Let's look at the final 24 hours of the ToV Kickstarter (and a million dollars raised with close to 10,000 supporters) with a fun look at the answer to the question, "What if we only played and based our games on Kobold Press content?" Let's take a look at the store and do some creative filtering:
Oh, and we are getting the playtest of ToV before the end of the month!
Unlike Wizards, we have a fully supported official game world, which leaves them unsupported legacy content. This puts us in line with Paizo and their official world, so that's a great start. There are 50+ items in the Print+PDF selection and over 350+ in PDF. There is much more stuff here than a game would ever need.
The selection is A+ quality in presentation, content, and art; on par with Paizo and Wizards, and with enough variety and depth, you could game for years using only Kobold Press content and always have things to do. The art also has a fun cartoony style but pays tribute to the classic notes of heroic fantasy from the past. Look at the Midgard and ToV Preview covers; they are beefy, chunky with brawn, and exude power and strength.
What I love here is having a fully-supported Forgotten Realms-style world. Wizards, it has been too long; please get your act together and support your settings. Even Paizo finds time to do their world-building work, and the Lost Omens books are excellent. This puts K5E a huge step ahead of 5E and, on the level of Pathfinder, considers the appeal of a strong and supported campaign setting. The Forgotten Realms carried a censored and weaker version of AD&D through the 1990s just through the strength of the fiction releases.
And Midgard has been around a long time and is awesome. I was a fan of this back in 4E.
We have more spells and adventures, and I suspect the class option books will be a little less valuable since the ToV classes will be the stars of the show and not the old 5E content. The spells may be like that too, but I suspect most will be fine.
Magic options? Plenty of those, and built by the same team, so you know they will play well with the base system. I have not played with this book that much (since I started 5E right around the OGL disaster), but it looks fun.
We have three fantastic (and huge) monster books, balanced to a more difficult encounter challenge level like the ToV monster book, which can all be used from day one. Already we are approaching a Pathfinder 2e level of content and options here.
This is one of the more exciting game launches since a wealth of supporting content will be ready to use. Both 5E and Pathfinder 1e and 2e did not start with this much stuff. If you wanted "one voice" for your 5E content and that stable base of content, adventures, and expansions - Tales of the Valiant is where you should be.
It is one thing to always depend on Wizards for the base game and then worry about the compatibility of expansion books from 3rd parties - nobody wants to waste money and be stuck with useless books. But when a company commits to supporting what we have and using that as a base to keep all this lovely, high quality, existing cool stuff?
That is a difficult thing to dismiss.
For someone who is not terribly interested in 5E anymore and feels burned by the OGL disaster, it says a lot for me to be generally excited about a new version of 5E. Not because the rules are groundbreaking but because the base world, supporting material, adventures, and future support will be there. With everything happening around 5E, especially feeling I need to force myself to excuse bad behavior from Wall Street, supporting a vibrant and stable community is good, and this is a fabulous home to participate in.
A pleasant place and a fresh start are all I want.
Eliminating the "feat or ability score bonus choice" is a welcome change. Replacing inspiration with luck is another. These are good, progressive changes, and long overdue.
No drama and a focus on fun.
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