Hello everyone!

I am a fairly new DM, and my party is currently enjoying the Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign. I noticed that some of the party members could use a boost in some of the game world aspects during downtime between battles, as they either are not much into roleplaying or need to bump up some professions that are handy for survival.

Anyhoo, I got bored one morning and decided to create a homebrew system that is loosely based on  Profession systems like in World of Warcraft, so there may be some similarities and differences between the two in the system I created. I am open to critique and opinions. If you like it, feel free to try it out in your campaign and lmk how it goes :)

D&D Profession System (Skill Tree)

As a variant rule, you can require characters to spend downtime training or studying before they gain the benefits of a new level. If you choose this option, once a character has earned enough experience points to attain a new level, they must train for a number of days before gaining any class features associated with the new level.

The training time required depends on the level to be gained, as shown in the Training to Gain Levels table. The training cost is for the total training time.

Profession Training System

Introduction:

In between quests and adventures, players have the opportunity to seek out NPCs who can train them further in various skills and professions during downtime activity. These skills can range from crafting and gathering to magical disciplines and more.

Finding Trainers:

Players can find trainers in towns, cities, or specialized training facilities. Trainers are skilled individuals willing to teach their expertise in exchange for a fee, a favor, or a quest completion.

Training Levels:

Each skill or profession has multiple training levels, ranging from Novice to Master. Players start as Novices and progress by completing tasks, quests, or challenges related to the chosen skill. If the plasyer has not learned a Novice skill, but can learn higher level skills, they must learn the skills in. order of the Skill Tree levels required (ex., a level 5 player wants to improve in cooking, so they must first train for skills in Novice, then afterward learn Apprentice in the Labor Maestro skill from the trainer NPC).

Training Tasks:

To advance in a skill or profession, players must complete training tasks assigned by the trainers. These tasks could involve performing feats of skill, solving puzzles, or mastering practical challenges related to the chosen skill.

Advancement Rewards:

As players progress in their chosen skills, they gain access to new abilities, techniques, or benefits. Each skill provides unique advantages that can aid players in various aspects of their adventures.

Skill Benefits:

Here are some examples of skill categories and their associated benefits:

• Crafting Professions: Enhance armor, weapons, and items with unique effects or bonuses.
• Gathering Skills: Find rare resources, track creatures, and identify valuable herbs or minerals.
• Magical Disciplines: Learn new spells, rituals, or magical abilities associated with the chosen school of magic.
• Performance Arts: Entertain and inspire others through music, storytelling, or acting, granting bonuses to social interactions.
• Stealth and Skullduggery: Develop stealth techniques, lock-picking abilities, and the capacity to blend into shadows.
• Outdoor Skills: Navigate the wilderness, forage for food, and survive harsh environments.

Downtime Activities:

Players can engage in skill training during downtime, such as long rests, travel, or while staying in towns or cities.

Role-Playing Opportunities:

Utilize NPCs to provide background stories, lore, and role-playing opportunities related to each skill or profession. This adds depth and immersion to the world.

Customization:

Allow players to choose from a list of available skills or professions. You can introduce unique skills or adapt existing skills to fit your campaign's setting and theme.

This expanded system provides players with a broader array of options for character development and role-playing interactions. It can help them feel more connected to the world and offer additional ways to engage with the campaign beyond combat and traditional adventuring. Wit this, they can become the polymath they always wanted to be.

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Leveling Professions

To level a profession, you will have to reach a certain character level within the level requirement range (ex. Character Level 1-4). Once a character has reached these requirements, they also level up once in the Skill Level Tree.

In order to partake in whatever activity is associated with your chosen profession; For any professions that use recipes of any kind, the recipes will be provided by the NPC with a number that corresponds with your skill level. (Ex., the DM will reveal the Skill Tree level, but only grant Skill Recipes that match the Skill Tree level for the player.) As you increase your skill level, lower level recipes will become readily available, for a price.

Profession Ranks

When you first learn a profession, you will be an Apprentice of that profession, able to level it up to Journeyman. In order to level it further, you will need to learn higher profession Skill Tree ranks from your profession's respective trainer.

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Types of Professions

There are multiple ways to categorize professions in Classic, depending on how you are assessing the criteria for categorization.

The main categories used by players are as follows.

• Crafting professions — Using the materials obtained through gathering professions, will allow players to learn recipes and schematics that can create powerful equippable gear, consumables, and other usable gear.
• Gathering professions — These professions are mainly used to gather items from the world, which will then be used to create items with the other professions.
• "Other" professions — these professions do not fit into any other category and are either class-specific or cannot be leveled up as others can.
• Primary professions — These professions take up a "primary" slot for players, of which only 2 can be learned at any single time on a character. In order to learn a new one, you will have to unlearn one of your current two.
• Secondary professions — For "secondary" professions, there is no restriction on which ones you can learn. You can learn all of them, as they each have their own unique slot.
• Service professions — these do not create a new item but instead will modify an existing item for a player or enhance their character. Unlike with the other professions, these require you to directly interact with a character, whether it is your own or somebody else.

I have sorted the professions into their assigned categories, depending on their status as primary or secondary professions.

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List of all D&D professions, including descriptions, organized into categories:

Adds a bonus to all checks per field in the Skill Level Tree. This also stacks with your Proficiency Bonus, and has a maximum of 5 additional Skill Points per roll.

Handcrafter:

Performer:

Scholar:

Caretaker:

Tycoon:

Warrior:

Labor Maestro:

Innovator:

Miscellaneous professions

Seeker:

Rider:

(If there are any Professions/Categories, or anything else that may be missing, feel free to let me know and I will revise as needed.)

Thanks for reading, and happy adventuring!

This seems fun, especially for tables that like to do a lot of micro-managing, but I think it's a little overly focused on just... leveling up these secondary features, but I think more valuable would be more specific rules about how to actually use these features. Crafting in 5e is really hard to utilize as-written, since it relies so heavily on the player having weeks worth of downtime to work on projects. This feature gives a flat boost to skill checks involving tools, but actually rolling skill checks is kind of the least-involved part of crafting. 

All in all, I think this is a very solid base to build on. For anything that I would actually want to accomplish with this concept, I think that a core concept like this is still very necessary, and kind of the most long and "boring" part to try and create on your own. If I were to use this with my players I feel like I would use this as a concept then just flesh out whatever individual Professions my players selected in the future. But I don't think I would have the patience to build the whole thing from the ground up.

Way back, during 1e AD&D, proficiency systems were published and were a big hit at the time. They took this kind of set up and went to town, with them becoming official and then getting out of hand by the end of 3.5 to the point that the current 5e system is really just a super simplified system for that because crafting wasn’t a focus of developers.

I like this, for what it is worth, and have a similar system I use that “breaks bounded accuracy”. 

the real key is if it works at the table for your players. 

This way madness lies.

Don't get me wrong, it's a cool system. But this requires a fully-developed crafting system to really provide benefits, and designing and implementing a crafting system is an insane amount of work. However much work you think it will be, double it. And be ready for it to rapidly expand and bloat as you actually start using it.

I love the concept and I've done it myself. Who doesn't like a Monster Hunter type system where you harvest pieces of magical enemies or rare woodland flowers and create cool gear from them? But this means for every enemy and every microbiome in your setting, you need to create drops and skill levels/rarity for each. For every drop, you need to create formulas, whether they be immediately known or much be researched later. For every formula, you need to set skill levels, determine costs, and create a magic item or effect. And no small part of this is balancing all of it so that crafting is worthwhile but doesn't completely invalidate adventuring but also remains fairly balanced with other downtime activities and the benefits of other professions.

This is fun as an intellectual/creative enterprise on your own time, but - in my experience - when actually implemented in an active campaign it can easily triple your workload as a DM. And I'm already running out of time and flying by the seat of my pants half the time as it is. Just fair warning from someone who's been there.