D&D is a game where homebrew stuff is sort of the lifeblood of the game. Homebrewers are the ones who then make official D&D content if they're commissioned or, more rarely, hired.
I imagine the most common form of homebrewing is the creation of settings and adventures. While I'm running a game set in Ravnica and playing in one set in the Forgotten Realms, but general assumption is that one typically runs things in a homebrew setting - much as I'm enjoying the Ravnica game, I'm champing at the bit to get back to my own world of Sarkon (though the siren call of Ravenloft is drifting into my ear).
I've also been doing a lot of homebrewing of monsters - while there are plenty of things I'm eager to use from the Monster Manual (I still haven't run a Beholder combat encounter, for example) I do really enjoy creating my own monsters and creatures for the party to deal with.
But there are deeper hacks to the game that I've been hesitant to delve into given the enormity of the complexity involved.
I've actually homebrewed some subclasses, but I have yet to playtest them. I actually did adapt the Vampire playable race from some of the MTG Planeshift articles (breaking the Ixalan one into two subraces for Ravnica's blood-drinking and mind-drinking varieties) that have seen some play.
But even then, that's sort of the modular stuff. D&D is built to allow for a constant flow of new monsters, subclasses, races, etc. I think the deepest of homebrews is when you really get in there and truly hack the game.
Now, there are ways you could make a seriously different game by altering it in a few ways - for example, I could imagine a setting in which the path to magical ability is extremely limited - you could make a game in which no one gets any magic unless they get it from some more powerful entity, and thus the only spellcasters are warlocks. No gods, and no way to simply "learn" magic without having some other entity actually enact the magic. So you'd be cutting a whole bunch of classes (maybe Artificers could stay, but flavored specifically as using technology rather than magic.)
But I'm proposing something even deeper than that. I'm talking about really taking apart some of the fundamental rules of the game to service a different type of game entirely.
Can we hack D&D 5th Edition to make a sci-fi game?
First off, I should point out that the folks at Paizo, who publish Pathfinder, did something just like this, creating Starfinder. While Pathfinder was based somewhat on 3.5 E D&D in response to the unpopular 4th Edition, Starfinder used the basic rules concepts from Pathfinder and adapted them to a space-travel-based adventure game.
D&D has also played with Science Fiction, including the hugely unpopular but cult hit Spelljammer campaign setting. Spelljammer's a bit weird, though, as it's only aesthetically sci-fi. In fact, it's meant to coexist with the other canon D&D settings, and thus has explicitly magical justification for its version of space travel, which is actually based on Medieval theories about the nature of the cosmos (specifically the idea that a geocentric solar system was a "crystal sphere," and proposed that each canon setting like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, etc., existed in its own solar-system-like sphere - like "Realmspace" or "Greyspace.")
Spelljammer still has wizards and paladins in science fantasy settings that are far "softer" sci fi than even Star Wars.
What might we change, then?
Well, first off, let's look at the absolute core of the game - the six abilities: strength, dexterity, constitution, intelligence, wisdom, and charisma.
These are meant to sum up as best as possible the general strengths or weaknesses of a character. I actually think these work pretty well for the most part in most genres. Some games separated Charimsa out into separate stats, like Black Void's "Presence" being a kind of majesty or seeming importance in contrast with Charisma being more one's ability to talk people into something. Thus, you could have a scrappy fast-talking street rat whose charisma is high and can convince people to listen to what they have to say, but who will be barred on sight from any palace or high-end bazaar because of their low presence. On the other hand, you might have some noblewoman who has been raised to project power and importance, but who is actually quite socially awkward, with a high presence and low charisma.
What I'm saying is that we could actually expand these. Indeed, the Dungeon Master's Guide actually has two suggestions for additional ability scores: Honor and Sanity.
Honor I think could work quite well - a sort of alternative to Charisma that plays a similar role to presence. Indeed, I could even imagine that if you were using Honor as an ability score, you could even alter Paladins to have Honor be your spellcasting ability and determine the value of your aura of protection.
I'm going to look at my two biggest sci-fi influences from childhood to talk about the tone I'm looking for in this thought experiment: Star Trek (specifically Next Generation) and Star Wars (the original trilogy.)
In Star Trek, I think that intelligence plays a huge role in the characters' successes. The utopian vision of Star Trek is that a rational, enlightened future would be a utopian one, and so the series really emphasizes that everyone in the main cast is smart. Even Worf, who's basically the crew's Barbarian, is still extraordinarily well versed in technical knowledge, history, and culture. I don't think there's anyone in the bridge crew on the Enterprise D with an Intelligence lower than 16.
Therefore, it might be interesting to break up intelligence into different abilities. Maybe there's a broad "knowledge" that allows you to recall information and recognize symbols or cultural signifiers (something Captain Picard would have a ton of) while there's a separate "intelligence" that governs the ability to, say, solve complex technical issues. Geordi Laforge would probably be Picard's superior in the latter, but Picard would have a higher value for the former.
Proficiency skills would likely also change. Arcana in a sci-fi setting that doesn't (technically) have any magic might transform into "technology," and thus allow a character to better identify or futz with pieces of technology.
Interestingly, both Star Trek and Star Wars do have some canonical melee fighters. The former is more of a traditional practice, where the Klingons have ritual duels with bat'leths or other bladed weapons. Star Wars does have the iconic lightsaber, but that's extremely limited to the tiny fraction of the population with force sensitivity.
Now, if we look at another insanely influential sci fi story, Dune justifies melee combat by having technology that renders firearms and energy weapons totally unfeasible.
So, even within the genre, you could justify the use of melee weapons, but you'll need to go out of your way to do so.
If you get rid of (or reduce the viability) of melee weapons, this will have an impact on the usefulness of Strength as an ability score - one that a lot of players already kind of ignore given that only front-line fighters are likely to use strength-based weapons (Monks, Rogues, and technically even some Paladins and melee Fighters can actually build around Dexterity instead, so the only class I think really truly has to focus on Strength is the Barbarian.)
But hey, maybe we can work with that! Consider that Strength generally indicates a character's general physical capabilities and the fact that Constitution is used for a character's general hardiness, and you could actually probably combine the two of them and it'd still work. So maybe we just get rid of Strength as an ability and have anyone who wants to focus on brawniness just invest heavily in constitution. Con then takes over Strength's former roles, determining things like jump distance, carrying capacity, and melee attacks and damage.
Now, what about spellcasting?
If you've got a non-magical sci fi setting, you could just get rid of all the spellcasters. But, alternatively, you could also reskin spells as some sort of technological feat. Maybe you're not casting healing spells, but you have a medical tricorder that only has so much of a charge on it, and can only restore so many hit points.
If you want to keep things simple, you could suggest that there's some broadly-applicable power source that can be channeled in various different ways to simply keep the magic system more or less intact, but flavor "spell slots" as amounts of fuel. I'd look into the DMG's "Spell Points" system as an alternative to spell slots (having grown up playing video games with Mana or MP, I remember being very confused when I first started figuring out how D&D magic works.)
Anyway, this is all the tip of the iceberg.
A sci-fi hack of D&D would probably need you to build new races, new classes, and likely a lot of new mechanics for things like operating a starship. But it could be very cool.
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