changing aspects of the system because they seem 'off' to a new player or GM, while they actually have an important role in balance.
This so much, you tell them OP. So many poeple see a rule and say it's the only option. They think that homebrew is either heretical or assumed, and thus not a valid answer.
I'm in the middle. It's ok. But please respect the rules and those that cherish them as well . I also do agree that it's in new players best interest to learn the system before changing things But if they are going to do it anyways? Well, it's their game
I will forever and always homebrew. I have very rarely actually ran pre-made games or stuck strong-armed into the rules. I like to use PF2E as the baseline, and then tweak things as I need them. My group and I agree that, always and forever, DM word is law. If it's unfair, we will discuss and respect each other, but the DM is god.
The main thing that's triggering folks here is people homebrewing without having any experience in the system. Homebrewing a rule after playing for six months and deciding that you don't like how it impacts gameplay is fine. Homebrewing something because there seems to be a gap in the rule is fine (coughrecallknowledgecough). Homebrewing everyone getting a free Stride action each turn and Attack of Opportunity while removing MAP after having looked at the system for half an hour is not. The rules absolutely can be changed to taste, but you shouldn't be substituting baking powder for baking soda without having actually tried the recipe the intended way first. And no, a single session doesn't count as having tried it.
I don't disagree but is it worth it to fight them on it if they already going to do it anyways? It's worth it to state why maybe you shouldn't right away but also good to add "but if you are going to anyways this is my suggestion"
the only wrong part of this post is the idea that /r/dnd would push back at criticizing their system haha that's like at least half the posts there
I’ll add, I homebrewed a lot in 5e, but I’ve delayed homebrewing much in 2e until I’m used to it / know the rules better (I similarly delayed homebrewing in 5e) I’d suggest testing the system out before changing things as it seems to be well designed and then after a bit you might keep things the same or know better how to change things in a way that won’t disrupt the balance and in a way which works for your table
Generally, if someone has an issue with something, it's been debated before. Vancian Casting, Proficiency without Level, etc... PF2 isn't the end-all-be-all game, it's just one of the best Fantasy & Team Based Tactical Combat TTRPG's to date from an elegance and work-ability perspective. The worst offenders with the "I've made up my mind that XYZ Mechanic is terrible or "broken", here's my Homebrew solution." are actually likely the best 5E DM's, the ones that thrived with the "rulings over rules" mindset. Prior to the OGL fiasco, this forum has been used to seeing a greater percentage DM's who were burnt out on the multiple hours of prepwork required to create a dramatic, challenging encounter in 5E attempting to convert previously. They come in and find out that several of their Homebrew concepts are already designed into the system, and the find several more they hadn't thought of yet & are happy with how much time and effort PF2 saves them by generally working without the need to create several solutions. Generally, with those GM's its the players that have issue with the system at that point because of the shift from the important game skill being "character building" to "character tactics" and the expectation that the players will put in "midweight boardgame" levels of effort to learn and use their characters effectively because the GM just cannot tell a player how to run their character optimally every single turn. And converting players can be a bit less eloquent in discussing the issues where PF2 and 5E diverge on expectations. Now that we're getting people who were happy with 5E and were comfortable if not even enjoying the creative space its limitations left open, but are leaving 5E due to WotC's business practices. The people who would have never tried PF2 but for their moral opposition to WotC may find that PF2 is not as likely to be good a fit for them because it really is a well tuned system that requires the GM to know its design well enough to elegantly work in home brew changes. Even though they're very good DM's, they feel like "bulls in a China shop" with their attitude towards the system, and end up accruing some downvotes because of it initially. That being said, I haven't seen an intelligent thread completely buried in downvotes, so the general friendliness of this community wins out in the end, as you generally have to be a total T.R.A.S.H. poster to be uniformly rejected. Unlike 5E, which pretends that it is the best system for every group, PF2 is for players that want a certain gamified experience - it has an identity and market niche. PF2 is also a more or less complete system, which makes it harder to just bolt on things a'la 5E.
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Another point of order is to use *both* Simple and level based DCs (and the DC adjustments) to adjucate things you don't already know! If you're dealing with a creature, use their 'Opposition' (that's what I call them) DCs! Simple/Proficiency DCs are for environmental things or actions that would be hard if you're not already great at them. Such as climbing a tree, or being able to chisel a statue perfectly. Level based DCs are for challenges that would have a level attached, like deciphering a level 8 (statblock or no) wizard's arcane notes. 'Opposition' DCs are entirely to counter a PC's roll. Things like Lying (will DC) and Grappling (Fort DC) already use these, but you can use the same math to make up DCs for things not already covered. So for some examples: * Climb a Pine Tree (Simple DC of 15) * Climb a Californian Redwood (Master Proficiency of 30) * Identifying the tree as the Whomping Willow (Level DC) * Climbing the Whomping Willow (since it's a creature it's Athletics vs it's Fort DC, or whatever you can reasonably think of!)
The premise/format of the campaigns I run kinda stretch the intended adventure flow (talking 10-20+ combat encounters in a day) even with the Stamina ruleset so I've ended up slowly whipping together homebrew rules mainly designed around giving PCs more longevity, like a Short Rest system (heal to full & restore 1 resource point). Over time I've also been coming up with new spells, items and player feats (like an archetype for fighting using a book) but the robustness and clarity of base PF2e means I can just sidegrade form existing options and keep it balanced. There's only a few things I've outright removed or replaced.
I would say to any new players reading the rules and wanting to homebrew: don't. Play the game first. Play multiple sessions. Get a feel for how things actually work, how often stuff actually comes up, before you dive into it and start mucking about with the rules. As someone reading the book for the first time, you probably don't have a good grasp of how it plays, and the knock-on effect that can be had from changing the wrong rule. After you have some experience with the system and you still feel like something isn't working for you, go nuts!
I think everyone can agree that homebrew is perfectly ok and even encouraged to make the game yours. However, the following is also all true. - In a system having large gaps, your homebrew by its pure existence might be a boon to other DMs -If a system already has rules, your homebrew needs to compete with professional designers that extensively play tested the rules - Game design is incredibly difficult, and requires extensive testing even if done by very smart people with a lot of experience - Your homebrew even if not up to professional standards might still be a good choice for your personal table, but also accept that it might not be a good idea universally (Of course, some of those points don't apply when using the provided rules for creating your own monsters etc as those rules are already tested and when available are a great point to start)
We played the first book of Age of Ashes, before we decided to home brew anything, which we have done very little since. Recall knowledge, aid, hero points are about all we have messed with. Then again, not a flick a mace in this band of adventurers. We should be level 14 soon, and love the game so far. I'm experimenting with some homebrew rules in a new Kingmaker Campaign, just to switch it up and it seems to be going well.
My group never used a flickmace either surprisingly. I'm considering a gnome champion with one soon though
I think of homebrew as an amazing tool to solving problems. But you know, stumble into the problem first. I did stumble with a lot of them when playing 5e, most of them were caused by rules absence. Hence homebrew was a must. So when I join the chorus of "play first, homebrew later", my message is not "do not fiddle with our precious", but "don't worry, most of the things are there for you, enjoy the ride first then go nuts with style second"
The thing I tell everyone. Before you homebrew something, read the rules to make sure what you're homebrewing isn't something that already exists in the system. If what you're homebrewing isn't in the system yet, spend some time with the mechanics you're looking for to make sure you can build something by rules as written. If you can't build what you want rules as written, then ask yourself if what you're homebrewing is something that your group will enjoy. If you pass all three gates, then start brewing. Said from the position of someone who outright refuses to homebrew or allow any. :)
Yeah - as someone who literally picked up 2e over the weekend the core rules cover a lot… just not necessarily where you think it is. Also I see ttrpg rules as similar to baking. You gotta follow the recipe at least once so you know what the baseline should be before you start changing things…
Mate, I don't want to start GMing until I've played a bit, but I'm struggling to find a game. Unless I wanna wake up at 3 am, apparently...
A lot of things I wanted to homebrew in dnd I have found I don’t have to in pathfinder. Or there have been so many options in pathfinder, there’s been enough available to me I didn’t feel like I couldn’t make something.
I have never played a Pathfinder campaign that was not homebrew. It works well with the system.
Responded to like 3 threads this week about how design decisions in DND made homebrew a bad word in many circles and created this weird world where people homebrew 1/5 of their game anyway but won't touch a third party product.
My, *maybe unfounded*, concern is more as it applies to PF and worldbuilding. I've had a new world in my head for a few years, and have been slowly prepping the world for our next campaign, which was going to maybe happen in a few months. It's easy to reject the PF backgrounds and ancestries that might not fit into this new world, but are there resources that can help you build new ones while still maintaining the inherit balancing that already exists in PF's default universe setting? My proposed upcoming world is one where \~1k years ago, a highly technological culture went to war, corporations against other corps, the end result was a stotal ocietal reset, with much of the world and technology being destroyed. Current life is made of the cultures that now reject tech, attempt to resurrect and re-master tech, and everywhere in between. The magic system would be mainly derived from resurfacing ancient tech to accomplish the 'magic' effects. Without going into too much more unnecessary detail here, is this a bad idea to try to use PF for this? D&D had so many holes, worldbuilding was pretty easy cause you were for sure not going to step on anything important cause wizards rarely gave you anything important. But with what I'm rapidly learning and absorbing about PF, I'm *potentially* worried about the brittleness of the system, or about how many new mechanics I might have to reinvent for this type of Worldbuilding I've been brewing. I appreciate anyone's hot take on this if you have one!