Do you need the inventor feat to make homebrew items?


Homebrew and House Rules


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber

Do you need the Inventor feat to make homebrew items? If not, then the feat's theme doesn't seem to fit well with the mechanics it offers. If so, then that seems unnecessarily restricting (needing GM permission to make a homebrew anything is a big enough hoop to jump through).

Reading the feat, it seems you can only make formulas for common items, but inventing a new homebrew item, by definition, would likely be unique, not common. So it doesn't seem like it would work.

Say, for example, I wanted to make a staff of evocation, but the base form was a ring instead of a staff. How does that work? How would you run it?


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Pathfinder Rulebook Subscriber

You can't homebrew items in the system as written. That's intentional. Custom items created serious balance problems in PF1 that they didn't want to happen again.

Obviously you can house rule it, and Inventor seems like a good feat for it thematically, but at that point you're playing Calvinball.


Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Superscriber; Pathfinder Starfinder Roleplaying Game Subscriber
Captain Morgan wrote:
You can't homebrew items in the system as written. That's intentional.

There's no such thing as a system that you can't homebrew. That's kind of the point of homebrew: to make new things in a system that doesn't have those thing on its own yet.

Captain Morgan wrote:
Custom items created serious balance problems in PF1 that they didn't want to happen again.

Do you have a source, such as a developer quote, for this?

Captain Morgan wrote:
Obviously you can house rule it, and Inventor seems like a good feat for it thematically, but at that point you're playing Calvinball.

Calvinball?


Ravingdork wrote:
Captain Morgan wrote:
You can't homebrew items in the system as written. That's intentional.

There's no such thing as a system that you can't homebrew. That's kind of the point of homebrew: to make new things in a system that doesn't have those thing on its own yet.

Captain Morgan wrote:
Custom items created serious balance problems in PF1 that they didn't want to happen again.

Do you have a source, such as a developer quote, for this?

Captain Morgan wrote:
Obviously you can house rule it, and Inventor seems like a good feat for it thematically, but at that point you're playing Calvinball.
Calvinball?

From the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip: https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Calvinball.


1 person marked this as a favorite.
Ravingdork wrote:
Captain Morgan wrote:
You can't homebrew items in the system as written. That's intentional.

There's no such thing as a system that you can't homebrew. That's kind of the point of homebrew: to make new things in a system that doesn't have those thing on its own yet.

Captain Morgan wrote:
Custom items created serious balance problems in PF1 that they didn't want to happen again.

Do you have a source, such as a developer quote, for this?

Captain Morgan wrote:
Obviously you can house rule it, and Inventor seems like a good feat for it thematically, but at that point you're playing Calvinball.
Calvinball?

You can homebrew it, but the game doesn't have explicit guidelines for homebrewing items unlike 1e. So if you are homebrewing it you and the GM are making up all the rules for what you can create, including whether or not Inventor is a prerequisite for making them. Hence calvinball, you and the GM are making up rules as you need. Perhaps the game mastery guide will change this.


Calvinball Linkified

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