If somebody involved in the D&D homebrewing community – or even merely the Reddit side of the wider Fifth Edition community – was asked to name a homebrewer, there’s a reasonable chance that they’d name KibblesTasty. The man has made a name for himself with a wide variety of homebrew classes – the Artificer, the Warlord, the Psion, and the Occultist – and a reputation for balance and quality. With those four classes, various homebrew game mechanics, and more subclasses than a double-helping from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (okay, not quite, but there’s 29 there, not including those he’s published for his classes), he’s not only one of the more balanced and talented homebrewers out there, but one of the more prolific as well. 

And despite this, he seemed almost bemused when we here at ArtificialTwenty sent him a request for an interview. “I get a lot of messages and questions a day….but this one is a bit unusual.” Even so, he was more than happy to answer a few of our questions, and so I sent a list over and got down to business. 

Early Days and the Artificer

My first question, perhaps inevitably, was about how he got into homebrewing. It’s a classic for a reason. At first, he says, it started quite small. “Some little tweaks here and there”, he says, regarding the base rules of 5e. “By smoothing some stuff, I could increase the range of characters that were appealing options to my players”, and before long, “most of [his] DM friends started using the same document” that he wrote these changes in. 

What provided the first big boost to his career is unsurprising, given it’s what he’s possibly best known for. Kibbles read the first UA for the Artificer as a class (as opposed to the ‘College of Invention’ Wizard subclass that was questionable, to say the least), and he viewed it as three things: “very interesting, very broken, and very popular”.  I can’t say I disagree with him there. Coming to the same realisation as many of its issues (the bonkers power curve being one, and the third casting being another) he decided to throw his own hat into the thing.

And got the same result that so many homebrewers get. “Zero upvotes. Zero comments.” He tells us. After spending a “few days” on the draft, it was probably something of a disappointment, but he certainly made the most of it, given how well-regarded his Artificer eventually became.

It was helped, Kibbles reckons, by the fact that the original Artificer was “barely playable”. Other homebrew variants existed, some of which Kibbles rates, but a lot of them removed things that he, and others, viewed as integral. “Removed…golems! Potions! Thundercannons!” he muses at one point. As somebody whose own homebrew setting accommodates Man With a Gun as a character concept fairly well, I can definitely empathise.

So in “preserving the stuff people actually wanted to use” as he puts it, as well as creating a robust Upgrade system that has become one of the selling points of the homebrew, allowed him to carve out a niche for his Artificer, more people “started actually reading it and trying it out”, and it snowballed from there. 

Despite this, Kibbles has a very balanced view on the popularity of his homebrew. “Revised Artificer is probably in the top few of the most popular Homebrew classes of 5e,” he says, “But most people wouldn’t even know it exists.” Despite its seeming ubiquity in many online communities, he’s fully aware that even most reddit users in the Fifth Edition community may not know of its existence. 

One of the secrets to the popularity he has, he thinks, is that he stayed on Reddit. “The lifecycle would be that people would get popular, and then move to DMsGuild”, which would lead to them disappearing on Reddit due to the rules of DMsGuild. I’ve never thought philosophically about the life cycle of a homebrewer, but as a hopeful to eventually publish something to DMsGuild, this has definitely given me some pause! 

Interestingly, the biggest boost to Kibbles’s homebrew was something that didn’t particularly involve him – the release of Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and its official Artificer. Kibbles perfectly likes any version of the Artificer, including the official one – he is not a man who is in the habit of rubbishing anybody’s creations. But he noted that the community found the Eberron Artificer “very divisive”, with some of the more notable points of contention being “no thunder cannon”, and “alchemy being reduced to imitation spellcasting”. And this isn’t just him talking. Despite our love of the Eberron Artificer here at ArtificialTwenty, we’ve seen these comments echoed widely. 

And, of course, he acknowledges the exponential nature of homebrew’s popularity, something I myself can attest to. Homebrew is rarely going to get around fifty upvotes and a few comments. It’ll either languish in the high teens of upvotes (at best), with a few kind souls posing questions, or it’ll peak with hundreds of upvotes, and a lot of discussion in the comments. Notice breeds notice. And it has other benefits for Kibbles as well. “My work is popular, it gets more playtesting and feedback….my work is improved. Because my work is improved, it gets more popular.” He takes some time to appreciate how essential the D&D community is to playtesting something like a class. “Something that vast is nearly impossible to balance on your own.”

Becoming A Professional

In recent times, however, things have changed for Kibbles in regards to his homebrewing. “It’s gone from a hobby….to a part-time job.” And as such, he’s gone from about 2-10 hours a week of homebrewing to 10-20 hours. But this is a conservative estimate, and excludes some things that are essential parts of the process. “Do my playtesting games count?” He asks. “Do my campaigns count?” 

Much of his time, however, is spent just replying to people. Despite, as mentioned before, the seeming ubiquity of his work, there are so many people who’ve never used it or even heard of it before, and so he often gets questions related to it from people who are just discovering it. He gets 5-10 questions a day “ranging from simple clarification to uh…interview requests, apparently :)”. We think he might be talking about us with that second one. 

Of course, when an update or, heaven forbid, a new class is released, the time he spends replying to people goes up incredibly. He mentions “Hours and hours of just replying and talking to people” for entire weeks after he posts things. Considering his work often gets hundreds of comments, he can’t always reply to all of them, but he tries to read every top-level comment. “Those are people that cared enough to engage with the work and leave a comment”, and he’s happy to engage in return. 

In total, in an average week, Kibbles reckons he spends thirty hours or so on everything related to homebrew, “but that includes many hours of just like….playing D&D.” I don’t think he meant for that to make me as jealous as it did. And he’s ramping it up currently, for reasons we’re about to discuss.

Homebrew and the Pandemic

It’s impossible to discuss anything in 2020 without COVID-19 coming up, unfortunately, and our conversation did eventually turn to how that has impacted his homebrewing. At first, Kibbles’s work “consumed more of his time”, but because of the effect on COVID-19 on his company, they eventually parted ways. “All of this is a long way of saying that, in July, I became unemployed”

In an ideal world, he could’ve ran with that and become a full-time homebrewer, but sadly it’s not quite an ideal world. “I just don’t make that much money off making homebrew”, he tells us, “This is a world in which rent must be paid and food must be bought.” He is, of course, grateful to everything who pays into his patreon, but he can’t expect it to support him full-time. But its existence made it more viable for him to take a “blended approach” to his work. He occasionally does contract work in his old industry, but he now has the time and freedom to “figure out if I can convert my hobbies to more of my career”.

It’s something he compares favourably with previous work in the field of video game development. “It was just work…with longer hours and less pay”. Homebrewing, on the other hand, allows him to interact directly with DMs and players who enjoy his work and want to know more, and that’s what he thinks he was looking for in his older profession. He’s not sure whether he can convert homebrewing more meaningfully into a full-on career, but “it’s a good time to give it a shot.” We wish him luck.

Some Tasty Opinions

Taking the conversation back to slightly less dramatic waters, I ask him whether he has a favourite class he’s homebrewed. “I don’t play favourites!” He insists quickly. And maybe it’s like asking a parent to name their favourite child there. But he proceeds to give me a quick breakdown on what he likes about each class. He’s played the Warlord the most himself (although the first he played died a quick and violent death to an Air Elemental), but he thinks his affection for the Artificer is “probably clear.” It made up half of this interview, so that’s fair to say. The concept of the Psion, as a whole, he’s not as taken by, but “I personally feel that it’s my best class design!” He likes it more as an artist and a developer than as a player, and that can’t be faulted. The Occultist is similar, in that he’s got less interest in playing it himself, but he loves it because it gives the options to those who want to play it. 

And, of course, nerd to nerd, we couldn’t possibly let the interview go by without discussing just a bit about the actual playing of Dungeons and Dragons. “I currently play two weekly campaigns”, he tells me, which is a small miracle in and of itself in the current day, playing one and DMing another. He prefers to play in person, but obviously that’s not possible for many people, especially as he has players in the healthcare industry. One campaign he’s been in for a while is on hiatus, but they’re replacing it with “shorter campaigns, one-shots, etc.” There’s mention of one where the party get kidnapped by aliens and have to shoot their way off with laser cannons – and Kibbles isn’t sure if that one should be canon or not. We don’t get a vote, but we’re voting ‘yes’ anyway.”

If you’d like to see some of Kibbles’s stuff, please check out https://www.kthomebrew.com/. A huge thanks to KibblesTasty for this interview.