I have made an entire playable dragon race template. It completely defies all 5e conventional design.

Or, instead of twisting 5e into a different TTRPG, just play a different one better suited to your goals for the game

25

It's more that this game doesn't have enough content and variety. But it's popular, it's the zeitgeist, so it's what you can get your players to play.

Most homebrew isn't changing core rules. Just adding more variety. As long as the dragon race template runs in 5e rules, no problem. Balance will be harder be it's not like core 5e is balanced anyways.

11
- Precisely. 5e's greatest strength is its' simplicity. A player who's never touched a TTRPG before will have a much easier time picking up 5e than a more niche system (although PF2e is definitely not bad on that front, 5e is just super simple and even has resources for absolute beginners)
  
  But that simplicity is also 5e's greatest weakness. Once you're beyond the starting phase and understand how to play, then you realize how much stuff 5e is missing, you start noticing how some of the rules are oversimplified and unclear, and you REALLY notice how the game starts to get dysfunctional at levels 13 and above due to Quadratic Wizard and the fact that AC doesn't keep up with hitrate.
  
  But 5e at its' core is a simple, robust system that's dead easy to homebrew for. So covering that weakness (and being able to keep finding players for your games) is entirely within the realm of possibility. And hey, unlike trying to mod an actual game, if you decide that at all costs you want to play an Actual Dragon? Fuck it, we Homebrew.
  
  5
- Exactly how I feel. I want 5e with some additional content. Kinda like pathfinder 1 could be run like 3,7. I want 5,2e.
  
  It should still feel like 5e and play like 5e. But small fixes and varieties that improve barren areas.
  
  3
That's a good alternative, but sometimes the issue with picking a different game that is suited for that one thing is that you want your game to do more than one thing.

Every other time I pull a PbtA game I end up banging against the walls of the genre and walking into the barren uncodified void of "I dunno, I guess you just do it".

So fuck it, we Homebrew!

4
- For more complex games like what you're describing, I'm a big fan of generic systems like Savage Worlds, where it's intentionally made to potentially handle anything
  
  3

You can't say that and not show your work to the class.

6

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit?usp=sharing

Here you go. It's still a work in progress, I'm trying to make something fairly tightly balanced and I want all the classes to be equally powerful (Linear Fighter Quadratic Wizard can suck it as a philosophy for a team game), but as you can imagine fully testing something of this size will take me quite some time.

3
- Hmm, not bad at first glance, although it's a bold move to have a dragon class that requires a game starting at a level that most campaigns tend to wrap up or burn out at in this edition.
  
  I might use this to make an NPC at some point, I'll let you know how and if it goes.
  
  2

its'

That has to be a new one.

5

Posting this and not posting your content as well is pretty annoying tbh.

3

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eFc2qQTY9P3ym9fyMNYHC_mIogpt9kNrOdm5n_yj1cs/edit?usp=sharing

Most people don't care, so I try not to force the matter. You asked, here you go. Still playtesting it and doing some rebalancing, but it should be reasonably good to play.

There are probably going to be a couple of overpowered things in there and it operates by throwing a couple of 5e design principles out of the window (For example the whole template is intentionally designed to be very Multi Stat Dependent, so it has a whopping +8 Racial ASI compared to the normal +3.)

2