Tales of the Valiant

 

If I touch anything 5E-like from now on, it will be a version not from Wizards. I liked what they did in Advanced 5E, but I like what they do in ToV slightly better. Instead of expanding the game like an AD&D, the ToV design goals are to simplify and reduce frustration and complexity. They are also improving presentation and making the game easier to learn, which will move the needle.

This is an exciting version; they have 7 more days to reach their final goal.

Played as-is, 5E is a beast of a game to play strictly by the rules. It is way more complicated than Pathfinder 2E. A game that rebuilds the experience, like a Basic D&D, feels better and is a perfect starting point for a rebuild of 5E. This is a starting point to jump on - we don't get many of those outside of the OSR.

And some of the sacred cows of 5E are dead, like Inspiration, replaced by a luck mechanic. You can't do this in a patch; a fork and rebuild/refactor is the only way to build a new experience.

This isn't, "Well, it is just like 5E, so who cares?" The refactoring goes way deeper than that, and this is like a code refactor on the 5E game that takes something that became a 10-year-old pile of spaghetti code into a clean object-oriented framework.

From the end-user standpoint? It plays like 5E! So what?

If you got in there and looked at the code? Yeah, your opinion will change, and you will realize how simple it is to break and exploit the old system and how the old system is written into a corner in many places where they can't do anything new.

And this is a deeper problem a rewrite of the 5E core books can't fix. You are just putting a new UI on a pile of broken code, with a few fixes here and there. The old books will still break the new stuff and introduce problems that can't be fixed.

Everything in this game seems like the team is working smarter and harder on it than the Wizards' design team. Where the updates from Wizards seem to be passed down from the king, the Kobold Team is making their playtesters active designers. They listen, and things change. I also liked Advanced 5E doing this; the players know the exploits and cheese moves, and involving them early makes a better game.

ToV will be a better, more streamlined, easier-to-play, and smoother experience than a patched 5.5E. They are rebalancing the monsters as well to make them more challenging and more enjoyable, taking design cues from D&D 4E, where monsters had interesting scripts and abilities they could pull on a party (doom points for bosses) and not just sit there like a "bag of hit points."

Everything I see here feels like "The Basic D&D of 5E" mixed with the tactical rebalancing of 4E.

And Kobold has been around a while, and it doesn't embarrass itself regularly. I don't have to make excuses for terrible business practices, ignore horrible community treatment, pay more for less, and wait for Wizards' next "we screwed up" apology.

Enough is enough.

Play a game from a team that wants your business and cares.