Fully Homebrewed D&D Hack

Per DrumandFight's request, sharing this here.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kB1O7nDB_9G4PJRh_fae1WjNORY9dPS5

After 3.x was discontinued, my friends and I had a lot of hope for Pathfinder. During the Alpha and Beta playtests that we were very involved in, it became clear that they weren't going to 'fix' 3.x in a way that made sense to us. Changes that NEEDED to happen were rejected to support backward compatibility, and unnecessary charges were thrown in that proved they weren't really interested in backward compatibility.

The link is to a fully playable game - my friends and I use it for our weekly game and have for years. It continues to be a work in progress - we add new material and revise periodically, but those types of changes tend to be minor - changing the level of a spell, clarifying a description, or changing an action type to better support our vision for the concept. Having played D&D since 1st edition, this gets me my D&D fix, but with all the things that I really felt like 3.x's successor should be.

While the document is comprehensive, I'll outline a few major changes from 3.x as an overview of why this might suit you.

First off, compared to 3.x, we've reduced the number of classes, but made sure there are ways to more fully customize your character. You can think of the class as a chassis, but you'll make a number of choices so it's highly unlikely that two characters of the same class will step on each other's toes... There are (several) ways that any character can access magical spells, so we avoid some of the problems with high level casters completely dominating the game. In a lot of our campaigns characters freely multi-class between martial and wizard levels to build exactly the character they envision; anywhere from 100% mundane to 100% magical.

Within combat, there are several resources that characters are managing, so every round feels like you're making meaningful tactical choices. Most special abilities deplete a resource, so we don't have to have '1/combat' or '1/day' abilities - by giving them a cost you can decide whether they should be used immediately or saved. Characters are more durable; you can handle multiple combats per day but still have to consider some of those strategic resources.

Feel free to review it, or better yet, try it at home. I'm absolutely happy to receive feedback!

This is great. Thanks, DDMW. I hope some of the people much more versed in DnD than myself get some opinions on it.

I was like 'yeah sure I'll give it a skim' but its 212 pages... Maybe a long skim

The spell lists take up about half the document, so you can get a good sense of the rules and what classes can do without reading all the individual spells.