An argument against homebrew

All the coolest RPGs have their own setting

The Generic Universal Role Playing System (GURPS) is the Skyrim of TTRPGs. A game that has so little actual character it exists almost exclusively as a canvas for game designers and enthusiasts to project their own ideas onto. I hate both of these games for this reason.

I will grant that GURPS exists deliberately for this purpose whereas Skyrim essentially failed forward into being the Generic Universal Fantasy Video Game. There are some interesting mods available for Skyrim, and there are some interesting hacks available for GURPS. The difference between these two mediums is the barrier to entry.

Anyone who follows the OSR or it’s adjacent spheres is more than aware that the barrier of entry to writing and publishing PDFs about elf games on the internet is woefully low. Perhaps too low. Anyone with a grasp of the english language (and even some without!) can type up and publish a TTRPG product, system, module whatever.

Developing mods for creation engine isn’t rocket science. Being able to model and texture and program your own additions to the game does take a stack of skills that require at least a few months of front end work to acquire and years to master. One could argue writing in english is the same way but here in the west we do all that in school as children, you have to go out of your way to pick up blender or whatever.

Writing your own game engine from scratch is much more difficult. You might as well get a college degree first and even then you’re looking at a huge volume of work. This isn’t a technology substack so I’ll jump to the point. GURPS doesn’t solve the problem that skyrim solves. If you are a computer science drop out with a month to kill you can program a little skyrim mod that lets you realize whatever fantasy RPG adjacent ideas you have rolling around in your head without writing a renderer from scratch or whatever.

Perhaps I am some sort of Nietzschean super man of TTRPGs but I am able to whip up at least a playable draft of a rule system in a week or two. It won’t be tested or polished or refined but it’s not a huge expenditure of time or effort to imagine a dice system to resolve firing missiles at mechs or using magic to breed new types of orcs in a mudhole or whatever other application you have in mind.

My elder brother has never played dungeons and dragons. He’s 40 years old. He and my other brother played baldur’s gate 3 a number of months ago. He found the idea of using probability and dice to simulate complex tasks so enrapturing that on a flight overseas he drafted a ruleset for playing golf with dice. He even added attributes for various professional golfers. My brother is an avid golfer. What do we need GURPS for?

I think the GURPS phenomenon, and the homebrew phenomenon that exists in 5e/conventional play circles has a lot to do with how these people engage with rules and campaign structure. You will often hear people say that D&D is essentially an engine. “D&D is when you have attributes and skills and we roll d20s”. The skyrimification of Dungeons and Dragons. Much like Skyrim people like to stretch D&D far beyond its limits. I hear tell of people running political campaigns, sci-fi campaigns, steampunk campaigns and so on. You can create a simulacrum of a steampunk RPG from 5e but I ask you why? There is nothing implicit about the systems or design of 5e or really any edition of D&D that support that sort of thing.

I am not a game developer but I do study computers and I have dabbled with Unity for fun for a number of months. Using an engine or some prepackaged solution is a trade off. It will never be as closely suited to your vision as something written from scratch and it will leave its mark on the finished product. We suffer this because of the massive amount of time and effort it saves elsewhere that would otherwise stifle the project before it even begins. When writing a pen and paper game the time you save starting with someone else’s solution is way smaller. You still trade away the nuance and flexibility that comes with designing a from-scratch experience.

One of the funniest consequences of discovering D&D first and appendix N literature second was going back and doing my homework reading these stories and coming across something that made me stop and say “Oh my god it’s dungeons and dragons”. This will happen constantly if you actually read the books. The first instance of this I remember, and one of the best examples, is The God in the Bowl by Howard. If you have ever wondered where they got the idea for a “saving throw” look no further, this story has the most clear cut spell saving throw put to paper.

Conan stared in wonder at the cold classic beauty of that countenance, whose like he had never seen among the sons of men. Neither weakness nor mercy nor cruelty nor kindness, nor any other human emotion was in those features. They might have been the marble mask of a god, carved by a master hand, except for the unmistakable life in them—life cold and strange, such as the Cimmerian had never known and could not understand. He thought fleetingly of the marble perfection of the body which the screen concealed—it must be perfect, he thought, since the face was so inhumanly beautiful. But he could see only the god- like face, the finely molded head which swayed curiously from side to side. The full lips opened and spoke a single word in a rich vibrant tone that was like the golden chimes that ring in the jungle-lost temples of Khitai. It was an unknown tongue, forgotten before the kingdoms of man arose, but Conan knew that it meant, ‘Come!’

And the Cimmerian came, with a desperate leap and a humming slash of his sword. The beautiful head rolled from the top of the screen in a jet of dark blood and fell at his feet, and he gave back, fearing to touch it.

My point in bringing this up is that D&D has, or well had, a setting. It was one part Hyboria and one part medieval europe and one part a whole lotta other things. But as you played it a mental image started to coalesce in your mind about what was going on. How people’s armor and weapons looked, what the buildings looked like. What sort of names people had. The mechanics in the game reflected that too, and reinforced it. Saving throws were in the game because, in part, Conan used to pass them all the time in his stories. The rule’s nature was implicitly tied to the world of the game.

You could have hypothetically modified the rules of whatever napoleonic wargame they were playing with pewter miniatures in Arneson’s basement to accommodate Conan but why bother? They wrote D&D instead. I think there’s something to be said for how many blasted B/X clones we have and how few new modes of play are evolving. These games lack teeth, lack character, because they are not representative of someone’s personal appendix N.

I learned this running ACKS 2. I realized that by going in and imposing my own opinions on how magicians work or how clerics work or by modernizing the setting into medieval europe I was refusing the implicit nature of the rules Macris wrote. If I want to run that campaign I should to write my own game. Or find one which supports that implicitly or the campaign will feel incomplete. As if it’s wearing a skinsuit.

The takeaway is that you should, as a player, meet the game halfway. Don’t be that guy who shows up to a campaign set in the frigid northern wastes as a dune raider from distant Stygia. In the same way, don’t crack open your favorite edition of D&D to run a sci-fy game. Name your character the right way, pick a god for your cleric out of the book, and play the damn game. If you don’t like what’s printed in the book, pick a different game or write your own, I say.

Good RPGs are written with this push and pull in mind. The players and the DM need latitude to inject their own perspectives and ideas into their characters and the campaign, but the rule system has to have a cohesive vision behind it. AD&D and ACKS are both great examples of this sort of design. AD&D presents a present but unobtrusive canon of themes and ideas from the all throughout the scope of western fiction. ACKS conversely is more rooted in historical fantasy but still humors players with an entire slew of available cultures ranging from rome to persia to celtic europe.

There is a place for homebrew. Part of the essential promise of a pen and paper game is that it lives in the imagination of its players. My point to make is that the fiction of the game is as much of part of its nature as any rule. So perhaps the next time you think you need to homebrew a new class, or guns, or whatever into a fantasy RPG, don’t. If the game was about guns, it would have them.