All my Wizards' 5E books are being sold, and I don't care about 'maintaining the 2014 rules' nonsense. People who tell you to keep playing 2014 5E, play 4E, play 3.5E are just trying to keep you in the Wizards ecosystem, and the longer Wizards' exists, the more the 'tales of woe' about the stupid things they say or mass layoffs of the little people just trying to make a living at a hobby they love will continue.
I am done with the 5E drama squad on YouTube. It has turned into senseless clickbait. I feel suckered into watching every time I click on one of those videos.
But what did they do to the druid in the playtest??? OMG! Watch this!!!
This time, the entire Wizards company is doomed! OMG! What now???
As long as Wall Street money pours into this cesspool, the clickbait and horrible news will never stop. And 5E YouTube will happily wave the smell over at you.
Sometimes, the community around something has turned so toxic you must walk away.
And back in the day, if a class was hosed, we fixed it ourselves and homebrewed the darn thing. The idea of 'needing professional game designers' to work out apparent rules' shortcomings is stupid and makes you dependent. And it encourages companies to ship broken designs and patch them later in more books to buy.
Wizards' game of selling you the fixes sucks and will never end unless people stop supporting them.
The Level Up Advanced 5E game is the 5E I am keeping. People laughed at them for trying to create an open version of the rules while introducing balance patches, death fixes, class improvements, and support for the three pillars of play. But we have 5E! This is what everyone plays! Why are you using that emulated version of the game! Why should we care about implementing the game not tied to the company that sells it?
These are the same stupid things people said about desktop Linux users years ago, and the Linux users were proven right. Just ask any cloud deployment IT person. Linux is where it is at. Granted, LUA5E is sold by a company. Still, it is a much more open and accessible community than the secret temples of Wizards, who deliver 'rules from on high' with little community input.
And "being able to find a game" isn't a good enough reason. It's like eating fast food every night and telling yourself you do it "so we can all find food."
And fast food is expensive these days, just like 5E books.
And people laughed at the A5E team, and the A5E team was proven right. Everyone is rushing around trying to create 5E alternatives, and we already have one of the best implementations. There is a great post here on "Why play A5E?"
https://homebrewandhacking.com/2023/07/12/so-why-would-i-want-to-play-a5e/
And I agree with the class changes in LUA5E. They are all very well thought out. They bring back the warlord-style class from 4E, so everyone telling you to 'just play 4E' can pound sand. If you like 4E, you have two options: wait for MCDM RPG (1-2 years) or play LUA5E today. Many of the best ideas of 4E were improved here, especially the support for environmental aspects of encounters.
4E I loved, but it was another horribly broken typical Wizards' mess past the 10th level. At the 18th level, the game was pure, poorly play-tested garbage, and we quit. Monsters with thousands of hit points and endless combats where it was just subtracting X from that massive hit-point pile and doing this for 30+ turns (while you kept knocking the boss down and stunning them while pouring on dozens of fiddly tracked short-duration conditions). This took hours; nobody felt like they were doing anything but spamming the same at-will powers, and every turn was the same.
4E at high levels feels like an endless game of rolling the dice. All you do is roll dice and flip conditions. Even the battle chess movement game breaks down. After a while, everyone gives up and stands in one spot. Players in our games were begging the boss monsters to "please die."
And your best powers, useable once per day, could miss their target. Thanks for playing! Hope you like spamming at-wills for the next 20+ turns!
The magic items were trash, too. Meaningless, broken, and mostly weak +1 to +6 versions of everything. The book tells each player to make a "wish list" of magic items they want for their build and for the DM to hand those out on a schedule. And you needed the gear upgrade like an MMO to keep up, toss out the old, and pay millions of gold pieces for the new. Or demand the DM give it to you.
We have gone from magical treasures being unique and rare to pantry goods on an Amazon wish list.
4E was a pen-and-paper MMO. World of Warcraft is thousands of times better than this.
Don't waste your time and money with 4E; people telling you to play 4E are just setting you up for disappointment and will next year be saying, "Play 2024 instead!" They aim to keep you in the Wizards ecosystem so their YouTube channels will retain views - they don't care about your game, time, or money. And they likely only played 4E at the 8th level. Keep playing a version of D&D, and stay tuned for more Wizards clickbait!
Escape the cave.
LUA5E has some of the best parts of 4E baked in.
And it improves on every part of 5E.
You don't need these other games. Nor do you need the 2024 books, which, with backward compatibility, will be just as broken and a mess as the current edition is once you factor in Tasha's and all the others.
And again, if you disagree with a change that LUA5E made - homebrew it. There is an origin feature in the cosmopolitan option that gives you an expertise die for checks made to conceal a weapon (discreetly armed). This usually means an extra d4 of these checks. I homebrew this all the time and allow players to swap it out for expertise die on any urban-related activity, such as wine-tasting, street culture, street navigation, negotiation, haggling, finding information, shopping, local festivals and holidays - or any other city-task a player may want to specialize in other than hiding weapons.
Try characters by hand, homebrew 5E, and toss those electronic apps. It is an entirely different game. One I enjoy far better than paying software developers hard-earned money just so they can limit my options and sourcebooks. Oh, and in many electronic apps, you must pay for the same stuff again to use what you already own there.
It's a scam.
You aren't using electronic character sheets, so feel free to change anything. This is the one huge problem I have with games that require character creation software: you become too dependent on official rules, and your ability to use homebrew or 3rd party content is eliminated. Also, the game and character sheet complexity increases exponentially when designers are allowed to say, "Well, everyone uses software and VTTs anyways," and we get games like Pathfinder 2.
In LUA5E, I do it all by hand. I can run 4 characters myself and not have a massive issue with the paperwork. If I want 3rd party content, my pencil and paper are ready. Granted, if I were running 30 characters? I would play Castles & Crusades.
The exploration and social pillars are well-supported in LUA5E and also nod to the old-school sensibilities I love. Death means something here. The balance is much more finely tuned, making your decisions matter, and fights are much more brutal and rewarding. That fine-tuning and re-factoring of the math keep me from selling these books; you feel the actual effort was made here to make the numbers work. They tightened every loose screw and nut here. The exploits are gone. The monsters are dangerous again. The challenge is there.
A goal system is built into the inspiration system, and it isn't tossed out for a gimmicky, another math thing to track, luck mechanic (and something I could house-rule in). Pure genius and it stays more faithful to 2014 than many of the alternatives. The only thing tossed out here is a company that lays people off before the holidays.
And people who like their 5E exploits and power gaming builds are the ones who complain the loudest about a tightened-up set of rules that fixes more than it breaks. Then again, if you like that, house rule it in. The 2024 books will break your exploits, too, while introducing new ones.
This is an excellent version of 5E, and it doesn't feel like playing 5E at all - not in the sense that 5E has turned into a broken, too-easy version, player entitlement, tacked-on rules, ruined by expansions, and high-magic mess.
The only other 5E books I am not selling are the excellent Low Fantasy Gaming books, which give me a nice, low magic, gritty, Warhammer-like version of 5E. If I want low magic and gritty, I got it.
With LUA5E, if I want the high-magic romp that maintains challenge, 3rd party compatibility, and old-school pillars of play, I got it.
What about the official 2014 and 2024 versions of Wizards' rules? D&D Beyond? Endless Kickstarter 5E variants? And 5E YouTube? The toxic clickbait drama that comes with all these games?
Goodbye.
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