Having witnessed the rise and fall of every D&D version, it's clear that we're currently in the 'go' phase for all things 5E. I've invested in a few 5E replacement games, but I won't support the 2024 version from Wizards. I can't back companies that lack ethics and show hostility toward the gaming community, and I'm sure many of you feel the same.
D&D is a framework that can't maintain a steady version for over 10 years.
- The 1980s: AD&D
- The 1990s: AD&D 2nd Edition
- The 2000s: 3.0 and 3.5 D&D, D&D 4E
- The 2010s: 5E
The dates shift slightly by the end, with 2015 being 5E, but we are located at the end of those 10 years. D&D 4E had a 5-year blip that messed up the nice decade chart.
I like the 5E clones; Level Up Advanced 5E and Tales of the Valiant are excellent games with much to offer. Tales is the newcomer, while Level Up is the mature game.
It's disheartening to see the lack of enthusiasm for the 5E clones. I'm hopeful that the communities around these games will start making some noise, but everything feels stagnant. Those still playing Wizards D&D are the hangers-on with a dwindling community, Pathfinder 2E benefitted the most by taking the lion's share of the refugees, and 5E itself feels like Wizards killed it and the interest in the play-alike 5E games.
It's a concern that many of the best players have left the building, so to speak. Their absence is keenly felt in the gaming community.
The old-school fans who hung out in 5E feel mostly gone. Level Up feels like the last bastion of the old-school crowd in 5E. Most old-school players left for older editions or SRD-free OSR games. The best players are gone from 5E. Other games are picking up the slack. Shadowdark, Dragonbane, and many others are now popular in their niches.
I hate to be negative. But here we are.
I play 5E, but it does not reflect my vision of fantasy gaming. I get the feeling characters are "planned constructs" of game designers with different ideas of how paladins, bards, rogues, and other classes work in my mind. My characters need to "surrender to the game designer" and play by whatever flavor of 5E we are playing, rather than my characters being mine - with my ideas driving their progression and powers.
And don't get me started on multiclassing, which exists as an artificial construct of "how you cheat the system" rather than existing to "define a character with multiple specialties." You don't multiclass because your spell blade knows fighting and magic; you are multiclass to take advantage of a broken system that was never designed to handle the concept well.
Will 5E speak to fantasy gaming in the next 10 years? I wonder if it will since no version of D&D has ever lasted commercially longer than 10 years. I say commercially because there is a big difference between a few people playing AD&D 1e and a game supporting a substantially sized company with employees. A patched game is still the same, so people may decide to move on.
Level Up A5E has plenty to enjoy, just from 1st party sources. The amount of primary-source support here puts many "indie darkling" games to shame, and some excellent 3rd party books, too, are dense with extra content to enjoy. Level Up is 5E done right.
I am still exploring Tales. It is a solid system with plenty of world support. I want to see more character options sooner rather than later, and I am also waiting for the GM Guide in September. Tales plus Midgard puts the Forgotten Realms to shame.
Who else is shipping an actively supported campaign world plus adventures these days for 5E? It is this or Frog God and the Lost Lands, but Midgard has the advantage of having a complete 5E set of rules backing it up. Wizards sure isn't shipping campaign worlds with linked adventures these days, nor do I ever think they can do them right and pay the original creators some respect. Some of their IP they won't even touch out of fear. Pathfinder 2E is the only other one, but that is different from 5E.
It is sort of coming down to using Level Up to explore my old worlds, and if I want a new world with new stories, it will be Tales.
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