Reskin for Quick, Easy, & Balanced Homebrew

One of the greatest things about Dungeons and Dragons is it invites us to use our imaginations. Whether we are a player creating a hero or a Dungeon Master creating a whole world, we are encouraged to make stuff up. Even if we are using a pregenerated character sheet or running a published adventure there are a ton of opportunities to put our own creative stamp on the game. But sometimes we want to take things even further, and that is when we enter the world of Homebrew.

If you look in the official resources but can't find the kind of character, monster, magic item, spell, whatever it is that is shining bright in your mind's eye, then you can create it yourself. There is a rich tradition of homebrew in D&D baked in from the very beginning, but there are good and bad ways to go about it. I believe for beginner Dungeon Masters, Dungeon Masters without a ton of time, or players with big ideas that want to get their concepts approved without fearing that it's going to get shot down because they're going to break the game, the best way to start homebrewing is to reskin stuff.

To reskin something is to put a new exterior on something but keep the bones. In D&D terms we keep the mechanics but change the flavor. Let's say I wanted to make a black or copper dragon-born sorcerer because I wanted to do acid damage, hurling globs of Ecto Cooler colored goo around the battlefield and melting my enemies. I'll take acid splash as a cantrip, I guess chromatic orb works at first level, and then, well, there's nothing else on the sorcerer spell list in these early levels that does acid damage. Cue the sad trombone, guess I have to make a fire-based character again. Or, we can reskin things.

Spell damage types matter rarely enough that I see no harm in taking something like burning hands or scorching ray and allowing it to do acid damage. Then we do a little fun, creative work to make things make sense narratively. Our shatter is not a thunderous boom but a bubble of acid popping. It's not just for damage either, we can bring other spells and abilities into the theme. Our fog cloud is from the vapor rising as acid etches the floor, knock is acid melting through a lock, maybe hypnotic pattern is us dosing the enemies with a very particular kind of acid. Use your imagination.

You'll need to work with your Dungeon Master of course, and occasionally what you're imagining for your character might clash with some fundamental element of the world they're creating, so stay flexible. But for the most part the DM will be able to rubber stamp most reskins. At my table, if you want to change damage types, easy. You want your character to be a butcher, wear a leather apron and swing a giant meat cleaver, no problem, reskinned leather armor and a shortsword. You want to play a crow person but are afraid of being limited by the Kenku's mimicry feature, that's fine, you're a halfling that looks like a Kenku, have fun. Just please have these conversations at session zero or before sitting down to play with everybody else.

Reskinning opens up our options without upsetting game balance. When we make things up whole cloth the possibilities are endless. However, we must be careful or the game quickly evolves into the equivalent of children on a playground arguing about an infinity +1 sword vs a shield that makes them everything proof.

There are multiple books worth of material available and an incredible amount of work that at this point spans generations to keep Dungeons and Dragons balanced. People spend a lot of time arguing about how well this particular edition or older editions have succeeded in achieving balance and within all the noise are some wonderful insights into good game design, but the surest way I know to make sure that your game becomes unbalanced, and therefore unfair and maybe even unplayable, is to incorporate bad homebrew.

Now some tables don't care about balance, and if you're having a good time then great, do your thing. But generally at my table I don't let players use homebrew stuff. That's the rule, we can discuss exceptions. But odds are that thing you found online is whacky. More than once I've had a player ask about an item, or usually a spell, that I've never heard of that seems a little crazy (or a lot crazy) for their level. We've had to stop the game and track down the source, inevitably discovering that it was cooked up in some power-gamer's fevered dreams and uploaded to that damned wiki.

But let's be honest, it's way easier for the Dungeon Master to break the game than the players. We might be the only ones considering balance in the first place, but we've got a lot more levers to pull that can make things way too easy or have us hurtling towards total party kill territory. Reskinning existing elements is a great way to take some of those balance concerns away. It is also very fast and efficient, so you can devote prep time to other elements and not worry about play testing.

Pretend I want to make a Tiger King inspired adventure and I'm not satisfied with the big cats available in the monster manual. I can grab a winter wolf stat block, call it a snow leopard, and the players will likely be none the wiser. Even if someone does figure it out, they'll probably have a little thrill, not be disappointed. Here's a flame tiger (hell hound,) a venomous shadow panther (phase spider,) and a thunder cat (bronze dragon wyrmling.) That's the start of a cool homebrew adventure and it only took a couple minutes of leafing through the Monster Manual. So now I can put my efforts into imagining why the Tiger King is collecting all of these exotic creatures, what happens if he succeeds, and why the player characters should care.

Even if I can't simply reskin something to suit my needs I'll still use that as a jumping off point. Let's say the art for a Rakshasa is perfect for our Tiger King but CR13 is a little high for this adventure? I could just use the stat block of a veteran, or a gladiator, maybe even an Oni. But if nothing is really doing what I need I can take one of these as a starting point and add the things we want in our Tiger King, reskinning as we need. I'll give him locate animal, animal friendship, all the spells that make sense for him thematically, but I'm really going to focus on what we want him doing in the final boss fight. On top of his melee attacks which we'll call bite and claw, let's give him web described as nets or arcane cages, jump and spider climb but as cat-like grace, and some big AOE like spirit guardians or fireball reskinned as spectral claws.

Again, I'm not claiming that this is the only or best way to homebrew for Dungeons and Dragons. If you want to cook up your own items, races, classes, schools of magic, game mechanics, go for it, do it up. I'm just saying reskinning is one of the safest, easiest, and quickest way to get it done. If one night the players suddenly decide to go after the questing beast and all you have is the art because you thought they were going down the howling well this session, grabbing an existing stat block and changing some descriptions can be just the thing to save your skin.

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