The mistake I made with Level Up A5E was buying too many third-party books. You can dilute your game into this sloppy collection of cartoony books, serious books, strange settings, piles of magic items, so many monsters and spells, cute books, evil books, and books you like that don't match the tone of your game.
My game became a mess.
Add to that a second version of the game with Tales of the Valiant (ToV). I liked ToV a lot, but it wasn't for me. ToV has it all: tons of monsters and magic, solid rules, and great support and adventures. The setting is fantastic. The adventures are numerous and all well crafted. If you just want a well-supported version of 5E minus Wizards, play ToV. I tried it, I liked it, but it was not the game I wanted or expected.
ToV was good, but it still wasn't as good as A5E. The mix of 5E game rules and the best ideas pulled from 3.5E and 4E in A5E was spectacular. The martial classes were terrific. I liked the support for exploration and social encounters a lot. Rangers did not suck. The old-school, deadly play, combined with multiple fixes for all of 5E's problems, made me miss A5E.
So I put all my books in storage. My shelves were cluttered with two games, multiple sourcebooks, piles of unused items, and an unfocused game that occupied five shelves of space.
More is nothing. I hated it all.
So I came back. Why?
When I started, I had a good game going. The setting and rules worked together very well. Other games struggled to tell the same story. This wasn't a D&D thing; it was a classic hero story that relied on the super-heroic elements, not the invincible ones. I have other games more closely tied to GURPS, the system of advantages and disadvantages, which describes the characters best. A5E told this story the best, since this is how I started it
I asked myself, "Could I limit the game to the best parts?" By getting rid of books, could I make this game fun again?
It is a hard thing to do. In my opinion, all my Kobold Press books needed to be excluded. That is a massive library with thousands of spells and monsters. Those books are for Tales of the Valiant. If I ever play with those rules, I will save them if the character and system options improve. Some excellent Roll for Combat books needed to be excluded; they are great and highly recommended, but not for the game I want to play. Most of my random magic items and class books must be removed.
Many books intended to "fix" 5E are worthless and can harm the game if used. Some books are designed to supplement D&D classes and offer options that can break the fixes A5E implemented. Some books intended for the original 5E will be better with Tales of the Valiant instead of A5E.
I just did not want to deal with other books. They were extra complex campaign settings I did not want to use, or subsystems that would detract from my core inspiration.
Roll20 has a good character sheet for the game. I found this after I decided to return, which was a pleasant surprise. This will help me with my digital conversion and save my games online. I have cleaned my place considerably by removing my gaming table, which may sound like heresy.
What do I have left? The core books, plus some 3rd party books written for A5E that provide options. The collection is very tight and focuses on the core books, plus the books strictly written for A5E to offer options in that framework.
The MOAR Complete book is fantastic, adding many options to the game. I have a few multiclass guides that provide synergy feats, and I have the homebrew and hacking guides written for A5E. For rules, that is about it. The A5E Monstrous Menagerie gives me detailed monsters with some mechanical interest.
If D&D 2014/24 is B/X, then A5E is full-blown AD&D. The complexity and detail are welcome for a game that glosses over far too much and lacks exploration and social mechanics.
I have a few Dante's Guides from Yellowbyte Studios, just for some Diablo-like monsters. There is an excellent Sandy Peterson Cthulhu book, but too many bad guys ruin the game, so that is sidelined. Classic D&D had Hell and demons as the ultimate bad guys, and after the Satanic Panic happened, this went in a hundred "family-friendly" directions, and we got mind flayers, drow, dragons, evil gods, and so on. D&D still has too many "junk drawer" big bad guys.
You could play AD&D and assume most of the monsters and humanoids were "touched by the blood of Satan" or a god, and even dragons were that way and wrestled with their sinister side. Classic Greek Mythology plays into this with one drop of blood spawning an entire etymology of creatures.
Sorry, modern interpretationists, my monsters are classic monsters and not reflections of West Coast street culture. What you see around you is not the world, nor history, nor the classics these games were based on, nor any facet of meaningful truth regarding fantasy gaming. Hiring great writers for these games is becoming more challenging as the education system implodes and classics and history are no longer taught. Anyone with a traditional education can get a better job elsewhere since these skills are in demand and getting harder to find.
Once fantasy gaming "reflects the modern world," it is no longer fantasy gaming.
It is meaningless self-reflection based on vanity.
There is another nice demon guide written by Robert Schwalb (of Shadows of the Demon lord) for 5E, and this is another nice resource for a Diablo-like game. If 5E mainly resembles an ARPG like Diablo, then that is how it plays the best. This was my original A5E game, and I missed it since D&D does ARPG play well, and all of the other pillars of play horribly. With A5E, I get the pillars of play covered, so I have a complete game that covers everything, plus ARPG combat. I also get a fixed game with balanced math and numbers, where D&D or its clones still have terrible balance and scaling issues.
My world books? The best I have are the Frog God Games "Lost Lands" settings, and I have a bunch of old-school adventures converted from S&W to 5E. This good old-school world doesn't carry Wizards' baggage, the Forgotten Realms GMNPCs, or sci-fi elements. It works as-is with enough depth and detail that it feels old school without being tied to anything else that could wreck my game.
I have a mega-dungeon converted to 5E (Rappan Athuk), and plenty of other smaller adventures to toss in everywhere else. This is one of the better "generic 5E worlds" you can get since it flies under the radar of many, has extensive adventure support, and lets you do what you want. Nobody expects that characters from Baldur's Gate 3 will show up here to steal the show and act like GMNPCs in this world, and I am free to shape this however I want.
The world is old-school and traditional, feeling like a medieval fantasy world. Lords rule fiefs and kingdoms, peasants till the land during the seasons, and life continues. Parts of the world are in the early Renaissance, but you can change these and make the world in your vision. No starships are flying overhead. We don't get much in terms of jarring pop culture. The entire setting feels serious.
Also, the setting doesn't try to rewrite the base 5E rules like a few others I have (Brancalonia and Arcanis). Those are excellent settings, but they would work better with a base system closer to D&D, like Tales of the Valiant. I just want a setting that gives me 5E stats and adventures, and isn't trying to rewrite the fighter class or give me entirely new spell lists.
I am down to one and a half shelves of books for my game.
There is nothing on there that is a distraction, nor do I have cute monsters running around.
I am happy with this version of 5E, finally.
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