Natural Plenty

I like to style myself as Her Royal Highness Remedeez the Queen of Homebrewing.

I'm a weird combination of a person. I'm incredibly self-depricating, and sometimes frustratingly humble... and yet somehow I'm also incredibly egotistical and like to toot-my-own-horn. I can't explain it.

With that out of the way, Homebrewing is hard, man.

I can come up with ideas sometimes at the drop of the hat. I jot em down, and crack open some books and start whipping up the stat-blocks or item descriptions, or mechanics or whatever you can think of, that would be necessary to make my Homebrew A La Carte fantastical thing of wonderfulness! Then, I start looking at stuff on forums or on the DM'sGuild and... lo and behold some dude (or dudette) has beaten me to the punch! Oh! The agony! Woe is me! I cry for a few hours and watch Moulin Rouge and stuff my face full of Almond Joy because that's how I mourn the death of my ideas, and don't you dare judge me!

There are some days when I'm browsing all the wonderful D&D pools of information (reddit, forums, DMsGuild, WotC articles, published material, etc) and I think to myself... there's nothing left for me to make. For me to share with the world. Everyone has already "done it". And that's super frustrating. Sure I could put my spin on Vampires for the umpteenth time, or make a magic pair of shoes and call it by another name... but a rose is still a rose, y'know?

This is the price "creative types" pay. We either borrow bits and bobs and find ways to mash them into a new bit or bob, or we get really lucky and do come up with the elusive "thing that has NEVER been done before" but those things are really rare, and for good reason.

I think I've gotten a bit rambly there, and I do apologize. Sometimes blogs are born out of the sheer desire to just put thoughts and feelings into words and then smack it on the internet to hear folks reply to said words with their own words. Words are good, okay?

That being said (written, rather) I would like to take a moment and say I am having the hardest time figuring out how to make an effective crafting system for 5E that just... works. I'm having the hardest time of finding where to borrow bits and bobs from, and where to just... innovate from. Darn that Unearthed Arcana Article on the Artificer for throwing a kink in all my dreams! Heh! (WotC literally made the Alchemist, and yes I'm aware its been around for ages... but its throwing off all my mojo on making an Alchemist profession, not class!) </end rant>