Will custom homebrew classes ever be allowed as a feature? I've been a subscriber for a while now and it is always a feature I have hoped for. There have been rumors throughout the years but nothing ever concrete.. 

Quote from roguecaliber >>

Will custom homebrew classes ever be allowed as a feature? I've been a subscriber for a while now and it is always a feature I have hoped for. There have been rumors throughout the years but nothing ever concrete.. 

My guess is no. Allowing people to homebrew classes might clutter the database some and could make it incredibly confusing to pick your class if you toggle on the (I think it's called) "Use Homebrew," since you'd have a billion different options that pop up for classes. As you said, being able to homebrew classes has been debated and speculated on, and we really don't know whether or not we'll get that feature.

A solution would be to not allow custom or variant classes to be published at all. Rather, allow them to only be shared within your campaign. Sure it would still be an entry in the database, but it wouldn't show them even with the homebrew tag, unless your character was already joined with a campaign. Assuming the system could support that particular feature.

The complexity inherent in any class, plus the near-infinite number of possible features (people come up with some weird stuff) would make it next to impossible to implement in DDB. The things you can do with the homebrewer are there because that's how they implemented something official. To be able to account for any way someone might think to design a single feature, let alone a whole class's worth of them, would not be possible, at least with the way the character builder and sheet currently work. So I would also guess that answer is no.

There are a host of other problems, but the infinite(ish) complexity is one of the most obvious.

I'm going to have to disagree with you, based on the fact that neither of us have any intimate knowledge of how their system works internally. That's why I added the last sentence to my comment. It would be very cool if they could. Will they, can they, those are two questions neither of us can answer with any degree of accuracy.

I think this is a case where neither of us is wrong, per say, but no one (who doesn't actually see the system's inner workings) can be entirely and certainly right. Either way, it would still be an incredibly complex endeavor.

And yes, I agree that it would be very cool if we could create functional homebrew classes. It would probably motivate me to finish mine....

I'd just like to add in two classes from a third party setting, just for ease of use in a future campaign. But for now, it's a face to face game, so if anybody wanted to roll those classes, we all know how to do it offline on paper.

Quote from Doranur_Aleguzzler >>

I'm going to have to disagree with you, based on the fact that neither of us have any intimate knowledge of how their system works internally. That's why I added the last sentence to my comment. It would be very cool if they could. Will they, can they, those are two questions neither of us can answer with any degree of accuracy.

 I think many of us are familiar enough with the homebrew system and its evolution over the years to make some educated guesses about how the system works.

For example, Battlesmith Artificers can use INT instead of STR when attacking with a magic weapon. Ideally, the pieces of this feature would be coded separately so that you could homebrew a different feature that applies only when using a magic weapon, and/or plug in some other stat instead of STR. But that's not what they did. It's one lump of choices and you take it all or leave it.

Many other features were added in a similarly inflexible and hard-coded manner that does not speak to a design approach that can handle the level of flexibility required to build an entire class. They dropped UA because it took a lot of time to work in anything that wasn't basically a reskinned existing feature. None of their behaviors indicate a system that could handle custom classes.

Now it's possible that with the acquisition they are willing to do a complete ground-up rebuild - which as a developer and long-time user of the system I think would really be required to achieve what you're looking for - but it seems like a lot of work for something that honestly wouldn't affect their bottom line very much.

I think there's an ideological opposition here too. 5e was not designed to have more and more classes thrown into the mix. The base classes are supposed to cover all archetypes and subclasses are the way you bring certain facets of those to life.

While I love homebrew and use a lot of it, all new classes just don't appeal to me at all. There's too much to test, to balance, to question. With a fighter subclass, you know the base is sturdy and reliable, and you only need to look at the few features to tell what the overall impact will be on the game. For a whole class, I just don't want to put that much work in - especially when I've yet to see a new class that couldn't fit just fine in the game as a subclass.

So I think that since 1) it would be hard, 2) it pushes against the design concepts of the edition, and 3) there are many other uses for their time and money that would have a greater impact on users as a whole, it's unlikely to happen unless its a happy side-effect of a complete rebuild.

Back in the days when there were Dev Updates each week, particularly when Adam was still a part of the team, this question came up several times. Although he didn't go into great detail, his explanation as to why it was unlikely to ever happen is almost exactly what Helmut_McQuack said initially.

It is worth noting that you can homebrew the equivalent of custom classes through a combination of the subclass system and homebrewing items that form a facsimile of your custom class' abilities (you just only brew for the abilities you take, not every possible option).  One of my players is presently doing that to add the UA Mystic class to D&D Beyond--it is working fine, though it takes a fair bit of work to implement.  

Not an ideal situation, but, if you want to use Beyond and use a custom class, it will get the job done. 

Honestly, I have seen other websites with more options for homebrew creation, like creating monstors and classes. The only reason why i don't use them is because DnD Beyond system and layout for homebrew creation is just simply better. I can see where you all are coming from, but wouldn't it be kinda the same as homebrew races? because you can create Full races and variants or subraces of that race. Its the same thing with classes, there is a class and a subclass. just like there is a race and a variant race or subrace. So I would believe that it would be the same difficulty or less of difficulty to add homebrew classes as it was to add homebrew races.