DND Wiki Homebrew

[Milo v3]

This is going to be rant. Strangely this might be a first for this forum... I'm not actually complaining about DND Wiki. I'm ranting about the people who are haters of the site.

This may sound like a stupid idea for a rant with no logic to back it up. But you haven't read my arguement so please read if you do hate DND Wiki.

Firstly I want to say the genesis of this rant. While browsing this forum for a while I soon found that hundreds of people hate DND Wiki. The main reasons being either, One: all the content is bad, or Two: The owner is a tyrant.

Now generally in these forums whenever someone links to a DND Wiki page, a person in the thread soon says "Run away as fast as you can. :smalleek:", "Never. Never. Use DND Wiki's crap.", or something similiar.

This instantly makes my blood boil. How does simply posting your homebrew on DND Wiki cause it to become unbalanced, broken, or bad?

Some of my Favourite Homebrew is on DND Wiki:

Several of Frank & K's Tomes
Time Walker, Variant (3.5e Class)
Threat (3.5e Class)
Dragonblooded (3.5e Class)
Spider Rider (3.5e Prestige Class)
The Deviant (3.5e Class)
Black Entity (3.5e Creature)
Blood Storm (3.5e Spell)
Etc.

I think you get the point..

So do these become instantly horrible when they are posted onto the site? If I posted good homebrew from these forums onto DND Wiki does it become unbalanced?

No it doesn't. Sure there is a large amount of rubbish on the site. That doesn't make all its content horrible.

Its like anime, once anime became noticed in the west, hundreds of anime was suddenly made and sent to America, the UK, Australia, etc. A huge amount of them were horrible. But not all anime is horrible. Cowboy Bebop, Darker Than Black, Full Metal Alchemist, Hellsing, Code Geass, Samurai Champloo, the list goes on.

So what if part of the content is crap. Some of it isn't.

[Dsurion]

To be honest, I've never really had a problem with the site. Some stuff is crap. some stuff is good. That's really all there is to it. You have to keep an eye out for some shenanigans or utter sucktitude, but how is that different from anywhere else?

Actually, the first campaign I played in featured a few things from there, like the Time Mage, which was sort of like a Time-based Warlock if I recall correctly. I used to like TGCid's (or was it Jota's?) Holy Knight before it became a prestige class. The Gravity Warrior was interesting to me, and really didn't look all that bad.

But even from an inexperienced standpoint, I could tell a lot of what was there was crap.

[sonofzeal]

You're right, content there varies. However, in my experience D&Dwiki is a very insiduous trap for newer players, who tend not to realize it's homebrew. The problem is that the site does host SRD material, lending it an air of legitimacy, but doesn't clearly mark homebrew as such. I mean, you can tell it's homebrew if you check, but a naive viewer is unlikely to realize it. In a recent thread I mentioned "Improved Toughness" from CWar, and the person thought I meant this feat (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Improved_Toughness_%283.5e_Feat%29), believing with all sincerity that it was the same feat and that I had just been mistaken about how it works. Me, I knew enough to scroll down to the author information, and I knew enough that NBoF isn't a licensed WotC 3.5 book, but absolutely nothing on that page that I can see would give a newbie the impression it was homebrew.

There's also the fact that, while there is some good content, the "open door" policy means virtually no quality control. You find some reasonable stuff, some terrible stuff, some useless stuff, some massively overpowered stuff, and some stuff that is just plain poorly-worded. Some people are capable of eyeballing balance pretty reliably, but in my experience those people are generally also capable of knocking together their own homebrew and variants on the fly.

Material in this forum is generally safer, if only because it tends to have more comments and feedback on it. If I can't eyeball something's balance, I can read the comments of those who might know better, and get a rough idea what people think and how good it actually is. This makes it a whole lot more useful, in my opinion.

So yeah, while they're some gold amid the dross of D&Dwiki, I think the whole thing is better off avoided and denounced, before newbie players get led astray.

[Milo v3]

You're right, content there varies. However, in my experience D&Dwiki is a very insiduous trap for newer players, who tend not to realize it's homebrew. The problem is that the site does host SRD material, lending it an air of legitimacy, but doesn't clearly mark homebrew as such. I mean, you can tell it's homebrew if you check, but a naive viewer is unlikely to realize it. In a recent thread I mentioned "Improved Toughness" from CWar, and the person thought I meant this feat (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Improved_Toughness_%283.5e_Feat%29), believing with all sincerity that it was the same feat and that I had just been mistaken about how it works. Me, I knew enough to scroll down to the author information, and I knew enough that NBoF isn't a licensed WotC 3.5 book, but absolutely nothing on that page that I can see would give a newbie the impression it was homebrew.

There's also the fact that, while there is some good content, the "open door" policy means virtually no quality control. You find some reasonable stuff, some terrible stuff, some useless stuff, some massively overpowered stuff, and some stuff that is just plain poorly-worded. Some people are capable of eyeballing balance pretty reliably, but in my experience those people are generally also capable of knocking together their own homebrew and variants on the fly.

Material in this forum is generally safer, if only because it tends to have more comments and feedback on it. If I can't eyeball something's balance, I can read the comments of those who might know better, and get a rough idea what people think and how good it actually is. This makes it a whole lot more useful, in my opinion.

So yeah, while they're some gold amid the dross of D&Dwiki, I think the whole thing is better off avoided and denounced, before newbie players get led astray.

While I do understand your point, I have to say their are various ways of noticing whether or not something is homebrew or not on the site.

Its only homebrew if it has SRD or UA in the title. If it has (4e Race) in the title then its homebrew, if it has (3.5e Class) in the title then its homebrew.

But I know that there are several people, (especially people knew to D&D) who wouldn't notice that.

Also I can't really avoid it as basically all my homebrew (Their isn't much of it though) is on that site.

[sonofzeal]

While I do understand your point, I have to say their are various ways of noticing whether or not something is homebrew or not on the site.

Its only homebrew if it has SRD or UA in the title. If it has (4e Race) in the title then its homebrew, if it has (3.5e Class) in the title then its homebrew.

But I know that there are several people, (especially people knew to D&D) who wouldn't notice that.

Also I can't really avoid it as basically all my homebrew (Their isn't much of it though) is on that site.
It's not that people "wouldn't notice", it's that there's nothing to notice. Seeing that page for the first time, there's absolutely nothing to tip you off unless you're personally familiar with D&Dwiki, or have encyclopedic knowledge of 3.5 already. Again, I point you to the feat I linked. See, I would have hoped the URL would include something indicating it was homebrew. Like... "http://www.dandwiki.com/homebrew/feats/ImprovedToughness", something like that. Or that they'd have the word "homebrew" at least once, somewhere on the page other than the sidebar. Is that too much to ask?

That's just plain sloppy design, and it's a trap I've seen dozens of people fall into. You don't know how many times I've had to let friends down in my IRL games when they stumbled on something there and mistook it for official content. By the second or third time it's annoying, by the sixth or seventh time it's rage-inducing. And it keeps happening, as that recent thread demonstrates.

[Milo v3]

It's not that people "wouldn't notice", it's that there's nothing to notice. Seeing that page for the first time, there's absolutely nothing to tip you off unless you're personally familiar with D&Dwiki, or have encyclopedic knowledge of 3.5 already. Again, I point you to the feat I linked. See, I would have hoped the URL would include something indicating it was homebrew. Like... "http://www.dandwiki.com/homebrew/feats/ImprovedToughness", something like that. Or that they'd have the word "homebrew" at least once, somewhere on the page other than the sidebar. Is that too much to ask?

That's just plain sloppy design, and it's a trap I've seen dozens of people fall into. You don't know how many times I've had to let friends down in my IRL games when they stumbled on something there and mistook it for official content. By the second or third time it's annoying, by the sixth or seventh time it's rage-inducing. And it keeps happening, as that recent thread demonstrates.

Thing is to reach that page you probably would have to select 3.5e Homebrew then go through the feats section. Its not like the homebrew content is in the same section as offical content.

But that wouldn't excuse the bad search engine, which would easily send people into the homebrew section with the intention of going to the offical content.

Also I've never had that experience. I'm not saying it doesn't happen or its rare. But I've never had a player of mine mixing up Homebrew and Offical Content.

[sonofzeal]

Thing is to reach that page you probably would have to select 3.5e Homebrew then go through the feats section. Its not like the homebrew content is in the same section as offical content.

But that wouldn't excuse the bad search engine, which would easily send people into the homebrew section with the intention of going to the offical content.

Also I've never had that experience. I'm not saying it doesn't happen or its rare. But I've never had a player of mine mixing up Homebrew and Offical Content.
I think it's mostly search engine results that are to blame, yeah. These people don't generally go to the site looking for something, they search for something and end up there. But even on the site, a lot of people might not realize that the "OGL" section mostly isn't official material, especially since it's deliberately contrasted with the "homebrew" label. That feat I linked earlier was "OGL" for example, and even the use of terms like that can lend an air of authenticity to the uninitiated.

It may help that I play with a lot of people who are... shall we say, more enthusiastic than they are experienced. Still, it's something of a recurring pattern.

Also, while I tell people that 90% of what's on D&Dwiki is crud, I tend to always have Sturgeon's Law in the back of my head there - 90% of everything is crud. You have to be able to sift the gems from the dross. But I've found it's usually easier to give newer players the bad news first, get it into their heads that D&Dwiki stuff is to be taken with a heavy grain of salt... and once they've gotten that message, then start looking for those gems.

[Hazzardevil]

It doesn't help that theres at least 2 DND wiki's on the internet.
There's the first one and this one. (http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/3.5e_Homebrew)

The 1st wiki has a tyrannical owner, but how? I know that a good majority of the second wiki's homebrewer's set up that one because of the hatred of the owner of DANDWIKI, but it doesn't solve the problem much.

Both wikis are filled with a nice idea but bad execution, aside from the anti-christ which is take ur-priest, add religious references and make it more overpowered than beholder mage. There is also the salient vampire on one of the wikis, in fact these wikis make me question did the people on there even understand the rules of dnd before writing homebrew?

[Prime32]

It doesn't help that theres at least 2 DND wiki's on the internet.
There's the first one and this one. (http://dungeons.wikia.com/wiki/3.5e_Homebrew)Actually, when Wikia started removing functionality a while back, a lot of wikis migrated (but since deleting the old wikis or adding a notice of the move was not allowed, most became colonised by new users). The original community of dungeons.wikia.com moved to dnd-wiki.org.

So (http://dandwiki.com) that's (http://dungeons.wikia.com) three (http://dnd-wiki.org).

[CharityB]

I don't think that anyone actually has ever said that posting homebrew onto that site makes it broken, so that's kind of a weird and a little unfair line of criticism. I think the main problem is what's been said above -- there is a lot of dross mixed in with the good stuff, and it's sometimes difficult for inexperienced people to tell the difference between SRD material and homebrew material (even leaving aside the difference between well-written homebrew and unfinished or badly-written homebrew).

I actually have respect for that site and what it's trying to do. I do think that it's a little hard to navigate but I wouldn't automatically reject everything I saw there as being bad homebrew without reading through it first since there are a lot of hard-working writers using that site and it wouldn't be fair to lump them in with the half-finished homebrew.

[Grinner]

I actually love that site, with the exception of the more popular sections: Feats, Spells, and Prestige Classes, which tend to contain repetitious content.

[Tanuki Tales]

I treat the DnD wiki like the casual Seafood eater should treat Fugu.

[Igneel]

I don't think that everything is terrible [material from some of the Tomes for example] but alot seems to be incomplete, a joke, or not very balanced. But in all honesty I spend more time looking through some of the content trying to find things that seem interesting and possibly idea inspiring. Something like the Dracolichbound (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Dracolichbound_(3.5e_Prestige_Class)) PrC got me to start thinking about a PrC for my Wyrmfire Disciple taking a few leafs from it along with other PrCs that grant templates such as Walker in the Waste.

But the biggest problem I do have is the newbies to DnD stumbling upon its content and thinking everything is official, or at least not understanding how balanced certain material is. I have had a few players in the past that were new to the game that made requests from the site, which I would look over and suggest alterations to certain abilities and such to make it more balanced if it wasn't already.

[Dsurion]

There's also absolutely nothing wrong with linking to something you find form there to this site and asking people to look it over, as long as you make clear that you know the general opinion of D&D Wiki, so as to not get fifteen responses filled with nothing but, "D&D Wiki is trash!"

[PersonMan]

The 1st wiki has a tyrannical owner

I keep hearing this, but I've yet to see why people keep saying this.

[Clawhound]

I used to post over there. I did most of the work converting the SRD. (I would like to thank PERL and regular expressions for their fine work.) Anyhow, the admins do have a circle of authority that is theirs, but outside of that, they were pretty hands off.

I did see enough skirmishes. Most of the skirmishees failed to understand that the admins owned the playground. If you had a genuine argument, and were willing to explain yourself, the admins would listen. If you didn't play well, they had no problems being blunt.

[Milo v3]

I used to post over there. I did most of the work converting the SRD. (I would like to thank PERL and regular expressions for their fine work.) Anyhow, the admins do have a circle of authority that is theirs, but outside of that, they were pretty hands off.

I did see enough skirmishes. Most of the skirmishees failed to understand that the admins owned the playground. If you had a genuine argument, and were willing to explain yourself, the admins would listen. If you didn't play well, they had no problems being blunt.

Actually I think its more about when the owner & the admins argued about deleting content and licensing. The owner then deleted peoples posts, rewrote them, etc. all to suit him. Then he suspended most of the admins for no reason. After that basically all the Admin's left and created the second wiki.

[Debihuman]

This is going to be rant. Strangely this might be a first for this forum... I'm not actually complaining about DND Wiki. I'm ranting about the people who are haters of the site.

I don't hate the site. I think that there is a lot of cheese on the site. I also think that most people aren't as good at writing homebrew as they think they are.

Today's cheese came to me about my own Schrodinger's cat. See here:
http://www.dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger%27s_Cat_%283.5e_Monster%29

[I am not sure why this hyperlink looks that way and I have no idea if it works]

I actually had to amend the entry to note that the Improved Familiar Feat does not allow a spellcaster to gain one as a familiar. As a result, my creature has received one dislike.

Understand, I do not care about the dislike response. In a small way I find it rather gratifying. Oh look someone read it (well someone other than me and the person who posted there).

However, it should have been quite apparent from the creature's entry that the Improved Familiar Feat would not allow you to acquire one since the only way to get one is to have your cat familiar die by cyanide poisoning in order to spontaneously become one of these.

I am not yet certain whether I should add a clause about how the cat functions Underground since I hadn't considered that when I made it. I will mull it over before passing any judgment.

Debby

[Tyndmyr]

It's not that people "wouldn't notice", it's that there's nothing to notice. Seeing that page for the first time, there's absolutely nothing to tip you off unless you're personally familiar with D&Dwiki, or have encyclopedic knowledge of 3.5 already. Again, I point you to the feat I linked. See, I would have hoped the URL would include something indicating it was homebrew. Like... "http://www.dandwiki.com/homebrew/feats/ImprovedToughness", something like that. Or that they'd have the word "homebrew" at least once, somewhere on the page other than the sidebar. Is that too much to ask?

That's just plain sloppy design, and it's a trap I've seen dozens of people fall into. You don't know how many times I've had to let friends down in my IRL games when they stumbled on something there and mistook it for official content. By the second or third time it's annoying, by the sixth or seventh time it's rage-inducing. And it keeps happening, as that recent thread demonstrates.

God, yes. I've had this happen to me so many freaking times...sometimes multiple times by the same person. I mean, someone goes online searching for "D&D flaws" which is pretty reasonable for a new person searching for such things, and the very first hit is D&D wiki. It's all homebrew, and much of it is terrible. I've had it happen so many times that I specifically warn people that if it's from D&D wiki, it's probably some terribly broken homebrew, and not to seriously expect it to be allowed. Note that I am sufficiently accepting that ALL official books are allowed, and I sometimes allow third party from more reputable sources.


Thing is to reach that page you probably would have to select 3.5e Homebrew then go through the feats section. Its not like the homebrew content is in the same section as offical content.

But that wouldn't excuse the bad search engine, which would easily send people into the homebrew section with the intention of going to the offical content.

Also I've never had that experience. I'm not saying it doesn't happen or its rare. But I've never had a player of mine mixing up Homebrew and Offical Content.

Well, in addition to their terrible search engine, people get there from google. That's pretty normal, and not having an obvious way to tell homebrew from official is terrible for newer players.



Some of my Favourite Homebrew is on DND Wiki:
[LIST]
Several of Frank & K's Tomes

Frank & K's stuff is terrible, and does not play nice with a lot official stuff in a great many ways. I am familiar with it, but after experiments with it, it is banned in it's entirety not only at my table, but at tables run by everyone else involved with that campaign. This is not a point for D&D wiki.

The fact that much, much worse things exist on D&D wiki is the really scary bit.


So do these become instantly horrible when they are posted onto the site? If I posted good homebrew from these forums onto DND Wiki does it become unbalanced?


Good stuff is not made bad by being on the site, but it means finding the good stuff amid the drek is terrible, and a giant pain. It means I have to review anything from that site in detail, and it'll usually be a waste of my time since I have to ban it or fix it anyway. I'm generally better off straight up making my own material for players than reviewing ideas brought over from that site.

The idea is fine. The execution is terrible. Things seriously need some kind of moderation/metamoderation system similar to slashdot. That might make it functional, if widespread hatred/disdain for something made it vanish into the forgotten nethers of the internet.


I keep hearing this, but I've yet to see why people keep saying this.

Honestly, some more tyranny with regards to quality control would not go amiss.

[legomaster00156]

Personally, I quite enjoy the Wiki, as it provides some of my favorite "nice things for melee" homebrew content (especially the Meat Shield (http://www.dnd-wiki.org/wiki/Meat_Shield_(3.5e_Class)) class and Archblade (http://www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Archblade_(3.5e_Prestige_Class)) PrC). I am wise enough to realize when something has a massive cheese potential and/or is overpowered/underpowered.
As long as you can go into that site prepared to search for diamonds in the rough, you may be pleasantly surprised.