Hi all! I quit playing 5e for a few years to play Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), which I enjoyed thoroughly. However, after about 4 years, my group has fell apart due to real life stuff, as it goes. Recently, some friends have asked that I run a D&D campaign for them. They have characters on DND Beyond and want to play using roll20 for the easy compatibility. I'm all for it except for a couple things- I want to homebrew a couple of mechanics; namely, I want to get rid of the Wisdom attribute and rename it "Perception" because I've always hated the way Wisdom was defined in 5e. I then want to take the Perception skill and change it to "Alertness." The rest of the character sheet stuff would remain relatively the same, except skills that pull from Wisdom would be called "Perception" skills.
The other thing I want to do is change spellcasting- since Wisdom would be removed, I want to reorganize the casters so that Charisma and Intelligence are the only casting abilities. Nature is an Intelligence skill, so it makes more sense to me for it to be the casting stat for Druids and Rangers. Clerics and Paladins would pull from Charisma, since their presence and personal magnetism would be more attractive to gods' attention, and I've always hated the idea of bards using music as spells, instead of being "jacks of all trade" adventurers that just learn magic the same way as wizards/arcane casters. To that end, I wanted the the classes to look operate like this:
The easiest way to do this would be to manually update your modifiers in the character builder - it would not be all that hard to use the override features to set things like spell saves as if they were based on Intelligence or Charisma, rather than Wisdom. This would be annoying and would require manual upkeep every time a modifier changes, but would not be that hard.
There might also be a way to build feats to hack this together - you could use feats that give you spells and allow you to choose your spellcasting modifier in place of just choosing spells from the spell list. This would be time intensive and require significant maintenance, particularly for prepared spellcasters.
Neither of those systems is perfect, but it certainly is doable. Changing the names of things like “perception” is not possible.
Additionally. before you spend a lot of your time trying to hack something together on Beyond, I think you need to find a group that would sign off on this. Not only are you fighting against fifty years of inertia - you are doing so in a way that makes the ability scores less reflective of folks’ mental capacities. I expect finding a a full party willing to play in the game will be vastly harder than figuring out Beyond’s sometimes clunky homebrew tools - so you might want to see if this game might even come to fruition before you invest time in the homebrew component.
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Hi all! I quit playing 5e for a few years to play Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), which I enjoyed thoroughly. However, after about 4 years, my group has fell apart due to real life stuff, as it goes. Recently, some friends have asked that I run a D&D campaign for them. They have characters on DND Beyond and want to play using roll20 for the easy compatibility. I'm all for it except for a couple things- I want to homebrew a couple of mechanics; namely, I want to get rid of the Wisdom attribute and rename it "Perception" because I've always hated the way Wisdom was defined in 5e. I then want to take the Perception skill and change it to "Alertness." The rest of the character sheet stuff would remain relatively the same, except skills that pull from Wisdom would be called "Perception" skills.
The other thing I want to do is change spellcasting- since Wisdom would be removed, I want to reorganize the casters so that Charisma and Intelligence are the only casting abilities. Nature is an Intelligence skill, so it makes more sense to me for it to be the casting stat for Druids and Rangers. Clerics and Paladins would pull from Charisma, since their presence and personal magnetism would be more attractive to gods' attention, and I've always hated the idea of bards using music as spells, instead of being "jacks of all trade" adventurers that just learn magic the same way as wizards/arcane casters. To that end, I wanted the the classes to look operate like this:
Intelligence casting-
Wizards
Druids
Rangers
Bards
Charisma casting-
Clerics
Paladins
Sorcerers
Warlocks
Is there any way to do this through DND Beyond?
You cannot do this in DDB. Classes, the default skills, and the base stats aren't customizable.
The easiest way to do this would be to manually update your modifiers in the character builder - it would not be all that hard to use the override features to set things like spell saves as if they were based on Intelligence or Charisma, rather than Wisdom. This would be annoying and would require manual upkeep every time a modifier changes, but would not be that hard.
There might also be a way to build feats to hack this together - you could use feats that give you spells and allow you to choose your spellcasting modifier in place of just choosing spells from the spell list. This would be time intensive and require significant maintenance, particularly for prepared spellcasters.
Neither of those systems is perfect, but it certainly is doable. Changing the names of things like “perception” is not possible.
Additionally. before you spend a lot of your time trying to hack something together on Beyond, I think you need to find a group that would sign off on this. Not only are you fighting against fifty years of inertia - you are doing so in a way that makes the ability scores less reflective of folks’ mental capacities. I expect finding a a full party willing to play in the game will be vastly harder than figuring out Beyond’s sometimes clunky homebrew tools - so you might want to see if this game might even come to fruition before you invest time in the homebrew component.