I kid, I kid. I love Dungeons and Dragons, and due to family influence, I have been an apt player since my early youth. By seven, I was playing with my father, my brother, and a couple other friends who lived on the same street. This was 1st Edition as well. Those were silly days. Those were silly, horridly bad days. It was fun for the story, but touching those charts were nightmares.
Today however, there are 3rd edition, 4th edition, and even the award-winning compliment system Pathfinder for the famed tabletop game’s players to use to their heart’s content. Pathfinder however brings us a small step into the very real and very deep conscious of the player and community, striving for something better. Pathfinder itself is only a homebrew. It was tested, approved, and published by a founder and his friends, but by large, it’s a homebrew and custom fix for certain people to use for 3rd edition’s intricacies.
Knowing this breaks a lot of stigma on the common conceptions people consider over homebrew, that it’s all by large terrible. Giants in the Playground has an entire section in its message board devoted to player-created sources and ideas for other people to use in their game or alter as they see fit. It’s about being creative and reaching a niche and zone people can enjoy or make an identification. It’s why Wizards of the Coast released Tome of Battle’s Crusader after the months and months people cried about Paladin being an underwhelming class.
Granted, not everything made the homebrew way is a good thing; real work takes real time, knowledge, and dedication, but this (thankfully) is something that a seasoned dungeon crawler will be able to see when he takes his first strolls in the realms of the non-published material.
Now, I got to play my dark knight. You guys get to rolling some d20s!
