As D&D evolves into another iteration, it seems like it is going to become more challenging to create home brew worlds that integrate all of the classes and subclasses that are being offered.

I don’t dislike all of the subclasses they are creating. But I feel like the detail and assumptions included in a lot of the classes dictate the style, theme and setting that is expected when creating your own world. For instance, the College of Dance Bard assumes there are colleges. The assumption is that your bard is part of a college, that colleges are a part of the world like in Harry Potter or Skyrim. But what if there are no educational institutions in my home brew world? The Barbarian of the World Tree has access World Tree powers. What if I never decided to make a “World Tree”?  I know we are free to alter what these things mean when we use them in our home brew worlds, and that we can reconfigure these details to suit our home brew worlds, but I still feel like it sets an expectation that the DM then has to spend effort redefining for players. The more subclasses we see, the more complex this endeavor becomes.

All that to say I think it is becoming more challenging to create homebrew worlds that have their own identity because classes come with such strong identities embedded in their makeup. In earlier editions of D&D, the classes were more simplified and archetypal. They could transcend settings without too much work because of their simplicity and it worked. The DM could use all of their inspiration and energy to create worlds and didn’t need to worry as much about trying to integrate certain themes that didn’t work with their world’s style because the classes didn’t come with as much baggage. 

People today create unique settings with the SRD rules (i.e. Dark Souls 5e), and that is super awesome. But for the average player who doesn’t have time to rebuild the classes available to suit their home brew world, we kind of have to use what we are given. I think this is a weakness in the current rules system and in the evolving iteration. It’s complexity makes it more challenging to use when you want to integrate it into a setting with another style.

I think this is important to think about, because one of the most inspirational things you can do is create your own unique world in D&D! It is one of my favorite things to do. 

You may be overthinking things a bit. First of all nothing actually requires you allow all the possible subclasses from all the books, I know I don’t- I allow the subclasses from the books I have and none others less they are my own homebrew. Second you may be getting to tied not modern meanings of some terms like college while today it’s a synonym for university with the idea of a bunch of buildings and different areas of study it started as simply groups of folks with similar areas of interest learning and studying their interests together. So the college of dance bards might be a society of bards focused on dance and performance as a storytelling tool. Maybe the meet once every 5 years to share ideas and experiences but otherwise roam the world teaching, telling stories and studying local styles of dance and storytelling. The world tree barbarian doesn’t have to be linked to the world tree if you don’t have one. It’s could be that their society they think of the universe as a world tree even if it isn’t. Or they could not k ow what they are tapping into to generate their effects they just know they are and visualize things as a giant tree they can sometimes manipulate. Rather than trying to fit everything in as written with homebrew you are free to leave stuff out and /or reskin the classes and subclasses to suite your world ( much easier than trying to build your world to encompass all the different classes/subclasses from many different worlds.

I think you're overplaying the effort in this.

When I start a campaign, I give a list of books. Anything in those books, goes. If you pick a (valid) option from those books, then you can be assured that I'll accept it - no need to ask for permission. Anything outside of those is something you need to talk to me about. Again, most things are fine as-is, but if it's a problem, then we can work together to integrate it into the game. If we can't, then the answer is no. It really doesn't take much effort because most players are happy with the approved selection (usually PHB, MM, DMG, XGtE, TCoE, MotM, SCAG and FToD). If they want something else, it takes seconds to review it and normally approve. All told, option "policing" takes about 5 minutes of my time, and is one of the easiest parts of managing the campaign.

If you have jerks for players I can see it being a problem, but then I'm not afraid to tell them they can get another DM if they wish. I've not had to resort to that, but my players are just grateful to play so it's fine.

A college is just a school (and a university is a collection of colleges), but a school doesn’t have to be a physical place. Ever heard of a “school of thought?” In the context of D&D a “college of bards” simply refers to a bunch of bards with a similar way of thinking about the world and their role in it as entertainers. That’s all.

As for the World Tree barbarian, it could be that people from that tribe believe there’s a world tree, but there doesn’t actually have to a physical world tree. It could simply be that their belief in its existence is enough to fuel their powers, or that the “world tree” is a metaphor for something. And the players don’t have to know that there’s no world tree or that it’s a metaphor, heck you don’t even have to know for a fact what’s what, at least not in the beginning anyway. it can be something you develop over time and only reveal YoThe players if they go looking for it and if they do you don’t have to reveal it to them until they “find” it. That could take years of IRL gameplay, so you got plenty of time to figure it out, and only if you need to.

My point is that it doesn’t take much to figure out how things fit, and that you don’t need to have all the answers right up front. With just a little imagination and a reminder that these things don’t have to literally be what they say, a DM can fit pretty much anything into their campaign world should they need to.

Coming from old AD&D to 5e via a very brief spell with 3.5, I've struggled with subclasses.

I put it in my play testing feedback that maybe we could have a mechanism for some players who just don't want to play a subclass and just want to be a no frills fighter, or barbarian.

Admittedly, the first subclass option dawned on me that loosy this was the original AD&D class prior to the era of bells whistes and whizbangs, but then again I'd still like to see skills and proficiency points again as opposed to backgrounds and stuff.

I see the backgrounds almost like the starter build adventurers kit  "here's a bag with some skills, and a reason you have them". However I don't dislike them, as I say the transition from old school to new school players can do stuff and have special powers and sprinkles like on computer games took some getting used to.

I'd like to see a vanilla option for each character class and then the subclass options where sure you sacrifice somethings but get others, nut playing a vanilla fighter / barbarian / mage can still bag you a good solid character in its own right.

I run games for some kids with learning difficulties and sometimes it all becomes a bit overwhelming for them as they nervously approach 3rd level.  I re-drafted their classes so they weren't so intimidating with the plethora of information on the initial read and I'll weave the subclass stuff into their journeys as they just talk amongst themselves about what they'd love their character to do.

Link, Sposta - GMTA 
sevvy - the lead subclass for each class is basically the vanilla version, so the champion is a straight fighter, the thief is a straight rogue, the hunter is a straight ranger etc.  in 5 e classes are built to have subclasses as some of the abilities come from the subclass at different levels. A no subclass character would be missing a number of abilities nd be weaker than any subclasses version. So think of  base subclass as the “straight (no subclass)” version with all of the other subclasses substituting out various abilities at specific levels.

Every single “there are too many subclass” “too many species” problem can be solved with relative ease.  Hidden enclaves. A traveller from a different continent or plane.  Someone who believes in the Old Ways, which they have kept hidden through secret sects. A experiment gone wrong. Or even something very public which adds something to your world (to use an example from your post, a Bard University with multiple colleges in it—think Oxford University, with its smaller sub parts). Things like that. 

The ever-increasing number of classes and species is only a problem if you let it be a problem. If you are too married to your world that you are incapable of adjusting something for your players.

Here is the reality - no DM builds a world or story which is so perfect it cannot be improved. There is always going to be a mountain range where you can hide a secret society of, say, Minotaurs, isolated so long they’re seen as legends.  There is always a way to work everything (perhaps with minor flavour adjustments, but no mechanical changes) into the world - the DM just needs to be open to suggesting “sure, I can make that work—here are some things I need from you to get that to work” and the player needs to be able to respond “okay, those changes and restrictions work for me.”

thanks for the confirmation on this Wi1dBi11. It's what I suspected, and with my players with learning issues I've basically done just that to take away the excess of choice until they're ready.

But the second pair of eyes is very much appreciated :)

caerwyn, excellently put.  "but that class / monster / plae doesn't function like that.."   "it does in my game,"

IN sociology and psychology (and, yes, social psychology), there is.a concept that essentially goes “if people only know this, this is what they do”. It is a pattern bias, that has a strong tendency to limit creativity across a broad number of people. It is why “all the music sounds the same” or “all tv shows are alike” or “every dungeon is the same”.

It is why AI tools tend have some very firm limits unless the underlying models are more extensive and broad, and why facial recognition software has a long standing problem with anyone whose skin is too dark.  It is lined to the similar effect that people have when they see someone who, to them, strongly resembles the stereotype in their head of a particular type of person.

So, to start with, the details and assumptions (presumptive model) do, in fact, create a limiting function that is then supported (re-I fixed) by the generality of it all and the practical popularity of the particular item.  In short, the OP is right about that, factually.

That isn’t just a D&D thing, either - it applies in all games, in sports, in pretty much all of your life. If you want to enable players to participate, you are more or less given the sense that if you don’t have X, no one will want to play in the game you have. We see it here, pretty constantly, in every UA thread, and all the Rules & Mechanics posts and blah blah blah…

That’s a sciencey thing. Great for studying gamers, lol.

So while it may be true that no one is forcing someone to have all the classes, the general way things work is that if you don’t have all the classes, you are either shooting yourself in the foot or you have something against them or you just aren’t playing D&D.

That is common, typical, predictable, and very, very human.

DDB itself works to reinforce that kind of thinking and that way of being for commercial reasons, but it also means that all of this becomes the default expectation of anyone who comes to play the game but may not, for example, think that monks belong in D&D, or want to create a world that isn’t a kitchen skink world — and be able to use the tools and stuff available to them as if they were doing it the same way. VTT’s make this even more required as a basis — and so slowly folks who don’t follow that pat are slowly edged out of all the tools, all the toys, and all the systems. So does Roll20 and world anvil and all the others stuff.

And if you think I am joking, look at the sociocultural evolution of TV, or the rise of superhero, musical, and “water” films in each of their periods. 

What happens when none oof the classes and subclasses presented her are used? What if someone homebrews an entire set of classes and such that cannot follow the standard because they combined Khoisan and Yoruba with Dogon mythology and the splashed the society with some cool influences from Polynesia and South America? 

D&D can’t support that in its current system — not the class structure, not the subclass structure, not even the species and backgrounds. And if you think you can just re-skin one of the existing classes, well…

… you just proved the point. Because the thematic stuff is not universal, is not readily a “one to one” basis. Thinking that it is kinda sets one up to fail to understand the cultural stuff involved and so miss the basis and point of the original classes. “Make a new game!” You might say — except that folks want to play D&D using D&D rules, not have to create a new game, even with just the SRD, and now they are even more cut out from the VTTs and such because how many of them are going to support a complex world and game system that is played by seven people?

This is why so many worlds are kitchen sink worlds and why some of the old stuff that was done isn’t being done now by WotC. It all blends together at one point, but the point still remains: that is a problem. Because if the Devs arent’ capable of thinking outside the pseudo-Greco-Roman/medieval/dark ages/Rennaisance Western Europe sphere of thought, then all anyone will get is whatever the latest variation on such is in the zeitgeist.

Now, it was suggested that “if your players want it, you should find a way”. That’s fine, but that isn’t anything more than a “play the game my way” comment. Not all players want that, not all Dms want that, and now you have fed into the peer pressure like fundamental problem that was raised.

The answer to “what to do about world tree barbarians if I don’t have a world tree” is not “well, fake it til you make it” but a real concern and question answering response that could start with “well, just don’t have them” (and so lose players who are dead set on it) or recreate your world you have spent all these hours on to work with it, or “introduce a planar traveler” (ignoring that doing so severs the connection a world tree, rendering the barbarian not longer a world tree barbarian) and so forth and so on.

There should be tools and ways of doing that — or the subclasses need to not be tied to such concepts, or there needs to be far more official subclasses, and we can all go on for years about all of that, lol.

Now, I will grant that it is unreasonable to expect VTT sites or DDB to enable the homebrews of settings/worlds/classes and the like. Above all else, they barely keep this place working except in the most common, simple way. maybe in ten years, for 2034 and the 60th anniversary, they will have that capability. But the trend line says no, they won’t, and as was noted one of the most important underlying mechanics of the game has always been “create your own world”…

and yet everything is saying “nah, just kidding”, from players and commenters to the development team and on. There are some sound reasons (money) but look at all the folks who want to see something other than a kitchen sink world that draws on the same core 20 book series’ for the same mishmash of ideas just stirred in a different direction on a full moon. There is money out there.

So do not dismiss that, please. Because that’s how the hobby stops growing, stops evolving, and becomes static, and we collectively lose cool new worlds that will never see the light because they can’t be published on DMS Guild and they can’t be advertised where players congregate and the system as a whole works very, very hard to just keep ushering everyone back to the realms that were forgotten…

… and that way everyone is playing the same game the same way and we can all take our next dose of soma and smile as they slowly shut down the homebrews stuff here or limit it so strongly that it only works for worlds that are exactly like FR just with a different name.

Because people asked for it.

AEDorsay gets it

Hey everyone! Thanks for the responses here.  I don’t have too much time to reply, so can’t respond to each individual comment, but I will try to give a general reply to things that seem to be repeatedly popping up in the responses. 

First, I appreciate the conversation on this topic so thanks for replying. I like hearing what others think in regard to homebrew in D&D because I really think it is an important part of this game and something that is getting left behind in the current iterations of the game. Especially with DDB and VTT as AEDorsay points out! 

In regard to the specifics conversation on homebrew and sub classes, I must say that when I was talking about the “College of Dance Bard” and “World Tree Barbarian”, I didn’t mean to single out those classes really or get people hung up on how I can redefine what a “College” or “World Tree” in my specific world means. I was just trying to illustrate my point with current examples. But the point I was trying to make by using these examples is that the complexity of each subclass can make it more challenging to create homebrew worlds. 

I have run A LOT and have played A LOT of D&D throughout my life. I am extremely familiar with reskinning classes, or massaging a different takes on terminology related to different classes and powers in D&D (or even Gamma World if anyone likes that game like I do :) ) to make a class fit in a specific setting. In fact, in previous editions of the game, the devs would do this all the time (i.e. Dark Sun). And people on the DM’s Guild reskin and reinvent subclasses all the time! It’s a cool way to take something in the game and make it work a different way.

But subclasses embedded in the core rules mechanics inherently makes the game more complex and any time something becomes more complex it becomes more challenging to integrate. I am speaking as someone who works a lot and has less time that I did in the past to massage terminology or reskin classes. I spend most of my time creating a unique D&D setting these days, one that has its own structure and one that is built off of a previous campaign where the players characters became the new gods of the world at the end of that campaign. It is so much fun to create that world!

In the past D&D had issues with the complexity of power. Mainly “power creep”. People would come up with unique powers to add new things to the game, and that was cool until it became broken and the devs had to integrate defenses to ward off the new powers that would further offset the power in the game. In 5e it seems like they got a better handle on that. But now I see a complexity evolving in the game that makes it more challenging to integrate personal ideas via home brew campaigns. Right now I see it in subclasses. But I also notice there really doesn’t seem too much interest by the team to include options for home brew. 

As I keep saying, home brew is one of the best parts of D&D, so I hope that this is taken into consideration as the game continues to evolve. 

Thanks Wi1d Bi11, Linklite, IamSposta, SevvyDee and AEDorsay for the input!

Happy to engage. I for one (and likely the others) only focused on those two subclasses as they were the examples provided. That’s all. I only used them as examples of how one might proceed, and also didn’t mean to single those out.

As for Homebrew, you won’t meet a bigger proponent of homebrew than me, it’s kinda my jam. When I’m not working I spend most of my time creating and developing non-official material for D&D. I don’t tend to find it difficult to fit just about anything into my world in some way or other, and I tend to not reskin so much as reimagine. That’s one of the things I mentioned in my post, the other being that it doesn’t actually have to be done until it’s necessary, so I can just fit something in and figure out how it fits down the line if necessary.

I think WotC have a tricky balance to pull off. An explicit trend in their evolution of 5e has been to make character species and monsters less setting-specific, to encourage greater freedom for DMs to create their own home brew worlds which don’t feel like Forgotten Realms clones. For example, humanoids in MotM are now “any alignment” whereas “cultural” traits have mostly been removed from PC species. The “downside” is that it can feel as though some of the flavour has been lost to generic blandness: it then falls to the DM to add their own flavours. Interestingly, they didn’t collate all species into MotM: they explicitly presented the “setting agnostic” species, leaving some in their original sourcebooks (Owlin in Strixhaven, Loxodon in Ravnica, Kalashtar in Eberron, as examples). So they have left some precedents for DMs to restrict the species they want to see in their worlds. 

I’m not sure I can answer the subclass conundrum, but a DM is unlikely to need to accommodate more than half a dozen subclasses into their world. Discuss the setting and how you envisage it with the players. They might choose to go with subclass that you fitting well; if they’re set on a subclass that’s a less obvious fit, ponder it a while: a reimagining that works might present it. If not, ask the player to think again. 

However, trying to accommodate something which doesn’t obviously fit into the world sometimes leads to solutions that enrich and enlarge your world. That seemingly awkward subclass might act as the grit around which many new ideas accrete. 

Dorsay myself and maybe another person were talking in another thread about how it would be nice to "break" DND and make it more favorable townhome brew by swapping in and out classes, spells, and customization so you can basically print on demand your own ruleset. 

It's still a dream... I think you cans till create new worlds and new settings, but yeah... once spelljammer gets it's own release you can almost tell it's a sign that a new edition is needed to reset the whole thing soon so they can do it all again...

Given that about 50% of all games are not based on published worlds I don’t think homebrew is in any danger. But yes the class+subclass structure is limiting in structure for home brewers. World creation is, at best a difficult and tedious process, the more different from published materials your world is the more difficult it is to make a balanced world (or class). Dorsay (and her group) have gone to extreme lengths to create a truly original world, classes, etc. Creating a consistent balanced set of cultures, even if you have a background like Dorsay’s to help draw from is extremely challenging. For most of us it’s more than we are willing to do so we are modifiers not creators. We take a setting and change it around to a lesser or greater extent then add homebrew items, subclasses, monsters, NPCs and maybe classes and make the world our own - much less creative but much easier. But it’s still homebrewing in my book. For me it’s mostly magic items, for Sposta it’s everything DDB allows and then some. 
I wasn’t meaning to be insulting when speaking about colleges and other possible meaning for the word. Just making sure you were aware as I’ve seen many folks here who don’t have the experience (and sometimes knowledge). Same for the world tree barbarian as I have seen bumper outs post from beginning DMs and players in over their heads with the problem of fitting a book class into a reskinned idea - just wanted to give some possibly usable ideas.

I am laughing because I just realized that I have the perfect example of how D&D can fail to be of use by simply putting in place five rules for developing a world that I have already been using.

1 - nothing can be used as inspiration for classes, races, or cultures from any fiction written between 1920 and 1980. Note, that wipes out 80% of the inspiration for D&D itself. No Tolkien, no Vance, no Moorcock, no Zelazny. Nor can you take from D&D materials them selves, since all of them share that foundation. You can keep spells, monsters, and magic items.

2 - must incorporate at least 33% of inspiration from something other than European and  Mediterranean sources.

3 - you must firmly ground any races or classes and all creatures and gods into the historio-cultural ethos of the world — You can’t use something from earth, for example. You have to have a reason and a way that gods and peoples and critters and classes exist, drawing from the archetypes of that world’s history and cultures.

4 - three cultures, none of them a direct lift from earth. If you use earthly cultures, you have to use three different cultures from different continents and mesh them together.

5 - Anything you create to replace those things cut out must still work within 5e in general. So, without Vance, you have to change the rules for magic. Without Tolkien, if you want elves, you have to find a new way to present them. Without moorcock, you need an alignment system and without Zelazny you need to redo the planes, and so forth.

Now, be aware that I know it can be done, and that it isn’t easy. It means research and knowing the source material thoroughly. So you have to read all the books that inspired D&D so you don’t use them.

some May say “but why do that?”. Well, because when you do, you see the things talked about here. Not everyone wants to use a generic fantasy world, just as not everyone wants a world full of weirdness. Also, as a Player, this kind of world changes all the things you take for granted, can create a sense of newness, can provide broader role playing and give new challenges.

but also, because some DMs love this kind of world building, it is what draws them to D&D — and not being able to is what pushes them away.