Thread by @hexcrawl

I think someone saying that any beer that isn't Budweiser is a homebrew is weird.

I also think someone saying that Budweiser IS a homebrew is weird.

But when it comes to D&D, the term "homebrew" is in a really weird place right now.

https://twitter.com/mattcolville/status/1382567916646801412

First: "Homebrew" inherently carries the meaning of an amateur effort made for private enjoyment.

Its meaning when applied to the RPG or video game communities has evolved over time, but it's not a term that originated with those communities. It has a dictionary definition.

Arneson creating the first roleplaying game in his basement? Probably homebrew.

Gygax buying the rights to that game, revamping it with Arneson, professionally publishing it, and turning it into a multi-million dollar brand? Definitely not homebrew.

https://twitter.com/mattcolville/status/1382568095219261440

But if you look back three generations to the early days of the hobby, the very small size of the RPG "industry" and the largely informal distribution network for wargaming/RPG material made the line between "professional" and "amateur" paper thin.

When first published, D&D was also part of the wargaming industry, where it was pretty clearly a semi-pro production. There are passages that are just a description of how to kit-bash your copy of TSR's Chainmail and Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival into a semi-cohesive system.

So D&D is born out of that fan community. The original rulebooks are also a revolutionary concept paired to a semi-coherent presentation. It's basically impossible to play OD&D "by the book."

thealexandrian.net/wordpress/2610…

The inevitable consequence was that "homebrewing" was baked pretty deep into the game's identity.

That legacy persists. Outside of maybe model kits, no other hobby or medium spends as much time telling its fans that they should be modifying the "official" material. It's a fundamental part of our identity as gamers.

So it's unsurprising when the local equivalents of Samuel Adams' Jim Koch want to hold onto that identity: I'm not Budweiser!

(I bring this up mostly because I think there might be some value in the concept of "craft brew" as an intermediary between "homebrewing" and the big breweries. We'll come back to that.)

Okay, but now fast forward to 2021.

A generation ago the OGL and the rise of a robust PDF distribution market further blurred the line between "professional" and "amateur."

In the late '90s there were literally hundreds of homebrewed RPGs uploaded onto webpages and shared just like material in an old fanzine. By 2005, these same games were instead being uploaded to RPGNow and DTRPG offered for sale.

The DM's Guild blurs the line even further: An official marketplace where your stuff is sold right next to the "official" material, plus SOME of the stuff exists in kind of a nebulous gray zone where it's "more" official without actually being official.

So, on the one hand, the line between "official" and "homebrew" is blurrier than ever.

But on the OTHER hand, there are huge, systemic pressures that make the distinction between "official" and "homebrew" a vast and impassable gulf.

The first is the Adventurer's League: No homebrew allowed here. There is a very specific and very enforceable understanding of EXACTLY what is and is not allowed in League play!

You can trace the roots of this corporate desire / organized play necessity to define an Official Version of the game all the way back to Gygax's introduction to the 1st Edition of AD&D...

...but the immense success of the League (and the use of the League as a way of creating that "semi-official" category on the Guild) seems to have given it teeth, particularly because a lot of players ONLY play in the League.

Second: D&D Beyond. And, to a lesser extent, VTTs in general. This goes back to 4th Edition's online tools, but the fact that these tools are seen by many as indispensable + the fact that only official material can be used with the tools creates a huge and clearly defined line.

And that brings us to the currently fraught understanding of "homebrew": On the one hand, the line between professional and amateur has been virtually eradicated (particularly when it comes to D&D specifically).

On the other hand, there is an outgroup of "homebrew" material that is literally useless to many players. (And not as a statement on the QUALITY of that material: They literally CANNOT use it because they're either League players or want to use the official online tools.)

Of course, this is nonetheless dismissive. Being told your stuff is useless isn't a great feeling for a creator.

And if you're a professional, being told that there's no difference between what you're creating and a Google Doc that someone is enthusiastically sharing on reddit can also feel insulting.

And so that's the central tension: On the one hand, homebrewing is central to a multigenerational understanding of what it means to be a roleplayer. On the other hand, it is now the most convenient label for saying that something is useless to you.

On the third hand, there are a bunch of people paying their rent by selling material that's deemed "homebrew" by one standard (i.e., not official)... which makes calling it "homebrew" kind of weird & people dismissing its professionalism insulting.

(My mother was an award-winning author of historical mysteries. People would ask her, "What do you do?" She'd say, "I'm an author." They'd say, "That's great! What do you do for a living?"

It would legitimately make her blood boil.)

Which is why the concept of "craft brewing" may be useful -- a clear category that lies between the official stuff and the stuff created purely for personal use or swapping around in the fan community.

And I wonder if there's more Wizards could be doing to help legitimize the craft brewing sector of the hobby.