Hey me and some of my friends wanted to start some online rpg thing

Building races is something I do regularly, but this user is right, it's *really* easy to make them broken as fuck and comparatively hard to do a good job of it.

Don't act like 3.5 is the only edition.

Don't act like that's only true of 3.5

I think it's mostly exposure, all I knew for years was 3.5

>I feel like he was trying to give you advice, but it was either misinterpretation or he was bad at giving it.
No, he gave no advice, what i wrote was literally how he reacted, he raged out like a giant retard and spewed shit at me and my friends.

>The GM creates a list of a dozen or more specialty skills appropriate to the setting
No, that sounds horrible that we have to create our own skills. What we want is a system that we can just build upon and just have fun with, how well the system works is not that important, we just want to have fun in our own way.
Something that is completely prebuild where we could easily write out a character sheet with our own races would be fine.

>your friend *probably* just doesn't want you to hate RPGs
No, he was super hostile and his continuous hostility without any sort of help is one of the reason we aren't friends anymore.

>and play it as written, but change the flavour of the races while keeping their mechanics
Not what we want senpai.

>If it doesn't crash and burn automatically.
This sentence made me think you were talking about 3.PF, sorry.

Yeah, homebrewing for 4e is a little annoying too, and 5e doesn't give enough guidance, but it's fairly possible.

i think alot of what you guys are coming with is you restraining yourself in this box of rules.

like say one players new race is just a regular human that happens to have a tail or wings, we aren't talking about something that really needs to have a huge backstory or that needs to have an enormous influence in the game.
we're talking about small things that shouldn't be difficult to add.

and you guys seem to think that we want this super immersive and "best" experience, we really just wanted to fuck around with each other and adventure without too many road bumps aka "tabletoprpgs for plebs"

Your friend is probably railing that you guys are setting yourself up to be yet another group struck by the D&D sunk cost fallacy.

If you need to customise or modify D&D for some reason, there is definitely an RPG out there that will do what you are after more elegantly. If you keep using D&D for everything and creating more and more complicated homebrews to accomodate shit you like you'll get stuck in an endless loop of doing so without ever realising that:
- D&D is merely okay at doing what it does best
- D&D is egregiously terrible if take it out of its comfort zone
- D&D is not even the easiest game to play

Once you guys embark on this course of action it will be too late and he won't ever be able to convince you to play non-D&D RPGs. It will be a miasma of gentle misery for him.

>Not what we want senpai.
Not that guy, but are you sure of what you want? I mean, you can probably tweak Dwarves to anything as long as you change "minerals" and "rocks" with "[common use material of a race]". Elves are a generic race for everything that lives on forests, and Halflings are the generic 'small' race. You can change fluff and go with the same or similar bonuses, will work specially great since you guys are not familiar with the system, giving you both a balanced array of races and a nice flavor on anything you play. You're starting now, don't aim for the moon on your first shot.

Go as simple as possible. If you mess up with good friends, you can always walk things back and instate a new rule, fix a broken rule, etc. Your friend's advice is for games with random people.

>No, that sounds horrible that we have to create our own skills. What we want is a system that we can just build upon and just have fun with,
Well, coming up with a list of skills would honestly be a lot less work than what you do want. I mean, it is still a system you can build upon.
>how well the system works is not that important, we just want to have fun in our own way.
I'm aware of this and I 100% understand it, but the problem is that if you choose D&D and don't know what you're doing, you're probably going to have less fun, if any at all. I know this because that's how my first game went.
>Something that is completely prebuild where we could easily write out a character sheet with our own races would be fine.
>Not what we want senpai.
The problem with this is that when you don't know how the game works (which you won't; that's fine, you'd be new to the system), creating something new from scratch tends to cause a lot of trouble. Using something that exists but erasing "Elf" and writing "Monkeyfolk" and changing the language known from "Sylvan" to "Ooktan" is a lot easier than trying to come up with the abilities of a Monkeyfolk character without detailed system knowledge.

I mean, think of it like this: You wouldn't want to build your own PC without first having some PC maintenance knowledge. And this is generally a bit harder than that.

>and you guys seem to think that we want this super immersive and "best" experience, we really just wanted to fuck around with each other and adventure without too many road bumps aka "tabletoprpgs for plebs"
No, I totally get that. But the problem is that you want Smooth Peanut Butter but you're buying Crunchy.
I would sooner suggest a system like Mutants and Masterminds, though that might drive you crazy before you get through character creation.

Really, I think a game like Fate would be much better. Or Chronicles of Darkness, but that's not fantasy.

>if you need to homebrew, you're playing a shit RPG!!

But you need to homebrew in any RPG other than GURPS or a one-page game.

>Human with a tail.
This is no work at all, unless they can use the tail mechanically.

I'm just giving you the disclaimer that if you make mechanically custom races with unique or unusual characteristics, it takes a skill you won't have to do it without having drastically imbalanced PC races.

And maybe don't care about that, and that's fine. I'm just letting you know that what you're discussing may result in one player feeling useless and ineffective while another feels like nothing is a challenge because he's too powerful.

That said, most editions of D&d do have some kind of race building guidelines that might help you out, though they're often rough estimates, and not as playtested they should be.

I'm not telling you not to do it. I'm simply telling you it may not work out as well as you hope, and wishing you luck.

I'm actually not making that blanket a statement.

Homebrewing is fine for many games. Even very specialised games! D&D is lonely in its problems. L5R is the only non-obscure game I can think of that is an even worse idea to homebrew.

Everyone here's autistic. This reaction has nothing to do with D&D or tabletop gaming. He just likes something and is sperging out because people are taking it and fucking with it instead of loving it for what it is like he does. Guaranteed.

You can homebrew for D&D just fine if you understand how the system *should* be balanced, and have a good grasp on its finicky details.

Of course, none of that stuff is explained anywhere in the book. You have to figure it out yourself, often by reverse engineering the system, or using spreadsheets figure it out.

Your first many D&D house rules will be bad. If that does not deter you, good luck with your exploration in game design. You'll learn a lot about what works and what does not work in your dnd of choice.

My only advice is that (if 3.x/pf) you should take a good look at trailblazer, which takes a really good look at the design of monsters 3.x. likewise is consider strongly looking into upper Krusts challenging challenge ratings v5, which evaluates and assigns point costs to all manner of 3.x mechanics.

Again, good luck to you.

Changing shit to suit your players and yourself is the best part of being the GM. If the table is having a good time then that's what matters!

>it takes a skill you won't have to do it without having drastically imbalanced PC races.
It's a skill the people writing the games barely have.

>That said, most editions of D&d do have some kind of race building guidelines that might help you out, though they're often rough estimates, and not as playtested they should be.
paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/advancedRaceGuide/raceBuilder.html

>He just likes something and is sperging out because people are taking it and fucking with it instead of loving it for what it is like he does. Guaranteed.
Literally no one would have that reaction to D&D.

While all that is true, the issue at hand is that we're saying that a newbie changing D&D around is something that might not result in people having fun.
D&D already is hard to have fun in, unless you're having a very specific type of fun.

I don't even have a problem with what he's doing in general. It's D&D specifically that's the problem.

Any time you try to do anything with D&D that isn't generic fantasy, or an established setting, even small changes or house rules, you're going to be baiting the mouthbreathing neckbears from the darkest woods.

Just ignore them and do what you want.

>the dnd system
There are many D&D systems.

>It's a skill the people writing the games barely have.
Unfortunately a lot of the people they have designing for the system are unqualified for the job and do a crappy of it as a result, yes. Anybody designing for 3.x should have a very thorough understanding of both documents I just listed, and their implications. They should also have a good understanding of how the monster balance differs in pathfinder or 5e from that in trailblazer (3.5).

>I don't even have a problem with what he's doing in general. It's D&D specifically that's the problem.
I don't think D&D is a problem, but that doesn't mean it's easy to homebrew for either.

But it's not like GURPS. It's only good for a very specific kind of campaign/gameplay.

None are very easy to do a good job homebrewing for though.

I wouldn't react that way if I were put in your friend's position (and I'm sure you're exaggerating, assuming this even happened) but in my experience hacking D&D/PF to be something it isn't usually doesn't result in a fun time. Instead, I would recommend existing games that fit your goals and can help you achieve them.

Now, there's a line where you've homebrewed too much, yes, but even D&D can handle what OP's looking for- stuff in the vein of non-generic races.

Yes, it's full retard to try and make D&D do space opera or 1920s detective horror, but...