Tales of the Valiant PDFs

The Tales of the Valiant PDFs for the Player's Guide and Monsters Vault were released yesterday.

These are great PDFs and a top-notch version of 5E that is free from Wizards' influence and Wall Street practices. You could feel good playing this game, still be playing something familiar, and have a guilt-free conscience.

Play this, and be free of D&D Beyond. Hero Lab has a subscription service for creating characters, so you have an option if you want to pay for an online hosted character designer.

Could you play this instead of D&D? Why not? Tales of the Valiant is the ultimate guilt-free 5E.

Level Up A5E is still an excellent option, and I like its old-school design philosophy. But Tales of the Valiant is so easy with Hero Lab. It is almost addictively easy. With LUA5E, I take 30-45 minutes of reference and flipping through PDFs to build a character.

With Hero Lab and ToV, it takes about 3-5 minutes, which is a huge difference. All the math is done for you, so there is no guesswork or missing selections. You pick a few things, and you can play. The characters come pre-equipped, but you can change gear and pick it yourself.

Yes, you need to buy books on Hero Lab. There is a yearly fee. This is a premium service; people must be paid to work on these and support the system. Validated characters, online storage, and ease of use are worth the price.

You do not get any expansion material here; this is just base book content, and you have no 5E third-party character options. For some, this is a deal-breaker since there are players who will never part from their broken and exploitative 5E builds unless you pry them out of their necrotic, zombified fingers. Me? If I switch games to something like Dragonbane, I can play another version of 5E with a base book only.

Also, there are 5E books on Hero Lab (many by Kobold Press) that are their generic 5E version only and do not work with the Tales of the Valiant part of the program. I hope these are ported over, or you can pay a small upgrade price for the conversion costs and have them. This is only the second day, so I am patient, but it is worth pointing out. Books like Midgard Heroes or Tome of Beasts should be usable here, even if it is an option initially. I bet this is being worked on.

Part of me feels the current state of third-party 5E character options has a few good books, but most of the hundreds of books out there—including the ones Wizards put out—are garbage. If my sell boxes ever go out the door, I bet you most of these will be broken character option books that are pure, untested, break-your-game junk.

I don't want to grandfather in 10 years of Wizards' broken and power-gaming 5E content, and I am not buying the 2024(5) books. I don't care about Tasha's. I don't have cheese builds to support.

90% of what is wrong about 5E is in the books released after the first three. We can reset here and be free of people redesigning our game. Yes, ToV is a redesign by a team I trust and want to support. Seriously, the week after D&D Beyond eliminates al-a-carte character option buys, ToV's PDFs drop.

• And I can use Hero Lab.
• And the books are on Hero Lab.
• And I will have physical books.
• And I have PDFs that I own.

VTT support is also available for Demiplane, Shard, Alchemy, and Foundry. Roll20 is not yet available, but I am sure that is coming.

If I ever go back to 5E, ToV will be the game.

With my 5E books and D&D? I am not happy. The game has grown too big, the grift has killed balance, and the actions of its owners left a bad taste in my mouth.

I know. I love LUA5E, and I was tired of the mess of character options and random garbage on my shelves. The mess was part of why I divorced D&D and 5E. If I sold 90% and just kept the best with this as a core?

I would be happy.