My answer is simple. No, as a dm I got a ton of stuff on my plate, and figuring out a whole new set of complex rules that could easily slow down game play, and I don't want to do that to my game, or my other players.
Thinking about it, the most I would allow is you to awakended dog, useing the customs race, that as a druid you could shape change useing the same rules as wild shape, once you hit 2nd level, into basic humanoid like a commoner. I would maybe allow you to cast any spell that doesn't have somatic spells components in your dog form. In your commoner form I would let you cast spells, it's a commoner after all and I don't think that would upset game balance.
Ok. So this is a character for you. Now I see. I'll tell you a couple things from a DM's perspective. First, when someone comes to me and say they want to homebrew, what I typically hear them saying is, I have this idea but I can't do it if I follow the rules, because its going to be OP -- because 95 percent of homebrew is OP, and when its a player inventing it specifically for their own character, that may be a low estimate. Maybe your idea is in the 5 percent, I don't know, I'm just telling you my thought process.
Moreover, being a DM is a lot of work. Players show up with a piece of paper and a bag of dice and they're ready to go. Maybe they sometimes have to spend a few minutes leveling up. DM'ing takes hours and hours every week. Adding in these homebrew things makes more work, for me, the DM, just so one player can have some special toys. I don't really have the time or space to get into how it does, just trust me that it does. So my reflex, when a player comes to me with something like this is to not make piles of extra work for myself and instead to say "No. Figure out a way to do it within the rules. It may not be exactly what you want but it will be close enough."
Which brings me back to my post earlier in the thread. Play a shifter and re-skin it. Or play a tabaxi and re-skin it. Heck, play a human and re-skin it. There are like 101 races. I'm sure you can find one that's close enough to what you want to do, that it works for your concept. Or, if your DM allows Tasha's, use the rules for a custom race and be done with it. Don't go inventing new mechanics, that's just making work for other people.
And again, everything you describe above can be accomplished through role play. You don't need a custom race and magic item to pull it off. You got cursed by a witch to avenge your masters, or some nature god, or archfey saw what happened and changed you. Now you're a [whatever race you like]. No funny business required.
Yeah, it took me a while to realize this is the player asking the question, not a DM dealing with the player. In that case, OP, my answer is no. I don’t allow homebrew, especially when it puts you ahead of the other players, and I’ll have to think about the RP concept of a transformed dog. Honestly, even if I wanted to give a different answer, I wouldn’t have the time to figure it out.
So if you were one of my players, you’d get “Nnnno. *chuckle* Sorry.”
And, frankly, with the amount of work a DM puts in to make the game fun for you (and the other players, who are the main reason I wouldn’t allow this), they shouldn’t need to say any more than that. For me, that’s that. If you don’t believe me, give DMing a real try.
I like the archfey idea. I think I could work that in, i just really wanted to avoid a generic "I was a dog, then poof now I'm a person.... this plot point will never come up again, even if the campaign runs from level 1-20"
As a kind of aside, do you have a personal hard stance against players having "special toys"? Or do you just find that it just generally ends up being abused and thus unfun for other players? All other things (extra health pools, beast form spell casting, etc...) not with standing. I'm trying to figure out if having access to something (because of backstory) is too much bonus power, and is likely to ruin a "standard" game. In this case it would be a druid, with the Circle of the Shepard's feature Speech of the Woods as a passive. Like they don't have to take that subclass but get the ability to talk to and understand animals, and only that, feature as part of their backstory.
Whether or not the plot point will come up again is completely dependent on the DM's skill and the campaign they're running. That is true for every character and every backstory. Bob the sword and board champion fighter with a soldier background may see his background come up and be important, or he may not. It's just going to come down to whether or not the DM can work it in. So you being a transmuted dog out for revenge will be exactly the same. Making a strange backstory doesn't guarantee anything in terms of it coming up again.
To your question, I'll say that what I would rule doesn't really matter too much, its going to be what your DM rules that will matter. That said, as far as a hard rule. I don't know if its a hard rule, but there's usually a very high bar to clear. For one, if you give something to one character, then you need to be willing to give something to every character. It becomes precedent setting. Some DMs may be totally cool with that, some not. It's going to vary between DMs, and even with the same DM it may vary from one campaign to the next. For what you're describing would probably be a no. I would not allow you a free subclass ability. That's OP. (see also: precedent setting e.g. The samurai fighter would like to have the champion's ability to crit on a 19, because they came up with a backstory reason for it. Every single rogue ever wants the assassin's assassinate ability on top of their normal subclass abilities, etc.) Anyone else who wants the power you mention needs to take 2 levels in druid to get it, I'm not going to give it away for nothing. I might consider something like requiring you to spend a feat for it, but that's just off the top of my head, and something I'd really want to think about before I allowed it, and there would definitely be a conversation about exactly how it would work for you, and the costs, benefits and restrictions. (Maybe that's a little taste of the extra work some of us have been talking about.)
If you pitch an idea to 100 people, you might get 100 different answers spanning the vast gap between agreeing with you and disagreeing. You might also get 70 people who agree with you, 20 that disagree on principle, and 10 who disagree because of X/Y/Z (the people you can hash out specifics with). If you get the latter, you probably have a solid idea that could reasonably be pitched to a DM without being a huge time sink for everyone involved. Like we all know and agree, DM's are busy, and no one wants to have to balance around an entire party of characters with 4 multiclass/homebrew monstrosities.
I will admit that there are some sub class abilities that are much stronger then others. The assassinate feature being a great example, that said, on a personal level i feel there is a lot less to balance around for a player who can speak to animals VS. a player who has auto advantage based on when they act during the round, and auto crits on surprised enemies.
If you pitch an idea to 100 people, you might get 100 different answers spanning the vast gap between agreeing with you and disagreeing. You might also get 70 people who agree with you, 20 that disagree on principle, and 10 who disagree because of X/Y/Z (the people you can hash out specifics with). If you get the latter, you probably have a solid idea that could reasonably be pitched to a DM without being a huge time sink for everyone involved. Like we all know and agree, DM's are busy, and no one wants to have to balance around an entire party of characters with 4 multiclass/homebrew monstrosities.
I understand what you are doing, I just wanted it to be clear that this was only my opinion, and not an attempt at a rules argument.
I will admit that there are some sub class abilities that are much stronger then others. The assassinate feature being a great example, that said, on a personal level i feel there is a lot less to balance around for a player who can speak to animals VS. a player who has auto advantage based on when they act during the round, and auto crits on surprised enemies.
The thing is, this will be very campaign dependent. In some campaigns, you might be in a dungeon crawl where you never see an animal. In some you might be in the forest all the time and able to chat with a small army of basically spies. (and yes, what they know and how they respond will be based largely on their intelligence, etc.) In a campaign where there's a lot of large-scale engagements, that assassin ability might not get much use. Everything is always going to be situational. So it's really, really hard to weigh the relative value of different class abilities against each other, try to decide if you want to allow one but not another, and then look at them in the context of the campaign you have planned as a DM, and then remember that what you have planned will almost certainly change dramatically when you actually go to play it. So there's no way to know how strong a given ability will end up being in the long run.
So I would typically go with a "No" to avoid all the headache. You want the ability, take the class. That's the way RPGs work. You can't have everything, you have to make sacrifices and trade-offs.
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My answer is simple. No, as a dm I got a ton of stuff on my plate, and figuring out a whole new set of complex rules that could easily slow down game play, and I don't want to do that to my game, or my other players.
Thinking about it, the most I would allow is you to awakended dog, useing the customs race, that as a druid you could shape change useing the same rules as wild shape, once you hit 2nd level, into basic humanoid like a commoner. I would maybe allow you to cast any spell that doesn't have somatic spells components in your dog form. In your commoner form I would let you cast spells, it's a commoner after all and I don't think that would upset game balance.
Ok. So this is a character for you. Now I see. I'll tell you a couple things from a DM's perspective. First, when someone comes to me and say they want to homebrew, what I typically hear them saying is, I have this idea but I can't do it if I follow the rules, because its going to be OP -- because 95 percent of homebrew is OP, and when its a player inventing it specifically for their own character, that may be a low estimate. Maybe your idea is in the 5 percent, I don't know, I'm just telling you my thought process.
Moreover, being a DM is a lot of work. Players show up with a piece of paper and a bag of dice and they're ready to go. Maybe they sometimes have to spend a few minutes leveling up. DM'ing takes hours and hours every week. Adding in these homebrew things makes more work, for me, the DM, just so one player can have some special toys. I don't really have the time or space to get into how it does, just trust me that it does. So my reflex, when a player comes to me with something like this is to not make piles of extra work for myself and instead to say "No. Figure out a way to do it within the rules. It may not be exactly what you want but it will be close enough."
Which brings me back to my post earlier in the thread. Play a shifter and re-skin it. Or play a tabaxi and re-skin it. Heck, play a human and re-skin it. There are like 101 races. I'm sure you can find one that's close enough to what you want to do, that it works for your concept. Or, if your DM allows Tasha's, use the rules for a custom race and be done with it. Don't go inventing new mechanics, that's just making work for other people.
And again, everything you describe above can be accomplished through role play. You don't need a custom race and magic item to pull it off. You got cursed by a witch to avenge your masters, or some nature god, or archfey saw what happened and changed you. Now you're a [whatever race you like]. No funny business required.
Yeah, it took me a while to realize this is the player asking the question, not a DM dealing with the player. In that case, OP, my answer is no. I don’t allow homebrew, especially when it puts you ahead of the other players, and I’ll have to think about the RP concept of a transformed dog. Honestly, even if I wanted to give a different answer, I wouldn’t have the time to figure it out.
So if you were one of my players, you’d get “Nnnno. *chuckle* Sorry.”
And, frankly, with the amount of work a DM puts in to make the game fun for you (and the other players, who are the main reason I wouldn’t allow this), they shouldn’t need to say any more than that. For me, that’s that. If you don’t believe me, give DMing a real try.
Wizard (Gandalf) of the Tolkien Club
I like the archfey idea. I think I could work that in, i just really wanted to avoid a generic "I was a dog, then poof now I'm a person.... this plot point will never come up again, even if the campaign runs from level 1-20"
As a kind of aside, do you have a personal hard stance against players having "special toys"? Or do you just find that it just generally ends up being abused and thus unfun for other players? All other things (extra health pools, beast form spell casting, etc...) not with standing. I'm trying to figure out if having access to something (because of backstory) is too much bonus power, and is likely to ruin a "standard" game. In this case it would be a druid, with the Circle of the Shepard's feature Speech of the Woods as a passive. Like they don't have to take that subclass but get the ability to talk to and understand animals, and only that, feature as part of their backstory.
Whether or not the plot point will come up again is completely dependent on the DM's skill and the campaign they're running. That is true for every character and every backstory. Bob the sword and board champion fighter with a soldier background may see his background come up and be important, or he may not. It's just going to come down to whether or not the DM can work it in. So you being a transmuted dog out for revenge will be exactly the same. Making a strange backstory doesn't guarantee anything in terms of it coming up again.
To your question, I'll say that what I would rule doesn't really matter too much, its going to be what your DM rules that will matter. That said, as far as a hard rule. I don't know if its a hard rule, but there's usually a very high bar to clear. For one, if you give something to one character, then you need to be willing to give something to every character. It becomes precedent setting. Some DMs may be totally cool with that, some not. It's going to vary between DMs, and even with the same DM it may vary from one campaign to the next. For what you're describing would probably be a no. I would not allow you a free subclass ability. That's OP. (see also: precedent setting e.g. The samurai fighter would like to have the champion's ability to crit on a 19, because they came up with a backstory reason for it. Every single rogue ever wants the assassin's assassinate ability on top of their normal subclass abilities, etc.) Anyone else who wants the power you mention needs to take 2 levels in druid to get it, I'm not going to give it away for nothing. I might consider something like requiring you to spend a feat for it, but that's just off the top of my head, and something I'd really want to think about before I allowed it, and there would definitely be a conversation about exactly how it would work for you, and the costs, benefits and restrictions. (Maybe that's a little taste of the extra work some of us have been talking about.)
If you pitch an idea to 100 people, you might get 100 different answers spanning the vast gap between agreeing with you and disagreeing. You might also get 70 people who agree with you, 20 that disagree on principle, and 10 who disagree because of X/Y/Z (the people you can hash out specifics with). If you get the latter, you probably have a solid idea that could reasonably be pitched to a DM without being a huge time sink for everyone involved. Like we all know and agree, DM's are busy, and no one wants to have to balance around an entire party of characters with 4 multiclass/homebrew monstrosities.
I will admit that there are some sub class abilities that are much stronger then others. The assassinate feature being a great example, that said, on a personal level i feel there is a lot less to balance around for a player who can speak to animals VS. a player who has auto advantage based on when they act during the round, and auto crits on surprised enemies.
I understand what you are doing, I just wanted it to be clear that this was only my opinion, and not an attempt at a rules argument.
The thing is, this will be very campaign dependent. In some campaigns, you might be in a dungeon crawl where you never see an animal. In some you might be in the forest all the time and able to chat with a small army of basically spies. (and yes, what they know and how they respond will be based largely on their intelligence, etc.) In a campaign where there's a lot of large-scale engagements, that assassin ability might not get much use. Everything is always going to be situational. So it's really, really hard to weigh the relative value of different class abilities against each other, try to decide if you want to allow one but not another, and then look at them in the context of the campaign you have planned as a DM, and then remember that what you have planned will almost certainly change dramatically when you actually go to play it. So there's no way to know how strong a given ability will end up being in the long run.
So I would typically go with a "No" to avoid all the headache. You want the ability, take the class. That's the way RPGs work. You can't have everything, you have to make sacrifices and trade-offs.