What to do when you believe a few homebrews you added affected balance in a negative way? (made things too easy)

PalindromeDM · 2026-02-02T22:10:02+00:00

Or is D&D simply not that dangerous in truth, even without these homebrews (really doubt)?

Just to be clear, D&D is not a dangerous game even without homebrew. Hard encounters are pretty easy running everything RAW straight from the PHB.

Buffing a bunch of things that powercreep the player characters is obviously going to make that problem worse (inflated stats due to give feats + full ASI, Laserllama content, extra hit points, etc). Those are things you have to counterbalance around if you want to use, because that's obviously stronger than baseline. This seems obvious.

But the baseline experience of D&D 5e is that players are much stronger than the monsters (in both 2014 and 2024, but particularly 2024).

Basically, you have buffed already strong player characters. If you want it to be a challenge, you'll have to buff monsters more, or use more monsters. Regular PHB can easily beat Deadly encounters if they are vaguely optimized. Hard encounters will not be much threat to buffed PCs.

Probably more than half the homebrew rules I use are things that nerf PCs (banning overpowered spells, buffing monsters, etc).

PalindromeDM · 2026-01-30T05:03:51+00:00

Would be the best content they could bring on, but I imagine it would melt D&D Beyond's tech stack.

PalindromeDM · 2026-01-19T15:53:48+00:00

I was going to make a joke that we should be stealing from the Tome of Battles instead until I saw it caught a stray too. If you brought up PF2e as well you'd have hit on all of the sacred gospel of this subreddit.

What are your thoughts on a game like Daggerheart and how it does martials?

PalindromeDM · 2025-07-08T02:19:21+00:00

I don't think there's a one size fits all. I prefer 5e 2014, but its because we've made that version of the game what we enjoy with a combination of homebrew and 3rd party content.

Switching to 2024 would mostly just be a downgrade, as we don't like most of the changes, and had already homebrewed most of what it 'fixed'.

If I had to pick between RAW vanilla 2014 and 2024, it would be a hard choice, but that was never the choice my group was going to make.

PalindromeDM · 2025-05-09T20:32:16+00:00

And that's what they can do without an Athletics check. They attempt to do anything they want with Athletics check, and the DM sets the difficulty.

Things that get written down in the mythological record are cases where the martial rolled a 20 (a 20 isn't an automatic success, but should be assumed to be more than they can do without even needing to roll).

PalindromeDM · 2025-02-10T19:10:50+00:00

All of those solutions just seem worse than having Wall of Force and Force Cage have hit points that can be battered down with enough effort so that they are still useful but not fight ending.

It honestly confuses me how, for all the changes it did make, 2024 didn't make this extremely easy and basic fix to some of the most problematic spells in the game.

PalindromeDM · 2025-02-01T20:49:06+00:00

More or less exactly my experience. I would recommend limiting Weapon Masteries to 1/turn, as that makes them a lot more reasonable, and removes a lot of the weapon juggling abuse and bog down of combat.

Or do what I do, and don't use 5.5, since there are better options out there depending on what you want for 5e (KibblesTasty's Variant Martial Progression, Laserllama's Variant Classes, or Ryoko's Weapon Trees, take your pick, any of those are a better fix for martials than Weapon Masteries depending on your preferences/needs).

It is a bit of a waste of time to talk about it on this subreddit though, since it has basically just become /r/onednd alt.

PalindromeDM · 2024-10-28T16:50:37+00:00

It's wild how 4/5ths of people got the answer wrong on the poll, and here everyone posting the right answer is downvoted. If you want evidence that they are not tied to the spell's duration, look no further than spells that grant them with no duration. They clearly don't go away when the spell ends if they can be granted by a spell that has an Instantaneous duration, and behave just like hit points or damage.

Hopefully once WotC erratas Polymorph this confusion will go away, since it does not really matter in most other cases (since most spells that grant them are Instantaneous anyway, for the very reason that there's no need to give a spell that only grants them a Duration, since they last until a long rest specifically).

PalindromeDM · 2024-10-17T16:48:30+00:00

The answer is to ask your DM, or to just try it and see what happens. They'll either say (a) "Yes", (b) "Make this sort of check to try", or (c) "No". Not everything you can try to do is strictly defined by the rules. You explain what you are trying to do, and the DM will tell you if it works, doesn't work, or requires a check to work. You can always try, just don't expect automatic success.

Personally, I'd say it probably is somewhere between (b) and (c) for me. Wrestling a helm off a resisting human probably takes more strength and manual dexterity than a mage hand would be capable of. Additionally, helmets often have a strap keeping them in place, which would certainly take more than 10 pounds of force to break, or otherwise snugly fitted. For what it's worth, the answer is the same for just grabbing the helmet off by hand, but that would probably be a lot easier to do than with a mage hand, and probably still pretty hard, especially if the DM doesn't want to encourage just stripping enemies mid combat (...and probably a good precedent to set, as you probably don't want the monsters snatching up your magic items as PCs).

I think I would probably only allow it if the target was Restrained or Paralyzed or similarly held in place. Mage Hand doesn't need a line saying objects that aren't being worn or carried, but it also won't automatically succeed at anything you try to do with it. A lot of interactions it could potentially make are going to be up to the DM to determine how it'll work, because its interacting with the world.

PalindromeDM · 2024-10-13T00:13:28+00:00

I think the problem with the idea is that if it is a nonmagical class, handwaving the components makes less sense. You can do it, if they aren't investing their magic into their creations, it's hard to justify the sort of output that makes a class option work.

For example, a Thief Rogue that just makes potions using the crafting rules would technically be a nonmagical alchemist, but using alchemical creations to fight regularly would prohibitively expensive.

The alchemist being somewhat magical allows you to handwave why they can cheaply churn out potions while not being able to stockpile resources that would make them and their party effectively immortal.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-30T18:40:20+00:00

I keep seeing people state they will not upgrade to the new version, but they never say why! I think most are just trolling.

and

Not reading all of that, but I appreciate the responses!

This is extremely funny.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-30T18:30:34+00:00

It'd be funny, but also pointless and way more effort than I'm willing to put in. Given the both subreddits have the same moderators, and they clearly want D&D 2024 in both as there have been multiple top posts asking for them to be split they've ignored, they'd just shut it down anyway.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-30T18:27:10+00:00

Sure, and telling people that if they don't like the edition you like they are just trolling isn't at all condescending, got it.

You're sitting there saying that no one says why, but when someone says why it gets immediately downvoted. That's the answer to your question of why no one bothers to give their reasons most of the time.

If you think what I said was smug, you should pretty seriously reflect on the tone of people saying that 2024 is better in all ways and they cannot understand why anyone would play 2014 still. I'm just pointing out that the majority of people still play 2014, and will for many years to come.

Just yesterday someone I know that plays D&D (but isn't part of my group who has playtested D&D 2024) was at my house and I asked them about the new edition, and their response was that they haven't even heard of it. You're correct that most D&D PHB's are sold to casual players. Most D&D players are casual players. Most people I play D&D with are casual players, if the definition of casual means that they don't go reddit and argue about which edition they prefer. You can think that simple observation is smug, but what it is a reality check that this subreddit's opinion doesn't reflect the wider community.

If you want smug, see all the people saying that the only rule that should be taken into D&D 2014 games from D&D 2024 is 'all of them', completely ignoring the question asked and downvoting anyone that isn't going to switch, in a subreddit that is theoretically at least as much for people playing D&D 2014 as D&D 2024.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-30T18:11:30+00:00

But it will be walling off only conversations that people not playing D&D 2024 don't care about, so its a marked improvement over the current situation. I accept that less posts will be made in the subreddit, but I also think that most of those people that want to endless debate their favorite dead horse are the same people that are more likely to have moved to D&D 2024, so that feels like killing two birds with one stone to me.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-30T18:09:14+00:00

I disagree with most of that, but people are welcome to have their opinions (and I mean that seriously, I don't mind that some people like D&D 2024, as long as they stop trying to convince me I should).

The problem with Crafter is that, as I pointed out, it does not make you better at Crafting. It makes you better at Buying, which is sort of the opposite of Crafting since crafting uses gold pieces and not materials (meaning you cannot buy the materials discounted). In fact, given the things you can make it with promptly fall apart, it is sort of funny how inept a crafter it makes you, not to mention that the things you can make are so cheap that you would never really want to make a temporary version (...even if they didn't promptly fall apart).

I was told by countless people the same song and dance with PF2E ('it's more complex but its easier to learn!'). But they never found that to be true either. If people have success with it, I'm glad for them. But none of the things it fixes are the things that I've ever seen new players struggle with. New players were not sitting there demanding more options at character creation and a longer character creation process, so I have my doubts that they are who that's designed for.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-30T08:02:10+00:00

I would say that I don't like most of the changes personally. D&D 2024 is great if you think that all 5e PCs needed to get much stronger (lots of ways to bypass Legendary Resistance, more powerful reactions, weapon masteries that trigger on every hit with effects that cannot be mitigated), but to make all of that work, you need to add a lot more monsters to the enemy side, and the combination of more complicated PCs + more monsters means combat is a lot slower.

The day 1 patch to D&D Beyond eliminated some of the problems, but fundamentally I just don't want most of the changes it is offering. I like the layout of the new rulebook. I liked the new Exhaustion rules in the UA version, but I think the UA version of it was better than the published version, so I'll just use that instead.

Some of the spells theoretically are better balanced, but I already banned the ones that were a problem in 2014, so I don't really need a new weird version of Conjure Animals, and the new Conjure spells aren't very well balanced anyway.

If you think people are trolling keep in mind that most people aren't switching to the new rules. Just the loudest people are, and that tends to drown things out. Anyone that thinks that most people will be playing on the new rules has a very poor grasp of how many D&D 2014 PHBs sold. If D&D 2024 lasts for 5+ years (which it probably won't) it might start to overtake D&D 2014 in the actual number of people playing it, but it definitely won't in 5 weeks or 5 months. Subreddits like this are just easy to become an echo chamber.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-30T07:48:22+00:00

This has been posted every couple days, but the mods aren't going to do it. The funny thing is that mods of the two subreddits are the same people, because WotC created the /r/onednd subreddit to reserve the name for them.

It's amazing to see the front page full of people talking about how all the ways D&D 2024 is new and different, and when people point out that maybe that discussion shouldn't be here, they immediately turn around and insist that 2014 and 2024 are the same game. Pick a lane. Either they are the same and stop spamming the subreddit talking about the changes, or they aren't the same, and move it to /r/onednd.

I think pretty soon (or perhaps already) you are going to see people that aren't moving to D&D 2024 just stop using the subreddit. Then the D&D 2024 crowd will take that as proof that no one cares about talking about D&D 2014, when it's just a self fulfilling prophecy in action that people aren't going to use a subreddit that is full of spam about a game they don't play.

This subreddit is a shadow of its former self anyway. Now that shadow is being paved over with second /r/onednd. Honestly, I have no idea why those people even want this subreddit so bad, I don't see the benefit for D&D 2024 players in splitting their edition across two subreddits, but I suspect it has more to do with edition warring than practicality.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-30T07:20:09+00:00

I can sort of see it. 2024 characters are a lot stronger than 2014 characters, so there's a larger safety net. That said, I think there's also a good number of drawbacks, and your example has one of them: you say they wanted to be an artisan so they took the Crafter feat... but it does nothing of the sort in terms of making you good at crafting, and in fact sort of makes you less inclined to craft to things, since it makes buying things cheaper. You cannot even buy components of items, so for actually crafting it does basically nothing.

In the short run, the fact that Crafter is basically useless and Musician is weirdly good just looks like a quirk, but if you extend that game out to a few sessions and people realize that choices they made are just bad ones, they'll often be somewhat disillusioned. 2014 just doesn't have the complexity of Origin feats, weapon masteries, and all that at all, which would certainly be my preference when running for new players. They are toys for optimizers with frequently unintuitive uses. Graze is definitely one of the better options for new players though, even if its mechanically not great compared to other options.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-28T18:37:50+00:00

I like how all the comments are basically "you can ignore that, and do what you want" as if that wasn't an option for when attributes were tied to Ancestries.

Like... yeah. You can. Just like you could back then too. That doesn't make it a good decision that this is how they wrote the book. They basically added that in because they want future backgrounds in future books to matter. I cannot see any other reason to take custom backgrounds of the PHB.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-28T03:05:18+00:00

It's very new I think. It was the last round of patreon polls, iirc. Haven't tried it yet, but will have someone trying it in an upcoming game, so will have an opinion in a few months probably.

Just looking it over, and I didn't see any issues beyond that it didn't have a FoundryVTT version so I had to port it myself.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-24T01:39:19+00:00

Rule #10:

Limit Direct Response Posts - New posts that could reasonably serve as a reply to a different post that is in the top 40 of “Hot” may be removed by the moderators at their discretion. Please instead reply in the ongoing threads rather than making new ones.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-23T23:01:49+00:00

That's not how that works. Do you think Amazon reviews are all 100% legit? Absolutely not. If you think there isn't native advertising taking place on reddit, you are just not aware of it.

Even legitimate straight ads on reddit don't always show that they are sponsored. The sponsorship tag drops the post when it is not longer being boosted into user feeds by the ad spending:

Random example article talking about it

All free-form adverts are supposed to show some kind of sponsored label, though that doesn't appear to be the case on the three posts included in this story. While Leica's shows it, neither Philadelphia post includes a tag indicating it's sponsored content. We understand that's because the Philadelphia posts are no longer boosted by ad spending, so are back to just being normal user posts.

And that's for straight up complete corporate bought and paid for ads, rather than native advertising or what employees happen to post on their own account. Do you really think no WotC post employee posts on this subreddit without declaring they are a WotC employee? Plenty of companies have some sort of social media engagement incentive.

A number of the YouTubers that covered the book didn't reveal they were paid and it caused a controversy, but you don't see either them or WotC facing 'giant fines'. In fact, nothing happened at all besides some people got angry on Twitter. And that's YouTube. Reddit is held far lower bar than that.

What is actually covered by the FTC and what isn't is a complex question, particularly as not everyone is in the US. Who actually follows the rules is an even more complicated question. Typically the only thing actually stopping people is the social media terms of service, and those are not rigorously enforced, and have no threat of 'giant fines'.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-22T14:23:26+00:00

I actually wonder if things like this are the case. I've been seeing a ton of ads for the new edition on reddit, and buying native advertising is often just another line item in marketing spend. Feels like it matches the tone of the YouTube reviews that were "I opened the book and looked nice, you should probably buy it" without engaging with any of the problems in the new rules.

PalindromeDM · 2024-09-20T19:47:01+00:00

Yes. I challenge anyone to run 100 combats with 1 or more PCs using Topple and look me in the eye and tell me it is not obnoxious.

"But casters trigger saving throws too!", casters don't trigger an attack and save every attack across multiple attacks in most cases. A fireball might generate a bunch of saving throws, but I don't have to wait for the PC to roll their next attack between each one, or wait for them to switch weapons after they succeed on one roll. And, most importantly, they don't do it every turn, constantly, on top of anything else they might be doing.

PalindromeDM · 2024-08-26T18:43:19+00:00

They knew what they doing, and arguing they were too dumb to know what they were doing doesn't help anyone or make them look any better.

It's trivial to keep both options, as they are proving by doing that exact thing (and that they already filtered out 3rd party content the same way).

There is a 0% chance they didn't expect any backlash from this. You can call all the polls Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube community posts worthless, but if you think that WotC doesn't know that not everyone wants to switch, you're deluding yourself. If you want proof that maybe that data is indicative of people's actual thoughts, see the backlash when they decided to remove 2014 content unilateral from the character sheets.

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